The Buffet that is Beijing

The

staples of Chinese food in the western world - sweet and sour pork, honey chicken, beef and black bean sauce, fried rice - are conspicuously absent in Beijing. From the street vendors selling snacks from their tricycle-mounted hotplates to neighbourhood restaurants and finer establishments, we have discovered that Beijing, just like the Colonel, keeps its secret recipes… well… secret.

Strolling out of our neighbourhood hutong and onto the main dajie, we sauntered down the line of local restaurants and street vendors. The smell of barbecued meat came out of the brightly lit restaurant on the corner. A couple of doors down, the windows of another restaurant were dripping with condensation as hot pots steamed away. Next door, a doona-thick curtain kept out the arctic winds. Inside, baozi - steamed buns - were kept warm in circular bamboo steamers. On the footpath, you could buy a kebab in a kind of toasted pita-bread with pork, cabbage and onion for three yuan (A$0.50) or a folded pancake number (with eggs, sesame paste, chilli, cabbage and a crushed up waffle-looking item) for about the same small change.

In restaurants, we discovered that there's wisdom in following the waitress' recommendations. We had lunch in one restaurant near Beijing West Railway Station, which evidently does not see many foreigners at all. Our waitress was not happy with the food we were selecting (from the pictures) and assumed responsibility for our ordering. There were snow peas tossed with garlic and bacon, eggplant sautéed in soy sauce and steamed dumplings. It was our new favourite meal (but we both knew that the record probably wouldn't stand for long). Along with two beers and too much green tea, we paid 56 yuan (A$9).

We stumbled across a lively little restaurant while waiting for the opening of a theatre session one night. It's specialty was duck. The chef wheeled an entire roast duck out to us for our cursory inspection, before wheeling it off towards the bar, but still in full view, and started carving it up. The crackling was brought out first, which our waiter indicated should be dipped in sugar. A couple of minutes later, our waiter returned with strips of breast meat, which he gestured for us to dip in the garlic sauce and thick soy-sesame sauce. It was all highly indulgent. At the end of the meal, the chef returned with his trolley, this time adorned with a duck carcass - as evidence of our gluttony. The waiter returned one last time, with a colossal bowl of soup, flavoured with the broth of our duck bones.

At the end of the evening, walking home to our little hutong, we would pass the street vendors and wonder if we didn't have enough room for maybe just one more baozi.