Fengyi

Also, what's the difference between Hui and Uighur cuisine? And what kind of aspects/dishes in Peking cuisine do you think is essentially Hui? ← OOOPS! Sorry for the misunderstanding - ayi is my indirect way of referring to my maid. Perhaps I should have said baomu...... she only comes in a couple of times a week to help clean off all the Beijing dust, bring in veggies from the farmers market, cook lots of yummy food and of course, give me a good scold for eating the wrong foods, buying the wrong stuff and doing the wrong things...! I will try and get her recipe for her red-cooked beef. It has all these strange spices in it which she says are particular to Hui cooking. I've been too lazy so far to find out what they all are, but I will take a note next time! I myself know almost nothing about Xinjiang - however, I do know someone who is Han from Xinjiang...but we ended up just talking about the wine that they make. I will try and find out more! I will let more qualified and experienced people here talk about the influence of Hui on Beijing food!!! All I know is that an awful lot of the street food here has Hui influences. HTH!

Also, what's the difference between Hui and Uighur cuisine? And what kind of aspects/dishes in Peking cuisine do you think is essentially Hui? ← OOOPS!

My grandmother was pure-blood (well, as pure as one can ascertain..) Manchu. In fact, that side of the family still has one or two older ladies who are still famed for their shoe/slipper making, apparently one of the skills that good Manchu girls should acquire to secure a good marriage.... Modern Manchu women are also famed for their cigarette smoking - something that my grandma *did* do (until she quit in her 50s). anyway, one thing that made her food stand out (particularly in Hong Kong, where she lived for about 50 years) was her love of millet. Millet used to be hard to buy in HK (Don't know about now!) and she loved a bowl for breakfast 'to remember her roots'. However, as millet gruel seems popular through north-eastern China...that just may be a regional preference. I am off to visit my Machurian cousins in Shenyang sometime this autumn so I will ask them lots of questions about their food! BTW, with regard to Imperial Cooking - it is much more influenced by Shangdong (Lu) cuisine than Manchurian. By all accounts, the Qing imperial court shook off a lot of Manchu-isms to become essentially Han.

Sorry to come at a late stage (have spent the last week pigging out in Japan!) but I just wanted to add a few words about Xinjiang/Uighur vs. Hui/Muslim cooking. As the article points out, the influence of Hui cooking on Beijing food is very large. I've also heard this (repeatedly!) from my ayi who is a Hui person herself. We often talk about food and once a week she makes me a Hui specialty dish for lunchtime. We've covered most of the food in the article It is VERY different food from that of the Uighur Restaurant that I habitually go to (Crescent Moon on Dongshi Liutiao) where the staff and cooks are obviously Uighur (even down to their Uighur-mandarin). They are mainly fresh-immigrants from Xinjiang and one of them (if you're there late at night) will break out the fold songs and perform for anyone left in the restaurant. Their classic repetoire includes roast leg of lamb, lamb-on a -stick, the baked bread pasties, nang bread, lots of lovely salads, home-made yoghurt, and of course hand-pull-rice and the noodles in tomato and lamb based sauce (sorry - I'm too lazy to type Chinese right now). Very very different food from Xian (and places-east Muslim food)!! My favourite thing of all at Crescent MOon, though, is ordering 'Xinjiang beer': the chosen booze of Muslims They also have lots of red wine.....both of which are hidden from visits by the local Iman!! Gosh - I want some now! I really missed the chillis while I was in Japan!

I had these yesterday! I had helped organized the first ever Madeira-tasting dinner in Beijing and had decided to hold it at one of the only Macanese restaurants in Beijing (I thought the food and wine matching possibilities were good...besides the whole Portuguese thing...) We had the Pastis de bacalhau with some Vinho Verde to kick off the affair...and then paired three different Madeiras with various Macanese dishes (i.e. Rainwater with African chicken and roast goose; 5yr old Rich with chargrilled beef and macanese curried vegetables - excellent pairing!; 10 yr old Malmsey with egg tarts and crema caramel). All courtesy of the Broadbent Madeira Company bringing Madeira into China (way-hey!!!) Anyway, if anyone reading this is off to Macau, I can really recommend the lighter Madeiras with Macanese food - particularly with the coconut 'Portuguese' sauces! Of course, in the heat of Macau, Vinho Verde is also very good!!

