Chinese Food Experiences

When you travel to Spain you try Tapas, when you are in Guatemala you have black bean paste, in New Zealand it's lamb and when I traveled to Beijing I just had to try the Peking Duck.
In Spain I was picky about the seafood tapas, in Guatemala I found the paste to be bland, I'm learning to love lamb and on my visit to China I tried Peking Duck--- but I'm not sure it will be on my 'favorites' list anytime soon.

As one travel website wrote "a visit to the capital city of China should involved climbing the Great Wall and eating roast duck at Quandjude." Since we had already tackled the Great Wall earlier in the week, for our last night in Beijing we decided on a meal at the famous Quanjude Restaurant. I think there are 6 Quanjude locations so we chose the one that was closest to our hotel. I had read reviews in books and online that famous politicians and celebrities have all dined at one of the Quanjude locations so we trusted the recommendation and showed up to a packed restaurant filled with large tables of groups of 8-10. We were seated at a large round table (just the two of us) and were presented with a large menu with the first page featuring the famous poultry.
Since most Chinese have one person order for the entire table, typically only one menu is handed to a table and anything that is ordered is assumed to be enough to share with the entire table For example, I ordered Jasmine Tea and Brendan ordered beer but we were both served a glass of each. An entire Duck was 198RMB (about $30US) but since I was the only one eating the local dish I was able to convince the waiter to serve us only half of a duck for 98RMB which is expensive for local cuisine. The other fixings that are offered with it (and cost 2 RMB which is about 10 cents) is the pancakes, shallots, garlic, sugar, hoisen sauce and cucumbers. Since Brendan had already tried the local dish he ordered spicy prawns and fried rice in lieu of my poultry...in turn we got two large plates of rice and prawns (yes we got a lot of duplicate orders)

Other than the items we ordered I'm not sure what else I would have been able to stomach. Our other choices including every part of the duck including: Duck Liver, Fried Duck Heart, Duck
Gizzards, Duck Feet/Webs, Shredded Duck wing, A Plate of Duck Skin and the very popular Duck Tongue. Other famous dishes include Shark Fin soup, fried scorpions, sheep intestines ....need I go on?

When the duck was served, first they come and show you the cooked animal (yes the entire animal with the crooked neck and sad turned down face....Brendan kept calling him "Donald" and then slice it table side. You are presented with a plate of the "skin" first which I tried in effort to seem polite. It tasted like fried chicken skin but much thicker and was almost the consistency of fried fat. They they brought out the plate of sliced duck. Since I only ordered half a duck I was only given half of the duck head as the garnish. Apparently people eat that part as well.
The Peking Duck is eaten in a pancake with hoisen sauce and onions. Even with the onions and sauce I found the Duck to have a very strong "gamey" flavour with a strong after taste that I experienced into the night. I saw the Great Wall
I ate the duck
They are officially crossed off the list :-) and for dessert we passed on the "duck meat cakes"

Here is the website for the restaurant if you want to read further http://quanjude.com.au/about.html which oddly has a a totally different menu that the one we were given. I didn't see Pork, chicken or beef anywhere on our list of options and I would have certainly remembered the option of lobster or scallops. But maybe these were options at the other Quanjude locations?
The other food that is available in Beijing includes some of the following (none of which I personally sampled) donkey meat, dog meat, stir fried pig liver, fried chicken heart, pig kidney, roasted pigeon, fried silk worms, fried scorpions-circadias and centipedes, sheep penis, starfish, crickets, rabbit meat on a stick, lamb kidneys, bee cocoons, fried fish head. and yes people seem to love most of it. The above pictures are from the menus at the infamous outdoor food market (which is only open at night), however we did see many of these same items in sit down diners as well "fried bugs" anyone? "Dog Meat Pot" for you? (double click on the pictures to see all the bugs!)

Overall I found eating in China to be a challenge if you went to local establishments. One, I wanted to make sure I was ordering what I intended i.e. chicken and not dog meat. And there was a concern with the food health given the recent Chinese milk contamination (as well as other concerns with toxic levels of pesticides, fish from waste ponds ect).
With that said there are plenty of Western places you can eat including the nicer hotels, Starbucks, McDonalds, KFC, TGI Fridays....but you will pay more in the hotels (at least 5 times) and the fast food places were still not what you expect from the Western branches. We did visit a KFC and the had a "meat stick" that was suspicious at best.

I didn't get sick except for towards the end of our trip when I didn't venture far from the -Western toilets--Although this could have been from the water. There is NO clean drinking water in all of Beijing. Even in our 4 star hotel we were provided bottled water with instructions not to drink the tap water. This is apparently how the majority of China is and therefore fresh vegetables are rarely eaten as most is cooked/boiled for cleanliness and water is not offered at meals (maybe boiling water and making tea was how they got around it?).

I don't intend to be judgemental as I'm sure plenty of people would view the food I eat as "weird" ....but for now I think I'm going to stick with my Western appetite