thread of pictures of real chinese food

http://i.imgur.com/dSU42yX.jpg

Something in spicy black bean sauce? Was gonna say squid, but maybe some sort of pork fat?

my guess is 蒜泥白肉

translation, please!

mashed garlic and boiled slices of pork belly + some chili oil and other stuff

might be something else, though.

http://img208.poco.cn/mypoco/myphoto/20101116/10/5571590520101116100551083_640.jpg

i like it when the slices of pork are rolled up with a slice of cucumber of equal size and thickness inside of them.

how would you translate dope (adj)

Xp is that cold? I think ive had that

i was reading about vegetarian food on this thread. i have a long story about eating vegetarian food:

in guangzhou, i'm either sick of or unimpressed by cantonese or southern food in general and quite often, i seek out a lanzhou lamian place. they're pretty standard across china, despite being operated by usually muslim chinese from different ethnic groups and regions-- like, the menu is fairly standard and the pictures of the dishes on the wall are pretty standard and there's usually a picture of the blue mosque in istanbul or wherever the blue mosque is, and quite often oversaturated pictures of western chinese grasslands and super blue-green lakes, but the way that they make the actual food might not correspond to the picture on the wall, so you might get cumin lamb and it might be crispy slices of lamb dusted with cumin or it might be a briefly stewed dish with tomatoes and tomato soup and lamb mixed up, but you can order cumin lamb, no matter where you go. i like that standardization and maybe when i first went to china, i liked the sort of refuge from chineseness or at least chinese food and it was cool to hang out with a bunch of guys that were very much on the outside of chinese society in important ways and could barely read the menu at their restaurant and quite honestly maybe it's like americans hanging out at irish bars in shanghai or something, really stupid but i did feel that way before and i did appreciate the foreignness of those types of places, anyways right now i just like the chance to escape the cantonese love of rice starch products and sweetness and i want CILANTRO and vinegar and spice and products made from wheat. most of the lanzhou lamian restaurants in guangzhou are run by people from qinghai, which i know nothing about and have never been to, and it can be interesting to talk to the people running them, at least, and it's cheap and it's always good, and even my bougiest chinese friends will usually agree to eating at a lanzhou lamian restaurant because they think of them as "clean" and less likely to use recycled cooking oil due to muslim dietary rules and that's their theory not mine and fuck it, i'm not going to eat a 50 rmb bowl of ramen in tianhe when we could go get some pulled noodles and drink some sweet tea or coca-cola out of a little glass bottle with a long straw and look at pictures of the tibetan plateau and it's about 12 rmb at most for a bowl of noodles and a half hour sitting in air conditioning.

the other day, in a haze of hangover depression and self-pity, i took the wrong street coming home and came across a street that had a few restaurants on it, somewhere near luoxi metro station. i went into a lanzhou lamian restaurant, looked pretty standard: girl from qinghai working the front of house. i noticed that it was particularly clean and along with tidied up variations on standard lanzhou lamian restaurant pictures, there was a big banner on the wall that was talking in vague terms about how eating green food, healthy food leads to a healthier spirit. i also noticed that the menu was a bit strange. like, there was no "beef pulled noodles" or anything, but just a generic "lanzhou pulled noodles." the only time the character for meat occurred on the menu was in 肉夹馍, meat in bread, which i think should always be made with really greasy boiled for hours in coffee-colored broth pork belly and raw chili peppers and cilantro but in these types of places involves a sort of dense flatbread and generic stirfried beef. i got that and i got "braised noodles," which should have been listed as "braised beef noodles." okay. when i got the bread and meat, i thought it was okay but the texture was off and i opened it to discover it was stuffed with tiny cubes of mushroom and a pressed tofu product. my suspicions were confirmed. i had somehow managed to find the only vegetarian halal fake lanzhou lamian restaurant in china. and when my noodles came, they weren't even pulled noodles and were floating in a slightly sweet tomato broth and the meat had been replaced with a multilayered bean curd product.

the usual patrons of lanzhou lamian restaurants, single men silently eating plates of noodles and lamb under buzzing fans while pretending to check their cellphones for messages from people that won't ever message them, were replaced by a group of chatty older cantonese-speaking ladies that had brought some kind of fermented yeast drink to accompany their meal and talked about eating vegetarian food during their meal. i felt deeply out of place and dissatisfied and confused.

should be ice cold imho

http://pic2.nipic.com/20090423/562443_132051082_2.jpg

fuckin nipic

anyways, here's some roujiamo maybe

http://img.gudumami.cn/gu/attachment/Mon_1005/116084_TSomwnTnZeWSVmf.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/TWObHdO.jpg

I am pretty intimidated about feeding myself in China. I want the bestest Chinese food experiences, but with zero language skills I don't know how to shot!

you're gonna get food poisoning on your first day in china and you'll only eat white rice and plain congee for the rest of your trip

That is not going to happen. I have a stomach of steel that will have been acclimated in Taiwan!

i used to just stand up and point at dishes on other people's tables. kinda rude but people didn't seem to mind.