Thanks Peter I'm actually in London at the moment, so can't check up easily on things...but do try the new Da Dong branch at the south-west corner of DongSi Shitiao and 2nd ring road by the 'Old Granaries'. All reports of this place have been great - and it's very stylish. Also worth considering is the branch of Bianyi fang which is NOT in the Hadamen hotel (good duck but TERRIBLE service) but it's in the south tower of the Xin Shi Jie (New World) shopping centre just south of the Chongwenmen subway stop. If you get the subway to Chongwenmen, just walk south past the first New World and cross the street after it and enter into the shopping centre on that side. The Bianyifang is on the 4th or 5th floor. It's great duck, good service and nice other dishes too. One more consideration re: Quanjude - the one in the Tsinghua Science Park is really good - if you're in the Northwest. If money is no object - Made in China in the Grand Hyatt is an option. Good luck!

Very interesting topic - and I have been thinking about my cooking style for a while recently after moving from Cambridge UK (lots of lovely English raw ingredients, some hard to find Asian ingredients and nowhere to eat out) to Beijing (lots of lovely Chinese ingredients, some hard to find Western ingredients and EVERYWHERE to eat out in almost EVERY type of cuisine). The move has made me really re-examine the types of foods I am cooking now and why. Do you tend to mostly cook foods or recipes that spring from your home culture, or do you tend to mostly cook things from other cultures? That's the sort of thing I'm thinking about right now. I tend to cook Asian or European in Beijing -which are about as close to my home cultures as I can guess. I would cook other types more if I could get the ingredients (and if it weren't so easy now just to stroll down the street to a Cuban restaurant, Indian place or Brazilian BBQ!). In the restaurant-desert that was Cambridge, I cooked mainly Korean, Japanese, Chinese (northern), Indian (nothern as well), Mexican, Spanish, French, Italian and Greek. Very little South American or Middle Eastern. The main problem was finding ingredients! I was game for cooking any culture's food any time - and because we had to cook every single day, it kept me from getting bored! Where are you from and what is it that attracts you to the things you choose to cook? A bit of a mix - like chile-peppa....Machurian/Chinese/English/Canadian in my immediate family, including cousins add Spanish/Australian/Japanese/Indonesian/ and Dutch. I'm from Malaysia, Hong Kong, Canada (Quebec and BC), UK and now PRChina. I must say that sheer and utter GREED attracts me to the things I chose to cook. (yesterday I made the mistake of hitting a Russian food store going home a bit drunk after a party....now I have to cook something with all the sour cream I bought in my enthusiasm......) How long have you been cooking, and has your cooking shifted from that of one culture to another over time? At the age of nine, I fell in love with Julia Child's cooking. It was SO different from my mum's Chinese food. So the next year after watching all the shows, the first dinner party I cooked solo was french onion soup, chicken in cream sauce and JC's very own Baked Alaska a la Vesuvius (but my dad helped me with the flambe part!). At the same time, I was in the kitchen learning about (mainly) northern China food from my mum and eating loads of Japanese food with my aunties. I then suffered through 6 years of English boarding school food - the less said of that, the better.... After escaping from Prison, I went crazy cooking everything and anything I could lay my hands on - I was living in Montreal, with my own kitchen and life was good!This is when I really started to learn things from friends - like how to make Punjabi food, how to make homefries and american pancakes, how to cook baklava and good souvlaki, etc... then I moved to China for a bit and fell in love with Korean food! By the time I moved back to the UK, I could cook enough Asian dishes so I wouldn't miss out anything that I liked to eat Egullet has also been an invaluable source of ideas and inspiration! Now my favourite cooking is fusion of a type- using asian ingredients for european-style dinner parties. But don't get the chance here to do that as all my cooking stuff is in storage/on the high seas! How did you learn to cook - from a person, from books, from television, from (?) All three and egullet!- I have gobbled up any material on food and cooking that I can get my hands on! I am also shameless in forcing various people to show me how to make things from their own cooking tradition (have now got a couple of Hui minority dishes under my belt thanks to my ayi!) What direction would you like to see your cooking go in the future - do you have a "plan" or any ideas as to what focus you would like to take? Wherever my greed takes me next! [i just spent the morning at the new Fauchon in Beijing....drooling ever so slightly.]

