jeff yen

The local specialty in Wuhan for this time of year (although the season is just starting to end) is crayfish (xiao long xia / 小龙虾).

I’m not actually quite sure where this eating tradition comes from, but after Googling some fairly questionable sources, apparently the consensus is that crayfish in China are an imported species from the U.S, recently popularized (reports range from the 1940s to the 1990s), and would be considered an exotic destructive pest but for the fact that people eat the hell out of them every year, so they’re actually more profitable than the cash crops they destroy.

There are apparently some quite sensitive political and economic issues surrounding the little mud bug, like destruction of local fauna/flora, US-China import/export relations and the state of the Louisiana crayfish industry (such as it is after the oil spill), heavy metal poisoning, and so on, but I’m not all that concerned with any of it. I just got back from Wuhan after a week visiting Jing Jing, Yang Guang and the gang, and all I care about is that they’re delicious.

There is a somewhat stressful length of time that accompanies any travel in China to any place one might have friends. This is generally characterized by stuffing your face with unreasonable amounts of food with various groups of people who are:
  a) happy to see you and insisting on buying you dinner
  b) happy to see you and angling for a free meal
  c) dutifully upholding the traditions of hospitality
  d) hungry and anywhere nearby when dinner plans are being made
  e) a blood relation or friend to anyone in any of the above groups.

Although I’m very much in favor of the practice, after a few days of this, I just get slow, sluggish, and greasy… it stops being fun. In China — particularly outside the tier one cities — there are certain parts of the year in which "festival foods" almost universally take over the local restaurants. So if you happen to arrive in town during any of these times, when you go out to eat it’s almost invariably to eat this local specialty.

Consequently, there was a five-day period where Jing Jing and I gorged on crayfish no less than five times. Just our luck that every day that week, a new friend or relative popped out of the woodwork and asked to treat us (or be treated) to dinner.

So we ate crayfish. Lots and lots of crayfish. Steamed (zheng / è’¸), poached in oil (you men / 油焖), or barbecued (shao kao / 烧烤), we must have depopulated several provinces’ worth of ponds. Accompanied by ice-cold sweet mung bean soup (lv dou tang / 绿豆汤), beer, and whatever we could think to ask to be barbecued, there was really no reason to stop eating, so we just kept on going.

Our preferred venues for these were invariably da pai dang / 大排档, which essentially means "a big market stall." These are typically a restaurant consisting of an outdoor seating area, a smaller indoor seating area for when it’s raining, a kitchen somewhere in between, and no air conditioning. Basically, as you might conclude, like a larger version of a market food stall.

There is also a room where they do the washing up.

I highly recommend not going into the room where they do the washing up.

These places are not subject to the health code regulations typical of Western eating establishments, and even if they are, they are generally not in the habit of observing them.

So, telling if a place is safe and/or good actually becomes a much simpler and more effective enterprise than evaluating a rating in the window; simply look around. Regardless of how much trash there is strewn on the floor or how greasy and filthy the kitchen looks, if there are lots of local people chowing down it’s probably safe.

Moreover, it probably tastes amazing. Restaurants that turn out bland or tainted food do not survive very long in China; margins are low, and patrons with limited disposable income and several thousand years of common culinary traditions can be surprisingly discriminating about where they spend their money.

In fact, for da pai dang, it’s often said that the dirtier the place looks, the better the flavor. I can’t speak to the reasoning behind this, but I can attest that the theory has proven true every time I’ve eaten at one of these places.

Our favorite establishment is no exception. Every night that week it was packed, so every night we had to wait a while for a table to open up, grab a broom from the owner and sweep up piles of discarded crayfish shells and heads, and, on one memorable occasion, convince the owner to move our table a little further away from the street because of the twin inconveniences of wayward cars and omnipresent gutter water. If you’re seated near the kitchen, be ready to deal with both the incredible heat and the occasional crustacean escapee.

Once you get down to the food, the eating experience is… lively.

Most of the male customers are shirtless from the heat, and half of the patrons are smoking almost continuously. It will be loud; service in these places is typically requested by shouting at full volume. Moreover, beer flows freely all night — it’s cheap and cold, and everyone’s trying to cool off from the heat of the day or the spice of the food.

This atmosphere is better known as re nao / 热闹, literally meaning "hot and noisy," and it’s something that I’ve learned to welcome when eating out. In a way, it signifies celebration, community, and boisterous happiness all at the same time. Even when a drunken patron gets a little too upset and starts yelling at his waitress, the rest of the patrons watch on with mild amusement, and crack jokes at his expense with the rest of the staff.

It can be something of an acquired taste, unlike the food.

My favorite dish was invariably the roasted crayfish tails, served three-to-a-skewer, lightly dusted with spices and oil. The shells crisp and glistening from the long slow roast, they crackle between your teeth and peel away readily from the sweet, tender flesh.

We would also tack on orders of steamed crayfish (oversized crayfish cooked just firm, with a side of vinegar-chili dipping sauce), oil-poached crayfish (stewed in chili-peppercorn oil, along with onions, garlic, and other aromatics), garlic-chili edamame, braised clams and mussels, roasted scallops, honey-basted chicken wings, and really just about anything else the cook would consent to putting on his grill.

I loved it. Then I tolerated it. Then, I swore I’d be eating nothing but salad for months when I could finally escape the endless avalanche of seafood.

Now… dammit, now I’m hungry.