May I Repeat Your Order, Please?

By Beth Green

Have you ever ordered something in a restaurant because you thought it sounded good? I know I have. I’ve also ordered dishes just because they sounded strange.

You can find funny-sounding treats in restaurants all over the world. Deep fried candy bars is a conundrum I discovered in Florida—I always think of KFC-style secret recipe breading over a Butterfinger bar and gag a little. Menus in Asia, however, offer meme-worthy meal titles that pique your interest—and, sometimes, put off your palate.

I found reading English-translated restaurant menus in China to be one of the big perks of going out to eat in a “fancy” restaurant (“fancy” often just meaning tablecloths without holes and English-translated menus; you can infer the kind of “not-fancy” restaurants I usually frequented). Chinese dishes are often given names that are meant to be beautiful or auspicious, rather than descriptive of the ingredients and origin of the foodstuff. 

This is why you get menu entries like “Eight Tastes Chicken” (eight is lucky in China), “Ants Climbing a Tree,” “Crossing Bridge Noodles,” and “Crispy Pigeon Hanging Fire.”

“Ants Climbing a Tree” or ma yi shang shu (蚂蚁上树) is a popular dish from Sichuan province in the Southwest. It consists of ground pork in a fiery red sauce over thin noodles. I’ve had it with rice noodles and bean noodles. It has its name from the tiny bits of meat that cling to the noodles like insects on a branch.

“Crossing Bridge Noodles” or guo qiao mixian (过桥米线) is another famous Chinese entree with a strange name, this time from Yunnan province. Yunnan is the southwest-most province in China, abutting Thailand and Myanmar. As in Thailand and other Southeast Asian cultures, rice vermicelli is popular in Yunnan. To make Crossing Bridge Noodles, you start with hot broth, add ingredients (raw ones first, to be cooked by the hot liquid), and finally “cross the bridge” taking vermicelli from another bowl into your soup bowl. When you use chopsticks to do this, the noodles form a little bridge. There’s debate over whether this is really why the dish has this name, but I think this explanation is the most fun.

However, not all dishes have the same name throughout the country, or even from restaurant to restaurant. When I first moved to China, I enjoyed going to a hole-in-the-wall family restaurant that served food from far northern China. The first time I ate there some friends did all the ordering for the group.  When the food arrived, my partner and I were wowed by the restaurant’s lean, tangy sweet and sour pork. Then, a week or so later Dan and I went back by ourselves, armed with a dictionary, and showed the waiter a series of entries: “sweet,” “sour,” and, of course, “pork.” The waiter was patient and eager to help us, but completely baffled as to what we wanted. What on earth was this barbaric sweet and sour pork? We were stumped as well, since we knew we’d eaten exactly that just a week prior. That day we made do with our “point and shoot” method of ordering (akin to throwing a dart at a map and deciding to go there) and were sure to follow up with our friends later.

It turned out, the right way to order sweet and sour pork in that restaurant was to ask the waiter for guo bao rou, or, literally translated, “Pot Enveloped Meat” with “meat” being generally understood as “pork.” Unfortunately, as I found out when we moved towns, only that style of sweet and sour pork can be called that; going to other restaurants and ordering it only garnered me more than the usual amount of quizzical looks from staff.

Igor, bring me some...tofu.

Later, when I lived in Guizhou province, I discovered a tofu dish that I insisted on ordering for the pleasure of saying the name: “Brain Tofu,” dou fu nao (豆腐脑 ). A specialty of one particular restaurant in the town I lived in, it is a soft-set curd, the consistency of a not-quite-finished flan, resting in watery brine. It’s the color of our “little gray cells” too. Not entirely appetizing to look at, it was however a great fire quencher when paired with Guizhou’s other, spicy, cuisine.

What strange menu items have you found while traveling? 

Heaven on a Stick

By Beth Green

Street food is a curious thing. It’s loved, it’s despised, it’s feared, it's revered.
 
Travelers either avoid it like the plague (well, OK, because they don’t want to get the plague) or swarm to it, hoping it will pass on more than just sustenance. Somehow, travelers hope to ingest not only food but also culture and an understanding of the population. Did I learn more about Thailand by eating stir-fried ants? Did I become somehow Moroccan by gulping down cinnamon-flavored snails? Did I gain a mystical understanding of Bali from the chicken satay sticks I ate on the beach? Well, at the time I thought I did.

