Matters of taste

It wasn't until I went to China that I began to understand what Chinese food is really like. Meals in London's Chinatown will never be the same again
February 25, 2007

Before I went to China, my knowledge of its food came from visits to restaurants in London's Chinatown. In other words, it was extremely limited. Because of the Hong Kong connection, almost all Chinese restaurants in Britain are Cantonese. Cantonese cooking should not be conflated with that of China as a whole. While in principle I understood this, it wasn't until I went to China that I fully grasped its importance. Up until then, I had persisted in the fantasy—which I suspect is common in Britain—that every night, people across China sit down to identikit meals of spring rolls, crispy duck and sweet and sour pork, washed down with Tsingtao beer and a plate of orange segments.

This geographical confusion is bad enough, but Chinese food in Britain is unrepresentative in another, more basic, sense: it isn't very good. When I was a boy, Chinese restaurants seemed impossibly exciting. The challenge of eating (or trying to eat) with chopsticks; the fun of having communal dishes as opposed to individual ones; the food that was alien in so many ways but whose flavours were never unpleasant—all these made family outings to Chinatown memorable. But the magic wore off. I started to notice the uniform tang of MSG, the lack of really fresh ingredients, the harried-looking waiters. I came to see Chinese food as it is now widely viewed in this country: as unexceptional, convenient and above all cheap.

According to Fuchsia Dunlop, who has written two books about Chinese cooking, the problem with Chinese food in Britain is that it got stuck in a time-warp. "You have to remember," she says, "that when Chinese restaurants started opening in London in the 1960s, British food generally was in a bad way. Chinese restaurants reflected that, and since then many haven't really changed." This stasis was fed by the infrequency of travel between the two countries in the wake of the cultural revolution. But the situation is now improving. "In the last decade, more and more Chinese people—above all rich Chinese—have started coming to London, and demanding food more like they would eat at home." Thanks to restaurateurs like Alan Yau, the owner of Hakkasan and Yauatcha, a higher class of Cantonese food is now available. And other regions are finally being represented—Dunlop herself acts as a consultant to Bar Shu, a new Sichuan restaurant in Soho which opened to rave reviews.

Still, the gulf between real Chinese food and its British version remains large, as I discovered during my stay in Shanghai. I was visiting my brother, who was there for a few months teaching at a university. In one way or another, food dominated my stay. The restaurants are cheap—ridiculously so by western standards—and so we ate out a lot. We gorged on the (plentiful) offerings of street vendors. The food is hard to describe, both because it is so unfamiliar—like nothing else I've eaten—and so varied. China's provinces all have distinct cuisines. The scale of migration from countryside to city means that all provinces are represented in a place like Shanghai. For non-Mandarin speakers, it is often hard to know what you are eating—menus are never printed in English.

Sometimes, however, what we were eating was all too clear. At a restaurant in Suzhou, a town just outside Shanghai, we ate a dish of turtle that had been baked, shell on, and strewn with mushrooms and bamboo. After flipping it over, we gouged the flesh from the shell with our chopsticks—it was a strange hybrid, the texture of rabbit but with a fishy flavour. On another night, we went with some of my brother's students for a hotpot—a roiling cauldron of chilli-infused broth, in which we immersed various meats that became more anatomically daunting as the evening wore on. The final plate, presented with a great deal of mock solemnity and introduced as the "treasures," was lamb's penis and testicles. The testicles were OK, but the penis had an unpleasantly slimy texture.

For the Chinese, the habitual squeamishness of foreigners when presented with such offerings is amusing. But I found it surprisingly easy to abandon my culturally conditioned fussiness. I grew to admire the way Chinese people eat. They do so as if they mean it: in near silence (unless chatting on their mobiles), with looks of intense concentration. They shovel the food into their mouths, placing their heads as close as possible to its source. Any bones are picked clean, and spat out on the table. Some restaurants even provide plastic top sheets to protect their tablecloths.

Why the fierce devotion to eating? According to Dunlop, the memory of deprivation runs deep. "Older people remember feeling hungry in the 1950s and 1960s," she says. "Eating well has become a way of celebrating the fact that those times are over." But China is also simply rediscovering its rich and bafflingly varied culinary traditions. These were suppressed as part of the attack on bourgeois culture during the cultural revolution, when restaurants were given revolutionary names and encouraged to serve food "for the masses" rather than expensive delicacies. After my trip, I felt as if I had had a tantalising glimpse of this heritage. Visits to Chinatown will never be the same again.