You know you're a VIP when someone snaps their fingers and the world's most perfect hairy crab appears on the shimmering silver tablecloth in front of you. Then, after you open the shell like the hood of a VW Bug and savor the delicious egg yolk-like roe, a silent girl appears at your elbow and shells the rest of the crab for you, placing tender morsels of flesh in a saucer of black vinegar for you to nibble. When you're finished, you bathe your fingertips in a bowl of cool tea and sip a cup of potent ginger something. And it looks like a grenade went off on your plate...
What, you mean not everyone lives like this? (Shocking!)
Oh, and did I mention that our host sent us home with two containers filled to the brim with living, bubbling hairy crabs for my friend J-- to take to her family? J-- giggled while she lifted the lid of one container to show me ten bound creatures stacked one on top of the other. I got a mental jolt when I realized they reminded me of diagrams I've seen of 18th century slave ships.
But let's not get morbid here! They're just crabs and anyway we did go to a Buddhist temple earlier that day, where we were ushered behind the velvet VIP ropes to do VIP prayers, so that should cover us for any animal-related karma, right? This was after we had an exquisite multi-course vegetarian meal at the restaurant attached to Hanshan Temple.
It started out with refreshing glasses of gold and green young bamboo tea and little plates of fascinating appetizers (seaweed, wheat gluten, pumpkin mousse, etc.).
Then, out came a beautiful cuttlefish stir-fry on a plate adorned with a darling little bird sitting on a branch, all carved out of carrot.
Of course the cuttlefish was not cuttlefish, but its texture was just as delightfully chewy, and its sauce had a yummy peanutty-or-sesamy-y roasty flavor to it. And, as I mentioned, the bird was not a bird, it was a carrot ;-) Ah, the art of artifice.
What next?
A "fish" with a butternut Buddha! Everyone gasped in amazement. The Buddha was really a gourd, of course, and the "fish" was something marvelously crispy on the outside and dense and mellow on the inside (taro?), in a perfectly balanced sweet-sour sauce. Neither J-- nor I could stop eating this dish.
And just as I was sitting, blissed out, fumbling with a big slice of sticky fish with my slippery chopsticks, the extremely attentive waitress made an ostentacious display for our hostess of bringing the bumbling barbarian (me) a fork!
Grrr.
Later in the day, after handing me some delicious local street snack, someone else said to me cheerfully, "Better than pizza."
(!)
Being of Italian descent, I find this to be one of the toughest parts of Chinese culture to accept: permanent outsider status. The concept of being hosted with warmth and generosity while simultaneously being held at arm's length continues to confound me. But I try not to take it personally, especially after hearing how when a Chinese language teacher I met and her Australian husband would celebrate Ching Ming festival with her family, he was relegated to the lowest status position in the ceremonies, above only his own children. Again, the Italian in me says, What!? Once you are in the family, you're in the family and that trumps all. Not so in China. Doesn't matter who you marry. If you're not Chinese, you're still on the outside.
Granted, my persistently poor chopstick skills and failure to learn Putonghua might have something to do with the barbarian perception too.
Mercifully, my friend J-- is as fluent in my native Bay Area micro-culture as she is in her native culture, and treated me like an intelligent human being while guiding me through not behaving like an ass with her friends and family (at least I hope she did). And she also gave me a different kind of VIP treatment when we visited her hometown Guangzhou -- introducing me to her favorite foods.
One of my favorites among her favorites was breakfast at her mom's house including fresh, delicate, mellow-tasting cheong fan. Cheong fan are sheets of thin rice noodle made by brushing a rice mixture over cloth and steaming. How wonderful is that? It's poetic. It's awesome. You can eat cheong fan wrapped around fried crispy sticks or enfolding savory mushrooms or simply plain. All were delicious!
Another favorite was actually an entire meal at a restaurant called Bing Sheng. Apparently the restaurant started out as a snack joint, but continued building on its success and is now a group of restaurants with elegant, spacious interiors and beautifully prepared food. By beautifully-prepared I don't mean stiff, technical cooking, like what you get at Fook Lam Moon. The dishes we had at Bing Sheng were pretty homestyle -- char siu, stir-fried pig's innards, a simple crushed peanut pastry -- but the flavors and textures were nailed to perfection, judged by a standard of eating, not food theory. But then again, I'm a barbarian, what do I know ;-) For the record, the durian pastries appeared to be both technically and gastronomically perfect...
We ate so many other yummy things in such a short period of time -- dried fish skin with roasted peanuts, Chinese mango ice cream (exceptionally smooth, but not creamy), steamed milk, crispy duckling...the list goes on. But one I have to mention because it immediately lodged in my culinary reference bank: hot fresh soy milk. J-- is an enthusiast so we had this many times during our trip. At first you taste it and it tastes plain, raw, bean-y. Then you relax into how mellow it is, comforting and satisfying without being overly rich. Meanwhile the lasting impression is of freshness. Refreshing and warm? What an unusual combination. It's lovely. I would have it every day if I could. Here's a photo from Yun B&B in Shanghai, where the cook served us hot fresh soy milk with spring onion pancakes for breakfast...