Hi Kent! You might find more by googling the name 'Su Dongpo' or 'Su Shi' - that's the Pinyin versions of his (two) names. He was really into food, poetry, calligraphy and all the good things in life. You might have heard of the famous Hangzhou Dongpo Pork dish (东坡肉). which is one of the great celebrations of belly meat as we know it That's supposed to be named after (or some say he invented it!) the man himself. His poetry is REALLY good and well worth reading!! and it wouldn't surprise me if he did eat so many lychees! BTW, the ones we are getting here in Beijing are flooding in now - boy! are they lovely!!! SOooooooooo juicy!

It's very interesting for me to read this thread as a month or so ago the first ever Kosher restaurant opened up here in Beijing - and one of the first reviews pointed out that there was very little 'Jewish food' on the menu. (see That's Beijing Review for May 30 - Dini's Restaurant) - it did make me laugh to see that 'Jewish food' here would be firmly in the "exotic" category considering Beijing is a place where you can easily score camel's paw and donkey dumplings.... But I do find it relevant to this thread that the owners (see www.kosherbeijing.com) are most focused on the fact that their food is Kosher rather than anything else. The menu (on the website) runs the gamut from sushi to pasta to hamburgers - which I think here must be a reflection of the restaurant's need to serve kosher-observant Jewish people in Beijing (who were heretofore limited to home-cooking) rather than to serve Gentiles who wished to eat a specific Eastern-European type cuisine.

That chain is actually very popular because they do 'healthier food' by doing mainly traditionally steamed food. It's pretty good and not greasy at all for a 'global chinese fast food chain' as they call themselves....

This recommendation is near the Forbidden City - so good for any travellers! We were in the area visiting a friend who's lucky enough to have a courtyard house just off the Nanchizi Road in a hutong by the side of the Forbidden city. When we left to make way for her kids who'd got back hungry from school, she let slip that there was a good Hunan place nearby. Of course, we had to go! 刘家锅酒楼 - Liujiaguo Restaurant was a very pleasant surprise indeed. The food was not as searingly spicy as we expected but was incredibly tasty. The service was pretty good for an 'ole-skool' restaurant and quite friendly. We ordered the 'Mouth watering' chicken (very nicely done and very balanced in flavour), and then went a bit pork crazy with a 腊肉 la-style meat dish, a plate of 'fired gristle' and a big bowl of fried cauliflower. Fried Cauliflower?!?!?! Yes, and it was the MOST delicious cauliflower I have ever had (and I have made the infamous cauliflower 'fries'). It was fried with whole cloves of garlic, garlic shoots, bits of fatty pork and lots of soyasauce. The cauliflower was almost burnt, and was darkly brown -caramalized. It was heaven! The La-rou was done with chinese celery, chile peppers and was very cured and fatty. I liked it enough to force my SO from eating too much so I could get it wrapped and have it today. As for the gristle, if you are a cartilege lover as I am, it was BLISS. Lovely slices of, yes, gristle with red peppers and lots of onion. It was a bit of a pork-out I'm afraid due to the greed of myself. Actually, the place is supposed to be famous for its lake and river fish. and the other dinners did look like they were enjoying it! The other thing to add, is that they had some nice draft beer on tap in the colours of: yellow, black and ................green! Despite the fact it wasn't St. Patrick's day, I went ahead and ordered the green. It was (I kid you not!), Spirullina beer! Yes, healthy AND alcoholic! What better combination could there be?!?! Actually, the green beer was rather good - not nasty at all with a pleasant slightly sweet taste. The yellow tasted like a fresh wheat beer and the black was rich and rather like a thin stout with notes of caramalized soya-sauce. I didn't have my camera with me or else, I would have graced this report with a picture of all the beers lined up - it was a pretty sight! Total spend was about 130RMB including three large beers. Address: 刘家锅酒楼 - on Nanheyan Street 南河沿大街 19 号 (about 300m north from the Guibinlou). 65241487 ALSO at Dongsishitiao 东四十条 102 号(at the crossroads of Pingan Street). 64019131

