Thursday, March 10, 2011

Adventures in China, part 1 of hopefully many to come

Bing Sheng Restaurant
广州市东晓路33号
33 Dongxiao Lu, Guangzhou, China
+86(20) 3428 6910

I’ve recently been reading Calvin Trillin’s Tummy Trilogy, which should be required reading for any serious foodie. I believe the person who first told me of the books some four or five years ago may have used the same words, but for some reason I have only now gotten around to it. Now that I have, I am likely to repeat those words to anyone who will listen. No matter, because the books hold up remarkably well despite the years, and the joy that Trillin experiences in travelling and eating around much of America is just as heartwarming in the seventies as it is today, perhaps even more so.

I honestly believe that there is a lot of good food in America and most of it does not get much acclaim beyond local or regional press, or word-of-mouth. I myself have spent a lot of time chasing the regional specialties that America has to offer, from barbecue in Texas (and Kansas), through Creole/Cajun cuisine in New Orleans, or the Low Country fare in Charleston. Today, as much as around the time Trillin wrote his books, there are many kitchens, diners and restaurants dotting the US of A which do good and honest work. I have been fortunate enough to taste the specialties of many of these places but I am sure there are many more I have missed out on.

For America in the seventies, consider China today and you have worlds upon worlds of similar possibility. So many regional cuisines, so many places to eat in, so many things to try, and only one stomach, only one lifetime in which to try as much as you can. I think the Chinese are one of the most inventive when it comes to food. Much of this may be bred by necessity, but often it results in some rather spectacular dining. I was in Guangzhou recently and had a chance to experience the highs and lows of travel eating.

One of the problems described by Trillin in his travels across America is the finding of the best places to eat. You're on unfamiliar ground both literally and figuratively, and while it may be easy to corner a random stranger for a recommendation you can never be quite sure if it's going to be a good one in the end. Some people are, horror of horrors, most decidedly not as particular about food as you are. It’s all very different now, of course, with the Internet and with mobile telephony and the wealth of information we have at our fingertips these days - which was demonstrated wonderfully when it came time for lunch. One of my companions whipped out his Blackberry, texted his friend in Hong Kong and instantaneously got a recommendation on where to eat. After spending a few minutes online locating the restaurant and how to get there – we were off. The recommendation in question turned out to be one Bing Sheng Restaurant, which in itself meant nothing to us at the time. It was only after I’d gotten back and Googled the place a little more did I realize that it was a rather well-regarded restaurant with lots of history (and several branches). Good on them.

If you travel much in China (and especially coming from a small dot of a country like Singapore), one thing you will be hit by constantly is the scale of things – everything is often very much bigger. Bing Sheng itself is one of those banquet restaurants housed in its own building (with a separate cottage in the yard for supplies – imagine that!). I didn’t walk around, but from the three storeys of seating space it looked like it could seat at least 400-500 people at full capacity. That, to me, is mind boggling. That would mean feeding a thousand people every night if they did just two turns, and to do that requires a platoon of cooks and a battalion of waiters and runners and dishwashers, not to mention enough bulbs of garlic to fill a small apartment. The sheer logistics involved in running a restaurant of that size was all I could think about as we sat down to order.

There were a couple of dishes that had been recommended to us so that left us less room to maneuver around the menu, even given our capacity to stuff ourselves. Given the standard of living in China and its currency position, eating out is still insanely affordable for tourists, so we had no hesitation in over-ordering. The captain rolled her eyes at us more than once while taking our order, though that might have been due either to the staggering amount of food we ordered, or the equally staggering and infinitely maddening indecision we displayed in ordering it. We had arrived at the tail end of lunch hour, so while the fortunate thing was that the restaurant was emptying, they had unfortunately run out of several dishes we wanted to try. In particular the roast goose.

One of the implications of having such a large restaurant is that your kitchen must be designed accordingly, to be as efficient as possible. This means dividing responsibilities into stations, it means cooking several orders at once to save time. What this means to the customer is that food can come out at very different timings. (Obviously the kitchen is not going to hold your food while the rest of your order is being finished, there would be no space on the pass to keep every table’s order.) It is something you have to deal with at all Chinese restaurants. If you are not particular, it is not much of a big deal. But if you are particular about having your food available at timings reasonably close to one another, or even about the order in which you eat things (I like to drink my soup first, then eat my animal protein before vegetable; starch is always the last before dessert) – then it is cause for despair.

In any case, Bing Sheng does serve up some pretty tasty food, so I couldn’t complain too much. The very first dish we got was one of goose intestine in black bean sauce, which was spectacular. Other special mentions included a dish of char siew done two ways – one more traditionally roasted and the other deep fried. The deep fried version used unimaginably fatty cubes of pork, and was done such that each cube exploded upon contact into a mouthful of pork fat flooding the tongue. Let’s get this straight, this was sinful as hell. But god damn was it ever worth it.

My favourite dish of the meal, however, came as a bit of a surprise. We had ordered a random tofu dish (the requisite vegetable protein) just by looking at the pictures on the menu and pointing, and it turned out to be pieces of tofu fried first to give the skin texture, then braised in superior stock together with wild mushrooms and wantons. For some reason they called this 水鬼重豆腐, which literally translates into “tofu as heavy as water ghosts”. I think the rationale was that the pieces of tofu in stock looked like corpses floating in water. I don’t know what marketing genius came up with that idea. The tofu I suppose was smooth enough and had good flavour, but the real winner here was the stock, which was bursting with umami yet light enough to slurp by the bowlful.

When you travel to an unfamiliar place and you don’t have the time to do the hard yards and research your meals beforehand, stumbling as we did upon Bing Sheng was a godsend. Not everything was great there, of course – a dish of watercress fell way short of expectations – but as a whole it had been very, very good indeed. I just can’t imagine that place at full capacity. What chaos that must be!

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

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