Belly Full

Our bellies are full! Chinese food is said to be one of the world's three great cuisines, and we have been enjoying it everyday. We've been eating in restaurants for every meal, because our lodging is a college dormitory without a kitchen. Each restaurant and street food vendor offers a wide variety of ingredients, flavoring and cooking styles. It's a lot of fun eating in China, once the language issue is overcome. Being Japanese is an advantage as I'm able to read some (not all) of the Chinese characters.

The Chinese diet is well balanced. While they can select from different meat and fish dishes, they always eat them together with pure vegetable dishes. They value the seasonable vegetables grown in tune with specific times of year. Spiciness and greasiness vary from restaurant to restaurant and dish to dish.

It's the customers who create the meal by choosing several dishes, balancing tastes like bitter, salty, sweet and spicy. When a group of four adults dine together they may have one appetizer, two vegetables dishes, and three to four meat or fish dishes. We gasped at the amount of food that people around us ate at first, but now, we too order three or four dishes and do a pretty good job of devouring each of them. Chinese cooking is a strange thing, considering the amount of oil in each meal it's a wonder we don't suffer from heartburn. There is one thing for sure, after 4 or 5 hours we're hungry again!

There is a restaurant across the street from the dorm that is known as one of the best noodle shops in town. Each time we visit we're treated to a live performance of noodle making from the front showcase window. The noodles are ordered according to the sauce you put on top and whether you would like the noodles warm or cold. The noodles come plain, surrounded by several dishes of bean sprouts, soybeans, green onion, stringed turnips, cucumber and diced celery. The waiter asks you which condiments you'd like, and dumps them on top of the noodles before serving you. He leaves the sauce for you to add to your liking. Pour the sauce on top, mix well and enjoy! Their chewy texture is fabulous and the cold variety makes a wonderful lunch on a hot humid day. Our favorite toppings are beef juice in miso paste and peanut sauce.

The price of food is also a blessing to cost-constraint travelers, like us. It's cheap. As long as we don't indulge in highly priced restaurants, three meals for two can be managed under 10 US dollars per day, without much pressure to keep the cost down. Our favorite breakfast is a kind of egg pie called "ji dao guang bing". It's a pancake stuffed with fried egg topped with sweet miso paste, green onions, cilantro and bits of red pepper. Freshly made and piping hot they cost about 15 cents. Drinks like soda or fruit juice cost more than the meal itself. The aforementioned noodle dish is about 1 US dollar per bowl.

After a bit of trial and error, we've found a formula for picking good restaurants out of the tens of thousands here in Beijing. When buying simple foods like breakfast or snacks, they must be freshly made, ideally in front of you, while you wait. For lunch and dinner, our highest priority is the cleanliness of the restaurant. A bright atmosphere with many people eating inside is essential. If the pot of tea served is not steamy hot, it's not a good sign. We found that the locations of a restaurant, be it on a main street or back street is not so important as long as it's clean, bright, crowded and serves hot tea.

By the way, vegetarians can enjoy wonderful dishes in any restaurant in Beijing. Our guidebook lists a few recommendations for vegetarian only places, but, overall, they are totally unnecessary. Looking through several menus we learned that they are organized in categories, listing first their specialties, then appetizers, soups, meats, fish, vegetables, deserts and drinks. All a vegetarian has to do is to turn to the vegetable dish section and make a choice (but then, reading the selections is a challenge, but many menus have pictures of the dishes, and this makes it much easier). Chinese vegetarian restaurants, we found, are places where they serve mock-meat and fish product based on soy and gluten. When beautiful, fresh vegetables and tofu can be had at many restaurants, why bother?