Of Chinese regional cuisine, I actually favor Xinjiang, though that is in large part because the need to be halal prevents them from serving pork.
Xinjiang cuisine also avoids the slimy glop coating that is so common in ethnic Chinese cuisine. [A problem that gets much worse if you have food delivered - the food doesn't get drained, and it's packed into delivery containers pretty tightly, so your food arrives bathing in a deep sea of sauce that would have, if served on a plate, fallen below the actual food.]
Greetings from Shenzhen. Lots of coffee shops here too, but chicken you can get absolutely everywhere. Pork is ubiquitous too. Beef, as far as I can tell, much less so.
Also, the longer I'm staying here the more I'm getting cured out of obsessing over my energy use. The amount of propane a street vendor uses to prepare a single meal is greater than what I use up in an entire day.
I wonder if the choice of meats is a regional thing. I would definitely not peg chicken as characteristic of China, but I've never been anywhere near Shenzhen.
I've only been to China once (Guanzhou), but it was very hard to find vegetarian food. Everything everywhere seems to have duck or pork in it. The variety is definitely lacking compared to Europe or North America.
Funny, I'm in Beijing right now and there are coffee shops everywhere. You can pick a random street corner, close your eyes, throw a rock, and it will probably shatter the window of a coffee joint. And chicken dishes take at least a bit of effort to find, with pork being the king of meats, and beef a distant second. Aside from KFC, of course, which is all over.
How big of an umbrella is "Chinese food" in Japan? In China, you'd identify a restaurant by the province that its food is characteristic of -- Xinjiang food, Hunan food, Hong Kong food, etc. Those are all very different from each other. (There are more generic options too, of course.)
I really like some Xinjiang and Hunan dishes, but they're next to impossible to find in the US despite "Chinese" food ostensibly being common.
Xian food offers the most famous food in Xian, such as Pita Bread Soaked in Lamb Soup, Sheep Blood Soaked in Vermicelli Soup, Pork Sandwiched Between Pita Bread, cold noodles, Qishan noodles and the like.
Bah. Sounds like simple food with overdone presentation for profit. I've been to a few of those places.
Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan, a wealthy province that has been part of China since the Han Dynasty (~0; ±200years).
I live just next door in the next province to the south, Yunnan, which is far more geographically diverse, as well as culturally - as for the most part it avoided Chinese hegemony for another thousand to fifteen hundred years. As you'd imagine, frankly our general food standard is far better than that of Sichuan: the population is lower, ingredients are more numerous, fresher and less likely to be adulterated, and we still have dozens of concurrent culinary traditions. There's a far greater appreciation on wild or non market-supplied ingredients. The flip side to this is that we perhaps have less ultra-rich, and therefore the market for showy restaurants is less developed.
If anyone is seriously in to Chinese food and/or considering visiting this restaurant, give me a holler in Yunnan and I'll show you some local culinary masterpieces at a fraction of the expense. To be honest, I like the food so much, I'm considering opening a restaurant myself: bitcoin appreciated! :)
(Note: 14 years as a vegetarian, many of which were in Yunnan, so I came to love and know intimately the variety of fresh cuisine. Fern, bamboo shoots, wild shrooms, marijuana seeds, mountain goat cheese, loads of weird fruits, etc... yum!)
Have you ever been to the Miao areas of china before? Dog meat is pretty ubiquitous in those places. Like, many westerners visit Guilin, and it’s very easy to run into dog meat there.
I love to talk crap about Shenzhen as much as the next person but you’re talking out of your arse. The food in Shanghai and in Hong Kong is amazing even if the selection of foreign cuisines is limited. Cantonese food is absolutely amazing and local to Shenzhen. You’re also not going to have trouble finding food from anyplace else in China in a city that’s well over 90% immigrants from other parts of China. Sichuan food, Yunnan food, Jiangnan, Northern, Xinjiang, Manchurian. Chinese food is amazing all by itself. You can find Japanese food in any Tier 1 city in China even if the quality is hit and miss, ditto Italian or French.
Food diversity is much better in China these days. Last time I was in GZ, I had a lot of options (Indian, Vietnamese, Japanese, etc....). Also, cheaper of course. (Again, I’ve never been to SZ before, but I assume it’s at least as good as GZ).
Using a place which is intentionally pan-regional to make a statement about regions is not an anti-example. Also, I didn't make the original statement. And, no one said Sichuan was northern Chinese cuisine. So I'm a bit confused as to who and what you think you're responding to.
Non-muslim Chinese love pork, it is by far the most commonly eaten meat in the country.
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