Today, I followed tradition and had Christmas lunch with my dearest friend J. Tradition is that we always have lunch together on Christmas Eve, but neither of us can remember why. Neither of us really celebrate Christmas in any other way. What we ate certainly wouldn't be considered traditional Christmas fare and probably all the better for that!
Part of our tradition is to go to a restaurant we've never visited before. Fortunately, two days ago, I noticed that a favourite seafood place had sadly given up the ghost, but had been replaced by a place whose name gave little clue to the cuisine other than beef. So, we had to investigate.
It turned out to be a standard hot-pot place, but with an emphasis on beef, so guess what we ate.
We arrived at 11:45 and the place was empty, although it filled up and then emptied again by the time we left. We chose our hot-pot base. I love spicy; J is less keen so we went for this. Perfect.
Known as a 鸳鸯火锅 (yuān yāng huǒ guō), literally two duck fire pot, as you can see, it has spicy one side; non-spicy the other.
Then we choose the beef. They offer various parts of the animal. J chose this, so I'm not sure exactly what these are. It was a picture menu and I'm reasonably sure J didn't know either. Whatever, it is thinly cut slices of beef.
We also chose the next item purely because we couldn't work out what it was and the menu wasn't helping. It looked like strips of fat.
but proved to be tripe from one the beast's many stomachs.
To accompany our beef, we ordered some beef.
Beef heart
Beef balls
Beef on sticks. 牛肉串 niú ròu chuàn. I love that last Chinese character - it looks exactly like what it means. These were alternating cubes of tender meat and soft fat. Lovely.
J declared the beef balls "really good", but I found them a little on the dense side. But tasty.
Just in case we weren't full, we also had these skewers of vegetable in a deep, pungent chilli sauce. Wood-ear fungus, lotus root etc.
Nearby our table was this selection of dip ingredients from which you assemble your dips of choice.
It took us three hours to get through this lot, but we were also distracted by our own conversation. A lovely lunch time.
Merry Christmas!
圣诞快乐！
