Sunday, October 05, 2008

What's in a Menu?

The greatest difficulty Jia and I had on our trip to Fujian province was the food. We can always find food to eat, but it wasn't quite so easy in the countryside. None of the restaurants we tried had a menu. We were both dumbfounded--they expected us to go to the cooler, pick out what we wanted and tell them how to cook it. Now, we're not experts on Hakka (ke jia) food, so we couldn't just tell the staff what dishes we wanted. We ended up with some fairly bland dishes on those days.

At the first restaurant we stopped in, Jia looked in the cooler and hastily made the decision to leave. "It's all wild animals," she said. Apparently the animals in the cooler were cut up in any way, and sat atop all the vegetables. I'm just glad I didn't have a look.

Looking back, we should have consulted Mr. W about food as he is Guangdong Hakka and enjoys the food. Had we been prepared, we might have enjoyed eating a bit more. Instead we suffered.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey Matt. I haven't been by in a while. Great photos. I really enjoyed this post. Were you able to figure out if you've been blocked or not?