I'm not quite sure I follow. In addition to the PX I wrote about, Toro Albala also makes finos and amontillados. Their website makes that much clear, although my Spanish is minimal. In addition, they make vinegars and some other things. For those also unable to read Spanish, the Classical Wines site is some help (not only with Toro Albala but others). ← I always pictured them in Montilla-Moriles rather than Jerez unless they have now started vinifying across the 2 D.O.s ← I love the complexities of fortified Gypsy Boy, I think that what is meant is that, although Toro Albala make wines in the Fino and Amontillado styles (after all, Montilla-Moriles is where the latter gets its name from), they are not Sherries (i.e. from they're not from the magic triangle of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Jerez de la Frontera and Puerto de Santa Maria) . And so, Toro Albala wouldn't have access to the famed albariza soil so needed to grow the palomino grape for a truly classic Sherry fino. Of course, PX is in a strange situation because so little of it is grown in Jerez - so PX imported from M-M can indeed be included in the Jerez-Xeres-Sherry DO. As the soil in M-M is sandy rather than chalky, PX is widely grown along with Airen and Muscat of Alexandria and all of these can be treated in a 'Sherry-style' to make fino and amontillado wines from the free-run juice and these two names MAY be used on the label (unlike on any other Sherry-style wine produced outside of the region). However, because of the climate and soil, the finos generally aren't as fine as those produced in the Jerez-Xeres-Sherry area. Sorry to blither on. But talk of PX got me all excited. I cannot find ANY in Beijing. and the only sherry i've spotted is Tio Pepe, which is fine, but just not that exciting . I LOVE the dangerously seductive nature of PX with its hints of debauchery through sweetness! When I think back to my days of drinking through the Berry Bros range of sherries (sniff!)...I could almost cry!

and no one says 'boy, look at those Westerners! They're all so crazy and unappreciative that they add MILK to their tea! Even SUGAR' OK, so that's a bit crazy, but I liked the point about sake so much I had to add one of my own... Beijing is nowhere near as sophisticated a dining place as Shanghai, but you can eat from the whole myriad of Chinese cuisines here as well as enjoy just about any other world cuisine. These, of course, serve a much higher proportion of ex-pats than Chinese locals, but the wine dinners at european restaurants always seem include a good mix of Asian/Western. BTW, Rebel Rose, I think you'd be surprised at where some of the big collectors are - some of them are in cities most people have never heard of! They may have made their money there in mining or some other local industry and stayed. In fact, I just heard of a wine-importing friend who is going specially to one such obscure place just to personally entertain one client who's a big customer. So they must be buying big. But you can put most of the big players along the (mainly Southern) coastal cities (though I hear Dalian and place like that are really picking up) and in Beijing of course. As regards margin, however, Peter - I would say that beer is far more profitable for most restaurants. You can sell a Yanjing beer here (which is about 3 RMB in the grocery store) for up to 45RMB in a nicer restaurant and without the storage overheads, training or nice glasses costs needed for wine. Perhaps because we're a load of Northern cheapskates it is quite hard for people in the F and B business here to move wine with big margins in restaurants. People notice and make rather nasty comments (I've heard quite a few about certain places around town). Somehow, maybe because it's only 45RMB (in places where a cocktail is about 55RMB), beer attracts a lot less negative comments about its markup. I mean, a few places like Tiandi Yijia and Aria can move a lot of high-end wine because of the expense-account business, but I think even the nicer-end places here don't shift it as much as they want to. Moving profitably priced wine is apparently much easier in Shanghai and places further south. Funnily enough, I have noticed that Chinese people shopping at IKEA tend to drink wine with their meatballs and set meals. But a glass of wine is cheap there, and because they don't sell by the bottle, the initial outlay is low enough to entice. And heck, if you're in IKEA to get your house furnished, maybe a glass of wine is neccessary to face the horrors of the 'warehouse level'!!!