I do this already in Chinese restaurants (the really awesome ones in Montgomery County, MD), so y'know might as well continue. . .

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/whats-the-difference-between-a-szechuan-pepper-and-a-vibrator-8809364.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9CJqs5s23c

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1308358/confucius-cuisine-takes-sage-whole-new-level

http://i.imgur.com/G0lEF0I.jpg

it's mooncake seaaaaaassooooooooonn

http://i.imgur.com/WlTnmz4.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/yjpzPlK.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/fXiJlXA.jpg

lol http://i.imgur.com/ninukad.jpg http://i.imgur.com/pAKuHwY.jpg

i've never had a good mooncake.

Mooncakes are awesome fuiud

lotus seed paste mooncake==untouchable

I've had chicken feet in black bean sauce. What are other preparations I should be seeking out?

http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/09/chinas-newest-innovation-live-crab-vending-machines/279650/

Dowd's cliche of the day: Mooncakes look too good to eat.

i never saw this phenomenon before but everyday when i arrive at work i get off the metro in tianhe and for a couple square kilometers around the metro exit mouth there are people holding signs saying they'll buy mooncake coupons and you can buy the coupons they buy at a discount and regift them, i guess. i'm honestly not sure how it works.

i don't know. i've only eaten one meal in the last three days and am so hungry that i would eat any food product offered to me right now so it's hard to write what i hate about mooncakes but

sometimes too dense, too oily, too sweet but i understand that
there are many types of mooncakes and i've just never had the right kind.

I've never eaten a mooncake for the same reason I've never eaten a rainbow or a unicorn. No matter how hungry I am I could never eat a monet...

oh the pics above are misleading - 99% of mooncakes look like this:

http://i.imgur.com/e10dhqd.jpg

http://js.people.com.cn/forum/upload/day_110901/201109011400013164.jpg

whatever, it was a mooncake that looks like an ASS

http://i.imgur.com/ZF2gKeE.jpg

the classic mooncake for me is the red bean mooncake, limit yourself to a slice every hour or so at minimum. it's dense, yeah, but i dunno, no denser than a dark chocolate tort or piece of fudge. i used to hate the duck egg yolk ones but now i've come to appreciate the yolk. even the lotus paste ones i tolerate

right, i guess the idea is to enjoy them over a longer period of time with bitter hot tea to cut through the sweetness and richness rather than biting into them like a hostess cupcake.

That looks like a cross between a pork pie and these http://static4.depositphotos.com/1005455/276/i/950/depositphotos_2766865-Jelly-fruit.jpg I don't want that...

http://www.smartbeijing.com/blogpix/flyer1358756775.jpg

http://www.gdfs.gov.cn/yswh/UploadFiles_2001/200705/20070514174719918.jpg

艇仔粥

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323595004579065142981469178.html

Hell Yeah

Revisiting the country last year, Mr. Hales managed to train informally in two Dongbei restaurants, in preparation for Blackbrick's late-October opening. "I like to find something new that I can introduce," said Mr. Hales, who has opened two Korean-style restaurants and a food truck in Miami in the last few years. "I'm excited to do it again with Chinese."

But could we get real chinese dudes to do this, not white dudes who backpacked in asia for a month

Thanks

if he at least has a Chinese chef can we give him a partial pass

i think a fusion of cuisines that uses the system or thinking of a mother cuisine to present local products is basically a good idea, whether it's like west coast chefs using japanese-inspired presentation and general approach to seafood or produce, whatever, or even say on the other side japanese chefs using french or general european approaches to japanese foods. but... i feel like in this case you've got guys doing it sort of backwards and trying to work with chinese flavors and tastes and products without being interested in or finding out why the general overall system works, starting with like how a piece of meat is cut, the method of building flavors in a dish beyond just a list of what goes in it, i dunno.

like my boy dyao said it's kind of fucked up and lame to think that it would work, like if a dude claimed, "yeah, i trained informally in a bistro in rouen for two months and now i'm going to take french cuisine to the next level."

i don't know what the nyc or miami chinese dining scene is like but in vancouver at least it's always extra depressing when a place opens up selling DUMPLINGS! and the spurious idea of chinese food brought up to the level of every yaletown/kits small plates place set down in some 1930s art deco in a gentrified chinatown building and a drinks menu that features ginger and longan syrup martinis because there are lots of great and innovative and hey even expensive if you want and hey they even have tasting menus if you want and hey there's a great wine list if you want high end and medium end chinese places within a 20 minute drive or a 5 minute walk depending on where you are.

vancouver does manage to make room for places like bao bei and still maintain the best chinese restaurants in north america though.

i guess i could ease off and say i guess it's cool that these guys would go to harbin and be inspired or something... but this kind of shit is just fucking lame and i can't get behind it.