Eating out

There’s a wide range of eating options. At the “low” end there are street vendors selling cooked food. Lots of them sell meat on skewers, some (surprisingly to me, especially in February) sell corn on the cob, some sell roasted whole sweet potatoes. And that’s a very partial list. We haven’t bought anything on the street, but as I wrote in one of the Beijing entries, we have eaten food from places that were no more than a hole in the wall.

A step up from street vendors is a style of restaurant that has a few tables and sells steamed buns, soups, maybe dumplings, and I don’t know what all else because I can’t read the menus and Jamie and I like steamed buns, egg drop soup, and dumplings so much that we never order anything else. Or check that, we haven’t ordered dumplings yet because the place we’ve been going to hasn’t returned to full swing after the holiday period, and even now his favorite place hasn’t reopened; it’s doing the spring cleaning that traditionally accompanies the holiday.

Steamed buns are little balls of a flour dough with a meat filling (pork, usually). Eight or ten at a time are steamed in bamboo containers. The egg drop soup also contains herbs, including cilantro, and “fungus,” which doesn’t correspond to anything very familiar, but you can think of mushrooms to get in the ballpark.

About the “sanitary” customs, the less said the better. In small restaurants in Yulin, there’s a little roll on the table off which you tear a piece to use as a napkin (the paper is stretchy and a couple of inches wide). When you’re done with it, you throw it on the floor. Whether it would be impolite to leave used napkins on the table, I don’t know. There is typically also a bin of chopsticks -- we always take the disposable ones. There’s a bottle of vinegar and a bowl of chopped hot peppers in oil (they remind me of dad). You get a tiny bowl into which to pour your condiments, then dip the steamed buns into the bowl.

There are also bigger, nicer places, which have not only an open dining area but a lot of private rooms, which people here prefer. Food is served “family style.” All the serving dishes are in the center of the table (maybe on a lazy susan), and everyone takes what they want with their own chopsticks. There are no serving utensils except the ladle for soup. Each person has chopsticks, a little plate, a teacup, a small drinking glass, and a soup bowl and spoon. The soup bowl can be used for soup (which is the last course here, not the first), or rice. No napkin is provided. We keep packets of tissues in our jacket pockets for this and other reasons.

Jamie, Marien, and I were at dinner a few nights ago. We ordered three or four dishes to share, but we were still hungry when we had finished them. We tried to order another dish that we thought we’d all like, but the waitress said it was a cold vegetable, and all our vegetable dishes had been cold, and we should order a hot vegetable now. Jamie says this is one of many food customs (and perhaps superstitions) -- but he doesn’t (and I don’t) know much more about them.

With the odd (and I mean odd) exception here and there, I like everything I’ve eaten, and some of it I could eat every day. I decided ahead of time that there was no way I was going to be able to indulge all my food sensitivities here, so I would just try to eat anything that was served. So far so good, knock on wood.