Hi! Acutally, I would argue that the term 'Chinese food' is completely useless here. It's likes saying 'all wines go with European food'.... yep, from lutefisk to quiche, they all match wines perfectly "Chinese" food is SO limited in its variety outside its native country that I can understand where the idea of 'Chinese food' comes from. But it is such a gross simplification.... Here, in Beijing, we can dine at restaurants from every corner of China and it is just a diverse as going to Italian one night, French the next, German the next, etc... and that is without even getting into subtleties of sub-regions. Of course, techniques are similar but only to the extent that European cooking techniques are all similar as well. So, for instance, with the hearty northern grilled meats (yes, the northerners DO have charcoal grills and all that!), a bordeaux (or cs/merlot based) wine would go nicely. Claret is also nice with the simple beef stews of Dongbei. It's pretty good with Beijing roast duck and also, great with roasted or 'lu'd (it's a type of stewing) goose. I really want to bring a bottle to my favourite Uighur restaurant that does a killer roasted leg of lamb as I reckon it would go excellently. Claret would have gone nicely with the slow-cooked venison that I had last weekend at the 'Imperial Cuisine' restaurant of Fangshan. In fact, it would have gone better with that than the Pavillon Rouge de Ch. Loudenne with Dorade pairing that we had at a French Restaurant later in the week! I myself am still discovering new types and styles of Chinese food (I had a lovely surprise of trying some LI River minority food the other week - they use jasmine flowers in their cooking...it was like eating Muscat wine or somethng like Gewurtz!!). Anyway, the upshot of my rant is that, yes, there is plenty of food within the Chinese tradition that would good well with bordeaux. There is plenty of food which wouldn't as well. It would be harder to match it with Hunan, Sichuan and that sort of cooking, but then again, Claret wouldn't go that well with a lot of big gusty southern Italian food either I've whittered on for far too long, but it's something which I feel quite passionate about. PS EDITED to agree with JohnL's points about resentment turning to condescension...and also to say that I think swimming in Petrus would be REALLY painful....just think of all that acidity...OUCH!

I'm sorry, but I have heard this 'Chinese just mix sprite and coke with their premier cru wine' SO SO SO Many times (and have NEVER witnessed it) that it just plain infuriates me! I think that you, JohnL, have hit it on the nose. It's such a pandering blend of snobbery and envy combined. Perhaps the noveau-riche of the early 90s did this, but certainly now, I doubt that this exists. The Chinese themselves laugh at such behaviour! Last Wednesday I was at a Chateau Loudenne dinner here in Beijing and nobody mixed coke with their wine(!). In fact, many perceptive and intelligent comments were made about the wines' balance and structure. When I have taught wine tasting seminars in Chinese, I find that, contrary to the coke-mixing stereotype, most Chinese beginner-level tasters are generally more sensitive to acid/structure balance and taste than the UK entry-level tasters that I have taught. They do respect the flavour and tastes that the wine has on its own. Perhaps this is due to a food culture where perceptive comments on food tastes and mouthfeel are expected from an early age. They also have a bee in their bonnet about ageing wine - so I suspect many rich Chinese who are buying young Bordeaux are actually ageing them (being that a wine cellar is becoming de rigueur in many new houses nowadays!). And as for "there are 1.3 billion Chinese who are becoming interested in wine" WHAT garbage! There is NO one product in China that has a market of 1.3 billion. Not even rice! On this basis, I totally agree with you, Rebel Rose, that these speakers were going for attention and crowd pleasing. grrrrr

Sorry to dominate this thread, but I thought it would be a useful place to post notes of various Beijing restaurants that I've enjoyed. Last night, we went to the Sichuan Government Office Restaurant... or as the short name goes, 川办餐厅 (chuan ban canting). The first good sign is when we get there, there's a HUGE queue. On a Thursday night. Everyone and their neighbour is hanging around waiting for a table munching on sunflower seeds kindly provided by the management. The sight of a long queue in a city of several myriads of restaurants gladdened my heart (but saddened my weary feet) and we marched up, got a number and joined the masses. [Not to mention that next door was a shop full of Sichuan speciality food products! I myself scored a few bags of Pi Xian Dou Ban Jiang while waiting] The wait was worth it. The food was great and very cheap - particularly for the area (it's just off Jiangguomen nei). We had a couple of cold dishes: Country style aubergine/eggplant (which was deliciously garlicky and spicy) and a mouth numbing cold chicken which just pure ma 麻 without any la 辣 (it came swimming in a sea of Sichuan peppercorns). I tried to order the enticingly names 'wolf-sprout greens' but they had already sold out of these... The hot dishes included the best Huiguorou 回锅肉 I've had so far. It was perfectly balanced and had some lovely pickled veg throw into up the flavour. We also had some lovely steamed ribs with sticky rice, baicai swimming in deep yellow chicken fat and some little fried sesame buns stuffed with fatty pork (YUM!) In all, it was very enjoyable and the cooking was great. The ambience is definitely old skool Chinese (lots of shouting, smoking, ash on the floor, etc..) as are the prices - our meal came to 95RMB, 24 of which was on beer. The address is: 贡院头条 5 号 (Gong4yuan4tou2tiao2 number 5) and it's down a small hutong and through a courtyard.

