My Chinese Food Tour

About twenty years ago I went on a package tour of China, starting in Beijing and then heading south through various cities, finishing in Hong Kong. The sights were amazing, and it was incredibly interesting, but for me, the best thing about the tour was the food.

The meals were served at large circular tables that seated about ten people, with a rotating platform in the middle onto which various dishes were served from which we helped ourselves.

At first, the food was quite like what you would get from a Chinese takeaway. Sweet and sour chicken, stir fries, noodle dishes and the like. But as we headed further south, some of the foods got more interesting, and stranger. One of these was diced potato which was either boiled or lightly fried, I can’t quite remember. The memorable thing was that it was drizzled with a toffee sauce. Think of a toffee apple, but hot potato, and better. It was very tasty. Interestingly, there does not seem to be such a thing as dessert in China, as there was no order to when sweet or savoury foods were brought to the table, although we often had watermelon at the end of the meal. We did have starters though.

The most memorable starter was sliced lotus root, sprinkled with sliced red chilli. I had a bit of the root, and initially it did not taste of much that I can recall. Suddenly, my mouth erupted on fire. There must have been a bit of chilli stuck to the underside of the lotus root. It was torture, and I could not even have a drink of water as it hadn’t been served yet. I sat in agony for what seemed like ages but was probably a couple of minutes until I could glug some water down, which helped a little, but not much.

We had a buffet once. I don’t remember too much about it. I had a couple of platefuls and I liked it. The other thing that I remember, is the huge vat of chicken feet. There must have been hundreds, sitting there steaming away, browned by the cooking process. I’m not keen on bones and could not face trying one. Our guide said that Chinese people prefer meat that has flavour over chicken breasts. I guess from their popularity with the locals that chicken feet have lots of flavour.

Back at a round table one evening, a bowl containing hard-boiled eggs was brought out. Everyone at the table looked at them with horror as they were greenish black. No-one at the table would try them so I gave one a go. It smelled ok so I bit in. The inside looked even worse than the outside. The black permeated all the way through what should have been white and even the yolk. It could have been some kind of mutated eye. Fortunately, it tasted delicious, a bit like kedgeree. I imagined that the eggs had been left to marinate in soy sauce with fish. I told the rest of the table my opinion but none of them wanted to try them, so I ate the lot. When asked what they were, our guide reckoned that they are called ‘Thousand-year eggs’. I have since looked them up online and now I wonder if there had been something wrong with my senses of smell and taste that day.

It had been Chinese food for two weeks solid by the time we got to Hong Kong. The meals were not included there, so we went out for pizza for a change. It was the best pizza I’d had in ages.

Chinese food is one of my favourites. I eat pretty much as a vegan these days, but I still enjoy stir-fries and sauces like sweet and sour on my veggies. I would love to go back to China one day and I may even eat the meat dishes ‘cos they were so good. But I will probably pass on the thousand-year eggs though.