We ate really well in China. The food is healthy, and came to us in great abundance and diversity.
We were treated to numerous official banquets in our honour, and all kinds of vegetable and animal treats were served up - some very recognisable and some not so. We clearly recognised the fried cicadas for example, and one of us (N) got stuck into them and pronounced them delicious. The other of us (F) was more circumspect about the exotic offerings, but did admit that the prawns she was eating were, by any objective standard, at least as insect like as cicadas.
We were taken by some of the English menu translations in some of the restaurants too. Pictured is the 'Quack-bone' dish we ordered in one place, thinking it was duck. It turned out to be cracked bone, but was nevertheless delicious.
In Xuzhou as well as Beijing, the food is mainly Beijing style, and one interesting feature of this seemed to be that once you've gorged yourself trying to do a respectable job on the dozens of dishes piled up, sometimes on top of each other when table space runs out, someone then announces that the 'main course' is coming, and that the main course is either plain rice or plain noodles! We did our best, honestly.
In Xuzhou as well as Beijing, the food is mainly Beijing style, and one interesting feature of this seemed to be that once you've gorged yourself trying to do a respectable job on the dozens of dishes piled up, sometimes on top of each other when table space runs out, someone then announces that the 'main course' is coming, and that the main course is either plain rice or plain noodles! We did our best, honestly.
