Good eats

On Friday afternoon I went to Changzhou and ate dinner at a Japanese restaurant. Other than the sushi I had once in Hong Kong and a few times from supermarkets here, I had not eaten Japanese food, let alone a complete meal.

It was a cool little restaurant that had only private dining rooms that you enter shoeless through bamboo sliding doors. We went all the way and did the all-you-can-eat-and-drink option. For about $17 each, we could order anything from the extensive menu and drink as much beer and saké as we wanted. We just pointed at the menu and asked for "two of this and two of that…" So we stayed for several hours talking, drinking, and munching on sushi, grilled beef, tuna salad, fried chicken, fish eggs and cold vegetables. It was all really delicious and what we ate and drank probably would have cost us twice as much as what we paid had we ordered a la carte. There’s nothing better than high quality Japanese food at Chinese prices.



Speaking of food, an article by a Chinese-American writer, Jennifer 8. Lee, who came out with a book on Chinese food in the U.S. called The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, wrote about the official English translations of Chinese dishes (released for visitors to the Olympics). Anyways, it shows you how difficult it can me to figure out Chinese menus. Now I know why when I ordered a dish of “fragrant fish” one time it had no

In short, Chinese menus can be cryptic, fortunes cookies are not Chinese, and Chinese food in the U.S. is nothing like real Chinese food - it’s more bland, less healthy, and not nearly as diverse. It’s so much better (and cheaper) here – a paradise for epicures like me.

The link on numbers and what they mean is really fascinating, too. It’s a good primer on how widespread superstitions are and how language – like Chinese homophones – plays a role.

Sometimes the superstitions go too far. A popular one this year is connecting bad events in the first half of 2008 to the five Olympic mascots.