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Q: did you know how great Chinese food was before coming to China?
back in hy home country of the United States of America. i never eat Chinese food. i was happy with traditional American food. like hamburgers and pizza. sometimes i eat Mexican food. it is very spicy!! but now that i live in China, for the fist time in my life. i never tried so much delicious food!! rost duck is my favorite!! did you have the same experience when coming to China for the first time?
Im my hometown all asian food is an americanized version. But more than that, a lot of those places just run together all asian cusines. There are restaurant names like 'Bangkok Tokyo' and 'King and I - Thai Chinese Restaurant'. Good food, but a far cry from being authentic.
But now that Im here I love all the difference kinds of cusines within china. Sichuan food is awesome (or in the states -szechuan, which generally just means spicy) and my favorite is Dongbei food.
In Australia, we have different nationalities' restaurants in virtually every suburb - and most of the time, that meant Chinese (with Thai and Indian becoming more popular, Greek and Italian - especially down south, and Vietnamese also getting a foothold outside of their in-groups... before coming to China, I had my last meal in a Kazakhstani restaurant!)
So, when I got to China, the food wasn't that different, and I knew how good it could be! I did realise that it would be different - simpler (I still haven't had a Lemon Chicken, Salt and Pepper Chicken or Honey Chicken here - nor a Mongolian Lamb :(), and the Sweet and Sour Pork is different (no pineapple - WTF???) But, yes, the food here is (often) good, and I like the street food that I can't get back home (because of health regulations
)
I agree with bike-gypsy - Dongbei is great!!! (so is Guangdong/Cantonese!!)
Where I am from there are as many Chinese resteraunts as all others together, so I was raised eating it regularly.
That being said most Chinese food back west is much different than here, almost a hybrid of east and west.
I love some of the food here and hate some too, but it is almost all different than back home. I love the spicy food.
Talking of food it would be nice to find a place with decent eggroll or fortune cookie.
mattaya:
Exactly fortune cookies were invented in the states. Probably by a chinese American. Good for him!
Some of the food here is excellent, some not-so-excellent. Depends on where you get it I guess.
I had a good idea of Chinese food before I came here, as well as cooking techniques, so I was not surprised to find some really nice food. I was surprised however by some of the methods, such as a hammer apparently being used to slice chicken and resulting in razor sharp bone fragments throughout my meal, not deveining shrimp (gross), and the cruel means animals are often dealt with (live chickens being thrown into a defeathering machine, small animals being hacked to bits alive).
There is some really nice food here, but it is sometimes difficult to trust it. I just try to go for what smells and tastes good and try not to think about it actually being made of melamine
.
Best things: Peking Duck (with really crispy skin!), Hong Shao Rou, Yang's Pan-fried Dumplings in Shanghai, certain street foods, pretty much anyting from Xinjiang (love the spice), Yunnan (even the insects), Sichuan... It's a pretty big list. Overall though, I think the quality of pork and chicken here is awesome. Tastes better than in the US.
Things I don't like: Shattered bones in anyting, fish with bones, freshwater crab/fish/anything (all tastes like dirty, muddy water), most Shanghai style food (too much sugar and oil), and ocean food that smells like low tide (which is alot here unless you go to a coastal town). Also durian (anything that smells like a corpse should not be eaten), stinky tofu, and anything "smoked" which tastes absolutely 100% like buring hay.
I'll try and think of more later.
Honestly, I am not amazed by the Chinese food I have eaten. I don't know if this is because I have not gone to the right place or eaten the right things, or I can't stand how most of it is prepared, or if I am just madly in love with cheese and miss it a lot. There is often too much salt and oil, and I don't like spicey food. There are some Chinese foods I like, such as dumplings, those rice balls you boil in water that have the sesame paste in them that tastes almost like peanut butter, milk tea (I know, it's not a food, but I like it), noodles, that breakfast bread with the fried egg on it. However, I'm actually sick of Chinese food because I eat it every day for every meal. I only get a real Western meal about once a month, and that's only because I decide to go to PizzaHut or KFC. Maybe I should make those trips more frequently?
Shining_brow:
Jnus - do you have a kitchen? If so, why don't you cook yourself? Most places will give you a rice cooker (*if not, they're fairly cheap) - so, get a frying pan, some vegies, and fry up your meat (presuming your not a vegetarian!), and steam up your vegies... I eat 'western' most of the time - except when I'm out and about (and not at the local expat hangout), so I think I get a good mix...
Dude, you are so correct, no frickin cheese dude! I need my cheese!
I go to high end stores, buy cheese, steak and ground beef and top shelf milk (only contains a little melamine) and cook it myself!
I like some dim sum, the lil yellow pork thingees rule!
Some dumplings are edible and are cool too!
Shining_brow:
Cheese = Taobao!!! Simple! Yes, I've had stuff bought off Taobao - yes, it is good! No, it doesn't take long to ship it to you... worth the effort!
I did not know how great chinese food was before I came here. I do like some of the chinese food in America. Some of my favorites were General tsao's chicken, sweet and sour chicken and orange chicken.
I like Chinese food and especially the food that you can get in Beijing. Another thing I like the Japanese food they serve in china a whole lot better than the japanese food in the states. On a scale of 1 to 10 in America it's near the bottom. And on a scale of 1 to 10 in china it's way near the top! It's so much better! I had sushi in America it was the nastiest most expensive thing I ever paid for that was a waste of my time. But the sushi you get here is so good you could enjoy it and just keep getting more! And the good thing is they don't put that fattening ingredient like in America. In America those restaurants will add some chemical to make you full and your stomach will hurt as a result of the chemical they add to make you think your full.
Shining_brow:
Wow! You've been to America?? Really, I'd never have thought that.....




















