"Every time I go to a new place, I eat their tofu. It helps adjust your stomach to the water of the region."
After a short side trip to China off the mainland, it was finally time to go to Jiangmen, a city about an hour away from Guangzhou. Today, Jiangmen isn't really a destination for tourists. Next year, it may be. Jiangmen exemplifies what the "new" China looks like: wide streets that never sleep, tall condos with impressive modern details, malls that stay open until midnight on weekdays, with local businesses sitting in every crevice that has room for them.
 |
I didn't take the photo, but I did get to ride through this intersection many times!
Photo credit: Panoramio.com |
Jiangmen is a "small city" with a population of 1.8 million. That includes a large amount of land since it's a prefecture-level city. In 2000, the population was 876,531. In 1990, it was 379,397. The population has more than doubled since 2000 and more than quadrupled since 1990! In about 25 years, the population went from a little bit less than that of Stockton's to a few hundred thousand more than San Diego's.
 |
| Almost every building in this picture is a condo. |
Being the modern city that it is, Jiangmen has a good variety of restaurants featuring different regional Chinese cuisines. Cantonese is the local specialty, but on my first visit we decided to try some other stuff. My first meal in Jiangmen was a delicious lunch in a modern Hunanese restaurant:
 |
From left to right: Top - Tofu stirfried in chili oil, stirfried beef with bamboo strips, tudou si
Bottom - Stirfried beef in chili oil, dong po rou (braised pork), spinach stirfry |
 |
| Theme of the restaurant? Classrooms in communist China. |
 |
| The concrete, bricks, and open ceiling thing is popular in casual restaurants in China too. |
Hunan is a province north of Guangdong, and their cuisine is famous for being spicy, aromatic, and a heavy use of chilis with garlic. In China, "spiciness" is considered to have a couple different variations. Hunan's "spiciness" is more of the one familiar with Westerners; a "dry heat" caused by pure use of chilis rather than peppercorns. As someone who can tolerate only a medium amount of heat, I found this restaurant was pretty good at balancing the amount of spiciness and flavor. It was definitely one of my favorite meals of the trip.
One of my favorite parts of the meal in particular was the tofu. In America, tofu to me is nothing special, just something to order to balance out the amount of meat dishes. In China, I could eat this stuff all day. The preparations are just so much more flavorful and the tofu itself is so smooth and tasty.
Another dish of note is Dong Po Rou, a very fatty cut of pork belly braised and served in sauce. It was allegedly Mao Zhedong's favorite dish and it and its variations are a common menu item in all kinds of restaurants in China. Though the chairman was from Hunan, the dish's roots actually come from Hangzhou cuisine, which I'll talk about in excruciating detail on a later post. Btw, it's just as delicious as braised pork belly sounds.
 |
| I think -- and hope -- the spill on the bottom left is a drop from the plate next to it. |
Finally we have this: Tudou Si, which I believe is actually more commonly associated with Beijing cuisine than Hunan. It can be found in some northern Chinese restaurants in America though often terribly translated as "potato salad." It's about as opposite from western potato salad as you can get: slightly spicy, sour, and oily. What interests me about this dish, aside from how delicious it is, is that people very rarely associate Chinese cuisine potatoes. It's a dish that could easily be made appealing to westerners and yet so few even know about it.
Anyway, my next post will cover a regional cuisine within another region... Hakka food! See you later.
No comments:
Post a Comment