amdavidson

Chinese Dinner

posted on 2008-05-18 - amd.im/OITp

The vendor was about 11 hours late on Saturday bringing us data so we sat idle all day long.

As a sort of "Thank you" they took us out for a Chinese dinner. The items on the menu were picked for us, and I don't know how authentic they really were, but I thought the menu was a bit interesting. So I figured I'd pass it along.

The dinner started off with appetizers, we were served Turnip and Lotus Root. The lotus root was sweet and kinda sticky, but good. The turnip was a little spicy, but it was good.

Next up came a little Juice as a beverage.. I wouldn't really call it "Juice" like they did though, it was more like someone chopped up a seedless watermelon and put it in a glass, and warm. It was only ok... but it actually might have tasted good if it was cold, like some sort of all fruit smoothie.

The next dish made me believe that, at least in part, Chinese food is designed to be inconvenient to eat. The next was a dish you would be more likely to see in an American Chinese restaurant, beef with shiitake mushrooms and peas in the pod. The flavors were good, but it was quite difficult to eat as the beef was still on the bone, and we were not eating with a knife and fork... there was a lot of gnawing and spitting going on at the table.

Next came a vegetable dish: asparagus with chickpeas and sweet onions. Good, nothing too remarkable.

Then we really hit the main courses. The first of which was a whole fish cooked in some sort of oil. One of our Taiwanese hosts was kind enough to take the head and the tail and the rest of us received sections of the body. The fish was good, but oily and kind of bland... Again difficult to eat as the bones were still in it, and not just a few, but every bone that fish ever had... More spitting ensued.

Another of the main dishes was lettuce wraps which I'm sure most of us know and love. These were good as well. The flavor was very much the same as you would get at a PF Chang's or another Chinese restaurant. As I was finishing my first wrap, one of our hosts asked if I enjoyed it, and I told him, "Yes, very much so" and he said, "You know what you're eating?" I replied positively, assuring him that I have had chicken lettuce wraps plenty of times. He looked at me quizzically and says "Chicken? No, no chicken, pigeon!" ...... Well, it tasted like chicken.

We wrapped up the main courses with lobster, still in the shell, very buttery and again difficult to remove from the shell for consumption with the chopsticks I had been given, but good all the same.

Desert was some sort of tapioca balls in blueberry sauce with peanuts in it. We dipped some sort of fried bread in it. It was good.

All in all, it was a good dining experience, if a bit foreign.