The dirtier it looks…
The local specialty in Wuhan for this time of year (although the season is just starting to end) is crayfish (xiao long xia / å°é¾™è™¾).
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.
Left to Right: a, c, e.
Not pictured: b, d, d, e, e, c.
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.
We started taking heads about halfway through the meal. Oil-poached and barbecued casualties were unrepresented.
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.
The crayfish expert (gao shou / 高手) and her little brother.
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.
The Avocado Lady
Where the hell are they growing these? Also, looks like my camera's backfocusing problem is back.
She seems to have cleverly cornered the market in that part of town for "exotic" produce like basil, arugula, limes, avocados, and so on. Likewise, she supplies cheese – fresh mozzarella for 17RMB per round, buffalo mozzarella for 53 – and a variety of other goods more often found in Western kitchens than Chinese.
So it's been a vague goal of mine to visit ever since I've heard about her. Today, having really nothing better to do, I decided to take a look and see what all the fuss was about.
The shop is situated near the French Concession, a part of Shanghai well known for its comparatively dense population of foreigners, so her decision to stock items popular with Westerners is not surprising. What is interesting, however, is that her prices are quite a lot cheaper than her competition. It's actually difficult to do an apples to apples comparison here. She doesn't actually have any direct competition, since... even more interesting... to best of my knowledge, nobody else is doing this.
To be fair, it wasn't quite perfect. The basil, while about 1/4 of the price of the basil at the Shanghai Metro superstore, had almost as many bruised, blackened leaves as not. Digging down into the bag for fresher specimens helped somewhat. The endive/frisée and arugula were likewise kind of wilted and sad.
The "parmesan" ( ba ma / 巴马 or ban ma chen / 斑马臣 – phonetic translations that, literally translated, could respectively mean "sticky horse" or "I pledge allegiance to a zebra" ) cheese was in fact Gran Moravia, a Czech product more akin to a cross between cheddar and romano. That's fine... it works just as well in most applications as a stand-in for Parmesan, and most – myself included – would be hard-pressed to tell the difference in a completed dish. If I had an oven, I might even consider substituting it for gruyère in a batch of gougeres. You know, just because I like to live dangerously.
The prices on canned goods were fairly typical, maybe one or two RMB short of the prices I've seen in major supermarket chains; i.e., nothing special. I'm guessing this is because the prices on all imported canned products reflect import duties, which are criminally high in China, so she can't get around those like she can on locally sourced produce.
The strange thing is, and the source of not a little cognitive dissonance on my part, this place has the imported goods of a large supermarket or boutique store, and the atmosphere of a local fruit stall. A scrawny black-and-white cat wanders around the aisles, idly batting at my hand when I try to pet it. A sweating block of cheese sits unattended on an upturned plastic crate, accompanied only by a knife of questionable cleanliness. Prices are unmarked, and apparently variable. I asked the owner's assistant what the price was for the... parmesan... cheese; 60rmb per half-kilo ( jin / æ–¤ ). When I was ready to buy, I asked the owner; 55.
It was great.
The owner seemed nice enough, but Sunday was obviously the wrong day to visit. She was harried and a little snappish, as the place was crawling with customers, mostly foreign. One man showed up, filled a sack with about 30 avocados, paid, and left without saying a single word. Others lingered, tripping over produce and each other in the narrow aisle, moonstruck at the array of foreign goods on offer.
Seeing as I have no food processor (or substantial enough knives) with which to make pesto, and no tortilla chips (or corn tortillas to make chips, or masa flour to make tortillas) to eat with any theoretical guacamole, I opted to go for a couple of simple salads, with an eye for reuse.
Picked up a container of Spanish olive oil and a can of chickpeas (chickpea-parmesan salad, hummus), a couple of tomatoes, some fresh basil (insalata caprese, basil stir fry, omelets, thai curry), a red onion, one fresh mozzarella round, 1/3æ–¤ of gran moravia, and a lemon. All told, 86RMB. Not bad, and the olive oil and cheeses took up 62 of that.
