Chinese Cuisine: The Bountiful, Beautiful and Beastly

By Patricia Mohr@

On my first evening in Beijing, I met the rest of my tour group for dinner. It was an exceptionally large dinner. We seemed to be the only customers at the restaurant, and that was just as well. Though we were only a group of about 35 situated around five large, round tables, we feasted on enough food to feed a hundred hungry football players or at least 50 Japanese Sumo wrestlers.

The restaurant staff served us dish after dish, crowding the lazy susan that circled around the table and making me feel guilty at the end of the evening for leaving so much food on the table. I do not know what all the dishes were. Some were unique Chinese vegetables. Others were meats. Most all were delicious.

It would not be our only feast on the two-week trip. I’m told the over-abundant style dining is typical in China—at least in Beijing. The rumor has me rethinking the line American parents once fed to their finicky offspring, “Finish your dinner; there are starving children in China.” Perhaps that line should have ended in 1961 at the end of the three-year Great Famine, but it lasted long enough to play on my childhood conscience in the late 1970s.

China has come a long way since then. Its people are no longer starving. Some are fat and happy. Those in Beijing are busy climbing their respective corporate ladders and buying luxury goods.

The feasts are reserved for gatherings of family, friends, business associates and others like us. Feast or famine, I said, I am beginning to appreciate the new China.

For the love of Dumplings

On the second night in Beijing, a smaller group of about five of us found a darling diner serving the prettiest dumplings I have ever seen. The restaurant is located on a lane off Wangfujing Street in Beijing's trendy Dongcheng District, and it's called the Shun Yi Fu Dumpling Restaurant. The neighborhood is a Mecca for upscale shoppers. The restaurants in the area cater to that clientele.

The dumpling diner was bright, clean and cute. With the overhead menu written in Chinese Mandarin script, ordering could be a problem. It’s easy, though, to point at an item and hope for the best. For about 38 yuan ($6), you can try a nice assortment of meat, fish and vegetable dumplings. Wrapped in the white dough, the assortments were simply delicious.

While waiting for our food, my friends and I watched the workers in the kitchen make the new batches of dumplings. They joked and laughed with each other as they worked on the other side of a window separating the kitchen from the dining area. During the lull times, they sat quietly watching their customers enjoy their creations.

Dumplings became a favorite for many of us, at least while we were in China.

Food or Foe?

A friend of mine who lived in Guangzhou told me she had not seen any pigeons the whole time she was there. She wondered why. Then one day, she landed on the reason. “They eat them!”

Yes, nothing seems to go to waste in China. The Chinese turn away no organ or creature from the dinner table. My friends and I discovered as much when we visited the famous Donghuamen night market off Beijing’s Wangfujing Street. It is where vendors sell all kinds of exotic foods—silk worms, minnows, chicken hearts, cockroaches, cuttlefish, sheep testicles, also called “lamb bo,” fried sheep kidneys and scorpions.

The workers hold each piece up, tantalizing—or in some cases, torturing—the tourists with the prospects of eating the rich delicacy. “Testicles for you?” It’s a game they play with us, and it’s one we enjoy playing too. Though many of the items are considered delicacies in places like China, they repel the foreign mind and appetite.

“Do people really eat this?” I ask, trying to sound polite while knowing the question was rude.

The scent was strong and sickening. It was an odor my senses had never before encountered, and it stayed with me long after I left the market. Either it made an imprint in my olfactory sense-of-smell, or it saturated and lingered on my clothes. They say that odor is stored in a person’s long-term memory, stimulating the strong connections to emotional memory. I could not imagine what emotions the scent of the raw, inner meats parts were instigating in me. But as I tried to fall asleep that night, I prayed I would not dream of the termites, scorpions or lamb bo—especially the lamb bo!

Not all the concession stand workers were lighthearted about the foreigners’ finicky dietary tastes. Some were legitimately trying to sell their commodities and didn’t like it when tourists laughed at it. One of the workers starred down despondently at the rows of food before him. I wondered what would happen to the food at the end of the night. It was late, and so much of the food was left with very few people buying. Would it go to waste? Would the animals have died in vain?

I couldn’t determine how much of the food market was for real and how much was a spectacle for the tourists. It seemed to me that it was all a spectacle, perhaps subsidized by provincial or federal government as a tourist attraction. The prices were high—10 Yuan for a stick of sheep kidneys. It couldn’t be for real.

Yet after I had returned home, I listened to my Chinese friends ooh and aah at the sight of the exotic food in my pictures.

The scorpion and testicle appetizers I saw as bizarre and beastly were actually delicacies. And perhaps I was making too much of the odd items and not giving enough credit to China for having a wide variety of meats, pastries and vegetables.

“China has a rich agricultural history,” one friend explained.

What else about China was I being prejudicial about? My encounters with food made me realize, maybe the things about China I see as being exotic and different are exotic and different only to me.