About the Food

Virtually all of our meals have been eaten with the group. At each meal we sit at round tables with very large lazy susans and various dishes are served from that. Most of the food would not be uncommon at a Chinese restaurant back home, though it is more lightly sauced (without all the corn starch) and it all is very well cooked and the ingredients quite fresh. We’ve enjoyed the food at every meal. The food in Beijing was mildly spiced, but Nanchang has a reputation for spicy food. It has been hotter, but nothing to knock your socks off.

One distinctive meal was a lunch as one of the new “hip” restaurant called “0791”—the zip code for the city. (It appears that restaurants with dreams of pretension have numerical names all over the world.) The food here was more regional with healthy amounts of red peppers and other hot seasonings. We particularly liked the mushrooms (shitake?) served with hard boiled pigeon eggs, the sliced large mushrooms served on a large hot stone so that they simmered the entire meal and the small, whole shrimp quickly fried with fresh tea leaves. We were instructed to peal the shrimp, but Mark thought this a chore and the head and shell added a nice crunchy element to the meal. The fried tea leaves were yummy. These would make a great snack for our super bowl party.

Last night we ventured out on our own in search of a “hot pot” restaurant. After a couple of wrong turns and a nice Chinese couple who stopped to give us directions twice we finally arrived quite exhausted and hungry. The most pressing problem, though, was that the menu was in Chinese and no one spoke any English. Ronnie solved this problem by taking the waitress to other people’s tables and pointing to the things that we wanted. The hot pot is a large bowl of water with seasonings placed over a propane burner that is built into the middle of the table. We were served raw greens, rice noodles, dried tofu and some interesting meat that looked like prosciutto. These are put in the broth to cook and then eaten communally with chopsticks. It was fun and good. And a mess. Especially when dad tried to feed Allie noodles with chopsticks. The waitress finally came over and wiped off Allie herself. (When will the new parents remember the bib?) It was interesting to eat with the entire wait staff watching our every move. Does Mark eat the meat here? Well, when in Rome…(or when at Julie and Danny’s house…) We wished Mari could have been here with us--the tofu was excellent. Allie loved it, but she eats anything that gets near her mouth--we didn't give her the mystery meat.

Beverages are less interesting. The best beer is Tsing Tao. The worst tastes like a blander version of Bud light, if you can imagine such a thing. We tried Dynasty, a “dry red wine,” that tasted vaguely of some odd grape juice. I wouldn’t recommend importing it.

The beverage of choice is green tea. We have seen over a dozen different types of green tea on a restaurant meal—and it can be one of the most expensive things on the menu. Unfortunately, the traditional teahouse seems to be disappearing. We haven’t seen any and when asked we were given an address that turned out to be where one had recently closed and the space was now a boutique-clothing store. We have a lead on one that we will search for this afternoon.