The olive oil is... certainly not the worst I've ever had, but with a name like "El Toro" it was fighting an uphill battle anyway. I would describe the aroma as halfway between a rich, fruity, full-blooded olive oil, and fermented kerosene.
Next time I'm just going to bite the bullet and spend a little more on a brand I recognize.
The tomatoes were simultaneously rather soft and not exactly bursting with flavor. Woe, woe for the days of the North Park farmer's market, where heirloom tomatoes were practically free for the taking.
I was planning on taking a look around the French Concession – I suppose I should give it a chance, eventually – but the mozzarella wasn't going to wait on me, so I ended up getting right back on the subway. Brief stop at the supermarket to pick up a baguette and some more dragon fruit ( huo long guo / ç«é¾™æžœ ) and I was set.
Yeah, that CRKT is my primary kitchen blade right now. Nothing classes up fresh basil quite like a pocketknife chiffonade.
So, you know.
More for me.
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Credit for my actually being able to find this place goes to the Shanghai Dolls weblog, and their map.
274 Wulumuqi Zhong Lu, near Wuyuan Lu
乌é²æœ¨é½ä¸è·¯274å·, 近五原路
Google map
5 minutes' walk from Changshou Lu (常熟路) subway station (metro lines 1 and 7).
P: +86 64377262
Restaurautism
Today has been an interesting day for me. In virtually every respect it was fairly boring, but nevertheless for some reason it made an impression on me. I did some work, went to the gym but didn't work out (forgot my ID card), did some more work, talked on the phone, and came home for dinner.
I guess dinner was a little non-standard.
After a trip to a Carrefour yesterday, I've been armed with a few things that I can't normally find in China. In fact, I had to seriously control my urges in order to leave there with even enough money for the subway ride home.
At any rate, that haul put me a handful of shrimp and some mushrooms short of a bowl of Tom Yum, or a few vegetables away from a pot of green curry.
So I hit the street market today after work for some curry fixins. Got back to my apartment and my fake kitchen, whipped out my handy pocketknife, and started peeling and slicing. Nothing says "temporary living arrangements" like having a 3-inch folding blade as your primary kitchen knife.
Midway through food prep, Christine came barging in (she has very few other modes of locomotion) and said I absolutely had to come and see the view from her balcony. Sean chose that moment to join us, and we all agreed the view was good enough to warrant a minor photographic frenzy.
Twenty minutes later I had a pot of green curry happily bubbling away on my induction stove, and a couple of roommates wafting through my door on wings of curried steam.
Yeah, that's her view. If nothing else, I got to reacquaint myself a bit with HDR photography.
By the way, it turns out that Thai curries go with baguettes just as well as Vietnamese curries do… i.e., very.
Afterwards, we sat around picking our teeth and each others' brains, which was unsurprisingly a fairly food-centric affair.
We're all foodies to varying degrees. Christine, while resting more on the consumption side of the equation, has nevertheless perfected an astonishing array of cooking techniques centered around the microwave, and Sean's a world traveler who's picked up more than his fair share of cooking smarts. He described his version of a paneer which had us all salivating, even having just stuffed ourselves with ungodly amounts of curry, french bread, and fried rice.
The interesting part of the conversation came when we started discussing Wuhan's variety of restaurants, or lack thereof. This led to a cursory examination of how successful, for example, a Chinese-American owned and operated gastropub might be, with a healthy selection of fairly authentic Asian and Western dishes.
This is a conversation I've had many times, both in- and externally, with a fairly wide assortment of people here, from friends and fellow foodies to former restaurateurs.
The thing is, I know just enough about cooking to know that I know nothing about cooking, especially professionally. Sure, I can whip up an array of passable curries (from two cans and a fistful of fresh veg) or fried rice, or even invent a half-decent dish once in a while ( try jicama stir-fried with five-spice beef… it's actually pretty awesome ). But to cook quickly and above all consistently, day after day, in a high pressure environment, is not a skill I've ever developed. Nor do I know anything about running a restaurant, which is a rather larger and more putrid kettle of fish.