Loft's Suckling lamb.......yummmmmmmm! On a slightly less Homer Simpson-esque note, I thought people coming to Beijing in the next while might want to know that the Qianmen Quanjude is closed now for renovations. The whole article on the restaurant and how they are keeping the 'sacred' fires alight (the fire hasn't gone out since 1864) is here: Quanjude Renovations BTW, outside of the restaurant, the whole area is being pedestrianized, so you will be able to get completely drunk on baijiu and then stagger out onto the street without risk of being promptly run over by a bus

[bTW, the Starbucks in the Forbidden City has had it's sign removed because one of the local news achors started a hub-bub about it being 'cultural imperialism' sort of stuff and all that....But, why oh why oh why can they not put in a nice place to just *sit* and have coffee/tea/whatever in that place. I've been through it over ten times now and I would sell my culturally imperialist soul for a any cafe/ teahouse worth it's salt] But on topic, in Beijing we've got all the usual suspects (McD KFC et al.), plus a 'up-class' chain called Le Jazz which does Chinesified Western food. In the mall below where I live, there's a Dairy Queen/Yoshinoya (like Siamese twins - never separated!), a fast-food Guilin noodle (crossing bridge ones) chain, the Xiabuxiabu Hot Pot chain, a 24hr McD's, a Kaiten sushi chain which is ALL over Beijing and some other 'serious' restaurants. Other big fast-food chains here are Origus Pizza buffet (which can include all the beer you can drink!!), Qingqing burgers (the fast food of choice on Campus), Aisen Ramen (always packed!). A popular Chinese fast food chain here is the 'Chengdu Snacks' serving lots of small Sichuan eats at small wooden tables. There's also the 'Zha Jiang Mian Kings' for noodles 'n' sauce and the numerous Jiaozi (dumpling) places where you can eat lots of jiaozi and run out again in a matter of minutes.... I'm sure there's more, but my brain's dead right now..... There is of course also the HUGE WORLD of Street food - Jianbing, kaorou and the like, but those are sold by small hawkers rather than fast-food chain type places....

I was taken out last weekend to an interesting restaurant that might be a nice change of pace from Peking Duck-fests if you're visiting Beijing. It's on Sanlitun Beixiaojie 三里屯北小街 right by the 'Gold Barn' and it's called 一座一忘 -In and Out is the English name (tel: 84540086). It's food from the Li River in the south and very nice it is too as a break from Northern food. We had some very delicious scrambled eggs with jasmine flowers, a very tasty -slighty chilli-hot fish dish (which I never found out the name of as our hosts had ordered before we arrived), lovely vegetable soup, good cross-the-bridge noodles and an almost Thai-like beef dish with holy basil - but we didn't get to try the bugs, which apparently are a speciality of the restaurant. It's also quite fun as they serve the traditional half-fermented rice wine out of the bamboo tubes and it's all very jolly with people's memories of the Lijiang area stuck up on the walls. Not too expensive (about 60-70RMB a head).

This is probably too late to help - but the one place that I've seen the round bottomed woks here in Beijing is at the "professional" cookware stores - you know, the ones piled high with woks the size of bathtubs for toddlers and industrial jianbing makers (which I SO want to buy!!! ). If there's one near you, you can still buy the 'oleskool' style ones there.

I went to the other branch (at the Heping bridge and 3rd ring road) the weekend after your trip with some friends who'd never had Shanxi food before. We ordered (among other things) the kaolaolao noodles - and it was so funny....despite having just beforehand eaten our way through a suckling lamb, sundry cold dishes, two bowls of the other noodles and a basket of the red sorghum dumplings -we still were picking away at the kaolaolao noodles for ages and kept on saying...OK, this is my *last* one.....OK, that was my *2nd to last* one....OK I'll just have one more..... hmmmm....that one looks nice, I'll just have that one.... and so on until the whole basket was demolished. The texture is so curiously wonderful! I really want to know more about these noodles - there's a Chinese Wikipaedia entry on them, but I can't get the page to load! If you read Chinese, there's a little help on: Kaolaolao query But next time I'm at Loft, I'm going to hang around the kitchen to get a good gander at them!

