food

so, upon several requests, I am writing a blog about the food. Someone else who will not be mentioned, who has currently not quite been carrying his or her weight with the blogging, will have to blog later to give a different fresh perspective. I have to admit that my view of Qingdao food has been colored by the semester I spent in Beijing. In some ways, Beijing and Qingdao have similar styles of food because they are both part of Northern China and belong to the Northern school of cooking. This style is a bit heavier and wheat based instead of rice based. The main meats are pork and lamb, and chicken is less common. Foods are often more vinegary and salty than sweet or spicy (though there is a good spice to many dishes). Steamed buns and dumplings and pancakes, especially with egg and scallion, are common. Because Qingdao is on the Yellow sea, seafood is also very big here. The food however, and I can't tell whether this is an overall phenomenon or just because of my inexperience/ineptitude with the local cuisine, does not seem to be nearly as good as it was in Beijing. In Beijing, the dumplings were incredible, especially spinach and egg, pork and scallion, lamb and carrot, and mushroom dumplings. Here, the best dumplings we've had have been fish dumplings (and some pretty good cucumber and egg dumplings), but the lamb dumplings have been a disappointment, and when we've tried to order spinach dumplings, the waitress looks like we've asked for something completely unheard of. In general, it's been really hard to find tasty vegetable dishes. There's a group of hole-in-the-wall restaurants near our house (we live right behind Qingdao university, so they seem to cater to the college student crowd) that have a pretty nice cucumber and garlic dish, although I have had better versions in Beijing (not to be a snob). I surprising number of restaurants do not even have spinach or broccoli, both quite common vegetables, and the cabbage dish I ordered at one restaurant was basically cabbage soaked in vinegar. A part of it is that it's kind of hard to order in China because the waitress hands you the menu and then expects you to order within about 5 seconds of getting the menu, and dishes aren't necessarily named descriptively, or you have to be very familiar with it to know that "5 treasure eggplant" means fried eggplant with peanuts, or whatever it is. I've seen other people eating what look like very good vegetable dishes, so it's very possible that I am just ordering the more disgusting dishes on the menu. My friend goes into a restaurants, makes a quick survey of what other people are eating, and then orders by pointing at something someone's eating that looks good and says "I want what they're eating." So far that seems like the best method. We also are having a hard time finding good restaurants. Our school is in a somewhat posh area with lots of 5-star hotels, an upscale mall, a versace store (the real thing) and close to a large Korean neighborhood (there are lots of Koreans in Qingdao because it's basically just a short trip across the Yellow sea from Seoul). That does not mean it's a good place for restaurants, because most restaurants are not that great and a little pricey. We did find a good cheap noodle place, but if one doesn't want noodles everyday, one is out of luck. There some Korean and Japanese restaurants close by and lots of western fast food chains, like Popeyes, KFC, and MacDonalds. There are also lots of coffee houses, usually named things like "American Coffe house" or "Starbugs coffee" Coffee is also quite expensive, at about american prices. (An average lunch costs between 5-15 kuai, or 75 cents to two dollars, and an average dinner costs between 10-25 kuai, or a little over one dollar to about 3 dollars, although at western places or japanese/korean restaurants, a dinner could be 40-60 kuai, and at most small places you can get a meal for 5-8 kuai, and on the street you can by filling snacks or a small meanl for between half a kuai to about 3 kuai. Kuai is slang for yuan, or RMB, and the coversion rate is 8.2 kuai to the dollar). So basically, you can eat really cheaply or spend quite a bit of money. We (being the people in our apartment) are still searching for the perfect little family restaurant with really good food at reasonable prices, but it's hard, again, especially because our school is in a business district. I prefer the cheaper food, as it is generally better and more authentic. Also, fruit is usually very good and really cheap, it's sold on the street for about 2 kuai a pound, and I have been buying lots of plums. I bought some nectarines and cherries, and they were okay, but not as good as the plums. Watermelon is in season, and we had some at the 4th of July bbq, it was very good.
Ice cream is very popular in China, you can buy it on almost every street corner, and in a country where it's not really acceptable to eat while walking around on the street, ice cream seems to be the main exception. In general the ice cream is not as good, none of it is at all creamy or really rich, and the chocolate tends to be waxy and flavorless. My favorite type of ice cream is actually a milk flavored popscicle with raisins in it, I think they might use condensed milk to make it. I also had a cheese flavored ice cream bar that was surprisingly good, the middle tasted a little bit like cheese cake, and the chocolate coating was somewhat creamier and dark chocolate. The worst ice cream I had was an ice cream bar with a fake banana filling, the banana tasted very chemically, and the icecream was really icy and the chocolate chalky, I couldn't eat it. In general though, I do enjoy the icecream, and it makes a fine snack, especially considering it's in the 90s everyday and very humid. Some ice cream I haven't yet dared try, such as the ice cream with a picture of corn on the outside. Somehow, I don't think corn ice cream would be very good, no matter what the permutation.
So, I'll write more about food at some other time, and perhaps someone else who will not be named will also write about his perspective.