But, you know, I keep going back to that thought, that it might be… fun.
Perspective
Recently, I have been considering how my perspective is so fundamentally changed on certain things, just by virtue of a change in location. Now, the snarkist in me will of course pipe up with the observation that this is all a change in perspective is. But that is beside the point, and that part of me is an insufferable ass.
Take Starbucks, for example.
In the States, I always felt slightly oppressed by Starbucks. They were everywhere, they all charged money for wifi, their environments were uniformly bland and sterile, and their coffee was -- more often than not -- just plain bad. This isn't referring to their cream-sugar-ice-coffee concoctions, which are probably just as tasty as the combination might suggest, but their plain black iced coffee, which is what I always drank. It was consistently bitter, sour, and served with way too much ice along with a bad attitude, as if I was being marginalized for not purchasing a double-caramel-pumpkin-chocolate-macchiato with an extra shot of some hideous candy syrup.
So I tended to avoid Starbucks, heading for the usual hipster hangouts and smaller chains, where the coffee was cheaper and arguably higher quality, and the atmosphere was friendlier.
Here in China, though, the situation is reversed. Starbucks is the single store I know where I can consistently get fast free wifi and a good cheap cup of coffee.
Yes, the iced coffee is still bitter and sour, but it's actually iced coffee, rather than the normal hot coffee poured over a couple ice cubes, resulting in a cup of warm coffee-flavored water.
Yes, the environment is bland and sterile, but here I don't have intermittent high pressure fronts of cigarette smoke drifting into my airspace from nearby tables, or sweaty waitresses hovering over me while I consider which of their overpriced drinks to buy.
At one notable joint, I ranged through half of their coffee menu, being told with each order that that particular drink was not available. When I finally asked what they did have available, I was helpfully informed that their coffee machine was, in fact, broken.
In a fit of unbridled optimism, they suggested I order tea.
This is the suggestion of someone who has absolutely misunderstood the nature of caffeine addiction.
I replied that, while I appreciated their enterprising nature, someone looking for a cheap cup of coffee would be hard pressed to order a 50RMB pot of tea. In despair, I finally ordered a Coke, which arrived in a warm can, and on leaving I was charged 15RMB… a fair price for a quick lunch (for example, a bbq pork set meal from the neighborhood Cantonese restaurant), but a far cry from the normal 4-5RMB price for a can of soda.
So. The only consistent factor in these shops is inconsistency. Thus, whereas the green medusa or mermaid or whatever it is of Starbucks in the States is a figure of cold, unbending corporate conformity, here it shines like a welcome beacon of reliability.
The fact that I can fill up my thermos with iced coffee for 13RMB (15, minus 2 for having my own cup -- something Chinese places aren't starting to do yet) doesn't hurt either. Normally a cup of coffee anywhere starts at 20, since they all tend to just make espresso even if you just want plain brew/drip.
And before I start sounding like an overly picky hobo with a slightly nicer version of a tin cup, let me just say it's not only about price.
This was confirmed a few days ago, when I discovered a Carl's Jr. in Shanghai by way of a giant ad placed on the elevators servicing my gym. I spent about 45 minutes on the elliptical with that goddamn Famous Star drifting in and out of my eyeline. Afterwards I showered, changed, and after a few minutes of internal debate, blew half a red bill (100/2 = 50RMB) on a Double-western Bacon Cheeseburger combo.
Oh... and go ahead and super size that, too.
The point, obviously, wasn't the price ( 50RMB is about how much I typically spend on food in 3 days ) or the food -- though the faint nausea I felt upon seeing the burger didn't stop me from eating it -- but the momentary sense of familiarity. In a surprising departure from the normal Chinese business model, Carl's Jr. even has the familiarly enormous paper buckets that masquerade as beverage cups, and a self-serve drinks fountain. They even have a little salsa bar with pickled banana peppers and salsa fresca.
