The Mandatory Food Post

You can’t go to China without writing a post about the food, so I figured I’d get it out of the way early. To preempt a few questions: no, I haven’t eaten dog (I think), and so far nothing has made me sick. The basic underlying comment is that everything is ridiculously cheap, and delicious. There’s a jiaozi (dumpling) stand about two blocks from the dorm that sells three large dumplings for one Yuan, meaning you can get a decent lunch (six jiaozi) for less than $0.30. The dine-in restaurants, too, fall somewhere in the range between the gumball machines in American restaurant lobbies and bottled water at Starbucks (usually about $0.50 - $2.00 for a meal). For an upscale experience where you’ll be waited upon by multiple uniformed waiters and waitresses, the total approaches American fast food prices of $4.00-$6.00 per person per meal.

At one such upscale restaurant by campus, we had our first big language mix-up of the program (this one was also entirely my fault). Five of us went to a large hot-pot restaurant, where you ordered a kind of broth and then selected meats and vegetables that would cook in the broth at your table. One of us went to the bathroom while we all decided what to order. I made the unfortunate choice of trying to order, indicating that we wanted the duck broth (“Nutritive Duck,” as the English on the menu put it). The waiter said “hot,” which we confirmed was alright, and then he said “four.” Thinking that he was indicating the number of people we had eating, I said “five,” so our bathroom-going friend wouldn’t be left out from the dinner. He nodded, and left.

When we got the food, it turned out to be nearly inedible. As we established afterwards, “four” was actually the degree of hotness of the food….on a scale from one to five. So my “five” indicated to the waiter that we wanted as spicy a dish as they could provide, and he was happy to oblige us. And despite individual bowls of heat-mitigating peanut sauce and beer bottles that approached a liter in size, we were unable to cool our palates enough to actually eat much of the food. Another advantage of the cheap food, though, is that if a meal ends up being a minor disaster, you haven’t lost much money as a result.

The other restaurants have been much better experiences. The waiters (fuwuyuan) have the unnerving custom of waiting for you at your table as you decide what you want to order, which pressures you in two ways. The first is wanting not to seem like a dumb foreigner in front of the native, knowledgeable Chinese person – but I abandoned that quickly after I realized it was impossible. The second, which still affects me, is that you want to order as quickly as possible so you don’t have a waiter breathing down your neck. What seems like very attentive, personal service when you first order soon devolves into the chaos of the local Chinese restaurant. After taking your order, making you pay (many restaurants charge up front), and bringing your food, the fuwuyuan don’t have the American custom of checking in from time to time to see how things are. So, if you want to order another dish or ask for the check if you didn’t pay up front, you have to follow the Chinese custom: looking around and shouting “FUWUYUAN!” until someone comes. Usually it’s not much of a hassle, but it sometimes feels unseemly to my dainty American sensibilities.