Street side Barbecue

But nowhere I have traveled offers up street food more varied and interesting than in China.

The idea of snacking is deeply embraced by Chinese culture. A word for “snack,” is 小吃, xiao chi, or, literally “small eat.” Though it may seem obvious to say so, China is a huge country, and each region, province or even village may have a “small eat” that they are especially proud of.

Yang Rou Chuan

One of the most commonly seen street foods throughout China are 羊肉串, yang rou chuan， lamb meat sticks. These are a traditional snack of the Chinese Muslim population, and you can often find a migrant yang rou chuan vendor by his snow white skull cap, if he’s from Gansu or Ningxia provinces, or his octagonal green cap if he’s from the Uigyur Autonomous Region.

Yang rou chuan are thin skewers of mutton (well, possibly goat meat) that have been spiced with cumin and hot red peppers, then roasted over a shallow coal barbecue and fanned with woven palm leaves until cooked through. They’re tasty, cheap (usually you can get three to six for the equivalent of one US dollar, depending on size), and best washed down with a curbside beer.

Another famous Chinese street food is one you smell before you see. Stinky tofu (yep, that’s what they call it), or 臭豆腐, chou dou fu, are wafer-thin squares of tofu barbecued over a bowl of coals. They’re as smelly as a backpacker’s socks, but, if you can get past the odor, are a cheese-like nibble that will definitely earn you points with the locals.

Fresh Pineapple on a Stick

Visitors to Beijing have a special rite of passage to shock their friends back home—a meander to some touristy market, like the Donghuamen Night Market, after dinner finds rows of stainless steel food carts pushing bugs and other creepy crawlies on sticks. Here’s where you get to pose with a big, black scorpion by your lips; gnaw a deep fried starfish while recording it for Facebook posterity; or, crunch on a beetle, wings included. These snacks are traditionally eaten in Asia—not only China—but today you’re more likely to see modern Chinese eating KFC's popcorn chicken than chowing down on a praying mantis. 

Eating Bugs

I make a point to try new street foods when I find them (starfish tastes like oil, ditto the scorpion) and so far, my favorite Chinese street foods are found in Guizhou province. Guizhou is famous for not being famous, a southwestern province of karst hills and winding rivers. And, in China, it’s known for blisteringly spicy food. Put that on a stick, and I’m in heaven. 

The best snacks are often the simplest. During the winter, Guizhou entrepreneurs break out their biggest woks, set up a coal basket and burner on the street corner, and fry potatoes. The first time I saw it, I was unimpressed. French fries are as universal as, well, hamburgers. But then I tried them. After frying up the potatoes, the vendor slips them in a metal bowl; dashes vinegar and salt (well, okay, MSG) over them; spoons in heaps of hot dried chilies, tongue-numbing Sichuan pepper (花椒, hua jiao) and chives; covers the bowl and shakes it like a tambourine; and then gives the final, piping hot result to you in a plastic baggie. A serving usually costs about 30 cents US. The hot, numbing, spicy, tangy potatoes used to bring tears to my eyes—and only partially because of the peppers. 

Guizhou Peppers Set Out To Dry

Guizhou’s streets also offer up tiny, soft, sweet potato pancakes; barbecued octopus legs (heavily spiced); eggs baked into corn flour muffins; tiny bits of grilled spiced mutton; eggplant skewers; corn on the cob; roast sweet potatoes straight out of the field; fresh pineapple by the chunk; and egg-crepe wraps filled with cilantro, chopped meat, crunchy fried dough and hot sauce.

Guizhou Egg Muffins

When I lived in Guizhou a few years ago, it wasn’t unusual for us to walk out of work at dinnertime only to find we were entirely satiated by snacks by the time we arrived home.

Chinese snacks are also a snapshot into the culture. In cities like Beijing, which have embraced modernity, a street-side snack might be some prepackaged sweet bread or imported Japanese cuttlefish. In bar districts, where party-goers seek a little protein as filling to soothe their alcohol-laden tummies, you can find yang rou chuan sellers barbecuing their enticing treats. And, in the rural countryside of Guizhou province, you’ll see the crops from the farms, the staples of the working class, devoured by factory workers on their way home from building modern China. 

Guizhou Sweets