In fact, it was almost like being at a Carl's Jr. in the U.S., except nobody there was openly weeping or picking at cold sores.
I think the fundamental reality is that I am, in fact… kinda homesick.
Not what I would normally call "homesick," really, but in a kind of low-level, almost unconscious sense of the word. I'm not depressed or forlorn, but put a little plastic tub of KFC mashed potatoes in front of me and there's a little rush of endorphins that might not have been triggered had I been offered a far superior Chinese meal.
And now, since my laptop battery's almost done and I may be off to some music pub in Xujiahui (å¾å®¶æ±‡), it's random picture time.
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Friends Ellen and Roger; Ellen's been previously introduced, Roger is a fellow American here doing kind of similar work as I am, freelancing as a videographer. Also looking (or just got, I've forgotten which) teaching jobs. Also, how is it that my Nokia phone is better at exposing night pictures than my Casio digicam? Damn you, Hong Kong.
Jishnu, this one's for you… an entire store dedicated exclusively to selling frozen mochi. This is one of two display shelves with all kinds of flavors.
This sounds simultaneously like a delicious treat and an STD.
7/1/2010: Lotus Land
"Holy crap, this is good," she mumbled through a mouth full of chicken makhani.
Sunshine, as she likes to be called ( yang guang / 阳光 ), reached out with her spoon for more.
"It's not soup!" Ellen and I advised her, after watching her inhale about four spoonfuls of the rich curry while using her naan as a trencher. "You can actually try eating some of the bread too, it's quite good with the sauce."
She poked at the now soggy piece of dough doubtfully for a moment, then picked up her spoon with a determined set to her features.
"I like the sauce," she announced, resuming the attack.
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It's actually not very often that I get to eat a nice meal out in Shanghai.
The problem is not that there is a shortage of excellent restaurants (decidedly not the case, contrary to my initial impression), nor that all the places worth eating at are inhumanly expensive (only by Chinese working class standards). It's simply that, given my schedule, my meals normally consist of something grabbed for 2 to 3 RMB on the street when I happen to remember that I'm hungry, a banana I've been carrying around in my man-purse for the last two days, or a set meal from whatever fast food place is most convenient to where I happen to be working that day.
That, and my friends are equally busy, and I'm not about to make the effort to go somewhere nice on my own.
Demeter, a store that sells only fragrances (NY and Shanghai). 300+ varieties, including snow, wood, salt water, and grass.
So the local artists have generally moved on to cheaper, dingier pastures, while more profitable cafes, wine bars, and restaurants tend to fill their places alongside the brand-name boutique stores.
While a disappointment to many local Shanghainese, it remains an interesting place to take a visitor to the city, and a great place to find a good quality Western meal -- albeit at a price premium.
After window shopping for a while with Sunshine, Ellen showed up on the 9 train and we settled into a routine that I've found remains virtually the same regardless of your location: deciding where to eat. Eventually, I discovered that Sunshine had never tried Indian food, so thinking that the heavily spiced Indian fare would agree with her central Chinese palate, we made our way back to Lotus Land.
We were greeted briskly but politely, and invited upstairs. Following the maitre'd, we sidled through a crush of servers and patrons, up a narrow staircase, and into a swirling room full of golden light, dark wood, cardamon, and cumin. We were seated quickly at one of the corner tables, lounging on cushions on the raised platform, and placed our order after fifteen minutes of watching our waiter desperately scrambling out of the weeds.
Sunshine having never eaten Indian food, and Ellen having no particular preference, the ordering was down to me; I picked a few traditional favorites that should be fairly safe, and give Sunshine a good introduction to Indian flavors: chicken makhani / butter chicken, a vegetable biryani, palak paneer, aloo gobi, and a couple of naan.
Delicious... but where's my cauliflower, dammit?