Oh Hooray for China Internet's hard working staff!!! I finally got connected today on home wifi! Having done that, I can say that I was competely incorrect (in underestimating the amount that Ci Xi wanted on the table). and that I can't remember anything very well!!! The quotation is: "吃一看二观三"， So, while eating ONE, she looked at TWO and gazed upon THREE. So that's 5 dishes on the table for every 1 that she ate from. WOW I wonder how many were fresh that day - if she could be counted on not to eat them..... and, hrzt8w, the difference in the two verbs 看 and 观 is due mainly to their difference in meaning in Classical Chinese. The later involves more of a 望 sort of sense. [pedant classical mode ON] In fact, kan4 is a fairly modern verb. It doesn't appear in early texts at all instead 视 and 观 are used (cf. the Shijing and other pre-Qin texts). [OFF] Also, WRT to Li Jia Cai Restaurant, it's been remodelled recently to have a capacity of 100 now.. It must have been quite recently as the revised numbers accomodated don't appear on most websites (even in Chinese). I still want to go, but will have to save my pennies (not likely when Great Auntie needs to go to Fangshan!)

I still haven't gone yet!! but I too have heard that it's changed since they enlarged it by so much. I myself have a warm fondness in my heart for Fangshan - but my family's been going to it since it opened so maybe I'm biased. I heard some great stories about eating there in the thirties from my grandma. I think the "putting it all on the table" thing is not just a COmmunist hangover, however. Wasn't there a saying that the Empress Cixi would want to "eat three, look at three, gaze at three" (I think it's 吃三，看三， 观三 but I'm sure I could be wrong)? At any rate - there had to be A LOT of dishes for her to have in front of her. My own Manchu grandma used to eat like that - she would pick at a few dishes but insist that the cook made at least 6 or 7. So maybe it's a 'power' thing. Or maybe it is just a timing thing.... Your description of the wotou as 'orange suppositories' really upset me!!! I was brought up on the story of how they were developed as a refined version of the regular wotou by the Imperial court kitchens. And, if you've ever eaten common wotou, you know what an amazing improvement the Fangshan ones are!!! I was told that that's kinda the point of Imperial cuisine: that they take quite ordinary dishes and try and tweak them to make them unusual in one way or the other... Oh well, maybe I'm trying to be positive because I'm going there at the weekend to take my great-auntie out for lunch. BTW, trillium, I have an entire banquet set of the yellow dishes. They are all Jingdezhen ware - so you might be able to pick them up in a good china shop in Vancouver that carries Jingdezhen ware. I personally "appropriated" mine from various family members

I'm in Beijing. I've noticed over the last ten years portions getting bigger here (or maybe it's just my inability to eat as much ). It's gotten less greasy in the good restaurants, though. Home-style places still do a lot of grease (had lunch in one today and the eggplants were swimming away in it!). Mind you, we went out last night to a Taiwan-style restaurant and the portions were smaller (except for the huge shaved ice desserts), but it was not greasy at all! I would also add (andi hope it wasn't true for you!!) that, in my limited experience of Chinese tours, they take you to some really bad restaurants. But also, Beijing has changed terrifically in five years - particularly on the eating (and construction) side of things. The restaurant side really has improved!

Im not sure about portion sizes here in China anymore.....on Sunday we went out and got served a whole sucking lamb for four of us (and the waitresses weren't so surprised to see four people ordering one!! BTW, it was FABULOUS! Done in Shanxi style - with loads of cummin and fennel. Delicous!). Then yesterday, we were checking out the new complex my SO and I just moved into and we decided to go for hotpot. Well, we just ordered ONE set meal plus a plate of mu-er and some lettuce between us....and it nearly defeated us. Between the fatty beef and the pork blood, it was pretty hefty particularly the portions (and all for just 38RMB)! I was watching other people eating and was thinking.....how the heck do they stay so slim?!?!? I've only been back for a couple of months and I really, really need to join a gym! The portions really do seem rather large here to me - at least comparable to the ones in Canada...