Eric's Beijing Diary

Last night I went into town to get something to eat. I got off the bus near the town square, and started walking down a side street to look for a restaurant. A bicycle rickshaw guy saw me and rode up alongside me. It was quite obvious that he wanted business. He looked pretty desperate, so I hopped in and told him to find a restaurant for me. He rode around for awhile, and I finally spotted a place, so I stopped him and got out. It was a seafood restaurant. That part was no problem--I like seafood. The problem with these places, is that they have a bunch of different exotic creatures in tanks, and you pay by the jin (500 grams). It isn't cheap, either. And it's really very hard to know how much the final bill is going to be. If something goes for 90RMB/jin, and the thing weighs 3 or 4 jin, you could be in for a lot more than you expected. Well, I just wasn't in the mood for spending that much money. Actually, if you're coming from America, and you have two or three people, it probably wouldn't seem like that bad a deal. After all, we're talking about exotic seafoods--this isn't every day stuff. But when you are alone, and you live on a Chinese income, the price is so much more than you would pay at an average restaurant. Anyway, I left the place. I went back to the Square, and found a little roadside Moslem restaurant--tasty bowl of beef noodle soup for 7 kuai. It was good, but I didn't really intend to go that far in the other direction.

Today, I talked with one of my students who knows the area, and had him show me where some good seafood restaurants were. I went into town, bought a city map, and hired a rickshaw to take me to the harbor. "Seafood Island," it's called. On the way out there, I passed some neighborhood places and told the lady she could stop and let me out. She refused. She kept saying, "That place is no good." Well, she finally brought me to a place, but it was pretty much the same situation as last night, so I started to leave. The rickshaw driver saw me and told me to get in. By now, she really was on my side. She took me to another place that sits right on the bay. Same situation, but I was able to get some shell food (clams, etc.) that weren't too expensive. Actually, if you are going to eat sea food as a single person, the shell food is probably better anyway. You can get fish anywhere.

I guess you just have to be philosophical. This isn't something you would do every day. And the seafood really is good. It's just that, in China, fresh fish is a given. It isn't really a specialty. And you can get it anywhere for much less than what these exotic food places charge. When Mao went to visit Stalin on his only trip outside of China, his Russian hosts gave him some frozen fish. He told his aids to throw it back at them. He was insulted. In Chinese restaurants, they don't keep fish in the freezer, they keep them in fish tanks in the restaurant.

I never understood the significance of this until I worked in the sea food processing industry in Alaska when I was in college. We managed to get some fresh halibut from the packing plant where we worked. That stuff melts in your mouth. It is a tender, boneless white fish that is absolutely delicious. Restaurant halibut is stringy in comparison. Several times since that time, I have ordered halibut at restaurants in the Lower 48. It just is not the same stuff. Fish does not take freezing well.

The obsession with fresh fish in China can be taken to extremes. In Beijing, they used to have a dish where they take a fish and quick-fry the center of the fish. When they serve the fish on the table, the center part is cooked, but the head and tail are still moving. That's a bit much, I think.

A few weeks ago, we were having some fish at a little restaurant outside the West Gate, and one of the cooks brought the fish out to show us before he cooked it. The energetic fish jumped out of the basin it was in and started flopping around on the floor. It was a pretty good sized fish, too. Well, the fuwuyuan managed to catch the uncooperative fish and ten minutes later, Fishy was in our stomachs.