The chicken makhani appeared next, and all my doubts dissolved in the creamy, nutty, heavily spiced gravy and fork-tender chicken. I breathed a sigh of relief, and smiled when I heard Sunshine's amazed "holy crap!" ( wa sai / 哇塞 ) after her first taste. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the chef had actually used cashews as the thickener instead of cornstarch.. those aren't cheap.
This was the one I was worried about most. Things like butter and cream, which share center stage in this dish, are not quite the staples in China that they are in countries with thriving dairy traditions, so in many restaurants there is a marked lack of creaminess in cream dishes, or butteriness in butter dishes. Most Chinese bakeries' cakes lack body and depth of flavor because they simply replace much of the butter with vegetable or soy oil, and jack up the sugar content to compensate. On the other end of the scale, when a chef (pastry or otherwise) does get free reign with dairy products, they often go overboard -- I once had a slice of 'cheesecake' that was literally just a wedge of cream cheese on a sponge cake crust.
Next up was the palak paneer. The flavour was rich and deep, with a maddeningly elusive smoky undertone that I couldn't quite place. The cheese was real palak, firm and mild, and not the random cheese substitution so common in China (Sunshine had once asked me if I knew how to make pizza… when I told her I had everything I needed but cheese, she promptly presented me with a five-pound block of swiss cheese).
I reverted to my normal mode of eating Indian food; each bite a scoop of curry on a slice of naan. Looking over at Sunshine, I saw her plate was a single dejected piece of naan, slowly sinking into a gradually homogenizing mire of orange and green sauces. There was definitely a faint manic gleam in her eye as she plied her spoon, and the tip of her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth as she reached out for another bite of butter chicken was just the perfect finishing touch.
Ellen, laughing at us both, was probably the most civilized of us all, dipping a spoon demurely into the curries while Sunshine and I attacked each dish with single-minded ferocity.
The biryani, last to arrive, was a pleasant if unexceptional variation. In truth, I think its only failing was in comparison with the spectacular curries on either side.
We passed a happy hour and a half, lovingly soaked up every last smear of curry with biryani and naan, and adding our own laughter to the happy and blessedly smoke-free atmosphere.
Sunshine is fairly typical of most Chinese I've met, in that she's -- at least initially -- not terribly eager to try new kinds of food. Chinese food is steeped in thousands of years of tradition, which I think may tend to stifle their culinary imagination somewhat.
I've seen a few food competitions here, which purport to pit the best chefs of China against each other. Each one of their dishes has been done a million times before, and there is a clear reluctance to try something daring and new. So many of these competitions essentially become beauty contests, to see which chef can make the best looking radish rosettes, or carve the most elegant turnip swan. The food itself is reduced to a formula; the recipes are so exactly known that there are no surprises there; it is either right or wrong.
Left: Ellen. Right: Sunshine.
At any rate, Lotus Land was a resounding success. The food was well executed, the atmosphere was better than most, and the company was superb.
2 curries, vegetable biryani, 2 naan, and aloo gobi: 197RMB / $29 US
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Lotus Land
2nd floor, Tianzifang #12, 274 Taikang Road
泰康路274弄田ååŠ12å·2楼 近瑞金二路
+86 021-54652743
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Random picture time:
My housemate Christina was temporarily kicked out by her (temporary) roommate Marina who was making an early night of it, so she decided to nest on the window seat in my room and surf the net for a while. I told her she looked like a tiny prostitute living in a garbage dump, which she took with great good humour.
Incidentally, she's from Wuhan, speaks fluent English, just arrived from Beijing to see what this Shanghai business is all about, and is a web designer (I think). Apparently she just got an invitation to compete in some kind of beauty contest, so now she's going to the gym every day, researching runway walks, and checking out clothes online. But she still eats microwaved hot dogs and Orion cakes (the local equivalent of Hostess' cupcakes) for breakfast.
Whenever I bring this up, she waves a hand impatiently at me and walks away.
