Wonderful Chinese Food
When we got back to town, two taxis in a row refused to take us to our hotel so we trekked a mile and a half from Tian An Men to Shatan Houjie. It is widely noted that occasionally Chinese tourist people refuse to deal with foreigners. Most of the tourists here are from China. I am not used to being turned down by taxi drivers. I think that it was rush hour and they were looking for clients who wanted to go to the airport, not spend an hour in traffic for a 13 RMB fare.
The walk gave an excuse to order way too much food at Na Chia Xiao Guan, which is not Xiao (small) at all, but nothing like McJade’s.
It is in an old wooden house with an unlit wooden door and the label was so slight that our taxi driver from the hotel stopped and asked the doorman directions to the restaurant, unaware that he was parked in front of it.
Beijing taxi drivers are not to London standard. They spend a lot of time leaning out the windows and asking other drivers directions, or on the cell phone with workers at their destinations asking where they are. Dave suspected our two refusenik drivers of being illiterate, and not able to understand the mandatory pieces of paper that all Westerners have in China, with maps and Chinese characters showing destinations. Hotels and Restaurants all give them out. It’s the main function of a business card, the map on the back.
Considering the number of taxi drivers who must have been pressed into service for the Olympics, which the countdown clock informed us was 32 days 1 hour and 45 minutes away, we are part of a learning curve. The doorman who rescued our first driver from loss of face, also spent about 15 minutes after dinner telling another taxi driver how to get to Sha Tan Bin Guan, which is right by the Forbidden City. Learning Curve. I think they were just being social. SoCal. Ever notice how Angelenos love to recite routes to each other? Interspersed with the definite articles?
We ate:
- pickled fish aspic, gelled in the shape of a fish.
- matchstick mutton liver in chrysanthemum leaf salad.
- a giant slab of braised bacon in Chinese date sauce, my goodness, I thought that the prices were high because everything was delicate and overwrought, but the prices were high because the portions were supersized. The dates were huge too.
- a whole sea cucumber stuffed with minced pork kidney, sheep kidney, and deer kidney, served in a chopped mushroom brown sauce in a two tier basket, and get this, in the bottom basket, completely unmentioned on the menu, were ten shrimp and chopped pork dumplings, arranged lollipop like so you grabbed the shrimp tail and ate the dumpling off it, which was molded on the shrimp.
The last Qing empress dowager used to routinely order over a hundred dishes made for her. for every meal she ate alone. Most of them she probably never even looked at. It’s a way of showing off. The result, since the Cultural Revolution was rolled back, is that Chinese waitresses won’t warn you if you are ordering too much food. They figure you might just feel like a bite of it, or even a look. Hau chr, hau kan.
I grew up with the thought that people were starving in China, and 12 hours later I am not hungry again.
We also had Fresh Squeezed Orange Juice.