After completing our Emei Shan hike (including a frustrating extra night spent in an unheated mountain hotel, due to excessive fog preventing buses from departing the base), my travel partner and I bussed it two hours north to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province.
Chengdu is a relatively modern Chinese city, with a river bisecting the north and south parts of the city. I was particularly excited to visit the city, given its history and my own recent completion of Jung Chang's amazing Wild Swans, part of which takes place in Chengdu.
It was a foggy, smoggy gray January afternoon when we arrived, and after being thwarted by our first-choice hostel, we settled at a place in the Tibetan quarter, and set out in search of dinner. Having read that the Sichuanese favor snacks, and being advised by a friendly local to check out Chunxi Lu, we did just that.
Chunxi Lu is one of these expansive shopping plazas I have come to expect in giant Chinese cities -- wide plazas where cars are not permitted, with giant department stores (almost always the same ones) on either side. The sky is inevitably lit up by all the neon and light you could want, and kiosks sell bing tang hu lou. We found what we wanted -- a snack restaurant -- near the entrance to the shopping area.
We split a set course menu and ordered an extra bowl of dumplings.
Starting from 12:00, there was soft cubes of dough doused in chili paste and covered with scallions.
The plate to the right features corn kernels (these were kind of hard and tasteless to my western palate), and dried meats. I think both were pork; one type was spicy (hey, it's Sichuan!).
The next bowl features two oversized tang yuan, which I know my Chinese-food aficionados will undoubtedly recognize. For those not in the know, tang yuan are balls of rice flour dough formed around a sweet or savory center. I'm personally not a fan of the sweet ones, and let my friend eat both of them (I think she said these were sesame paste).
The next bowl is a standard bowl of jiaozi (pork dumplings) floating in water. It's worth noting that the skin of these was particularly thin and winsome.
To its left is a bowl of white fungus soup and these tangy, bitter red berries whose name escapes me. I think this was sweet -- again, I don't do sweet at the dinner table for the most part and was underwhelmed by these.
We managed to split each of the items on the next plate in half. There was an "open-faced" chive dumpling (the one that looks like a little bundle), a pouch of glutinous zongzi-esque rice wrapped in an even stickier wrapper of green rice flour dough, and then a puffy, fat-skinned dumpling of pork mixed with seasoned rice. I particularly enjoyed the open-faced dumpling; we had eaten a whole tray of similar style dumplings in Leshan, and I like the "unfinished" floury taste that gets concentrated at the point where the dough is pinched together.
In the center were two "breads" -- one tasted a bit like fried sweet cornbread, and the other was unispiring as yet another spongy, eggy, sweet Chinese bread creation.
No matter -- by far my favorite was the bowl (actually, they gave us two bowls) of thin-skinned flatted dumplings floating in chili oil. Again, as this is Sichuan, the oil reeked of infamous Sichuan peppercorn. The savory dumpling filling and flimsy dumpling wrapped fought valiantly but ultimately submitted to the powerful Sichuan flavor. Oh my goodness am I addicted to that taste!
One note: I read in my Lonely Planet China that
these "snack-style" lunch counters are fast disappearing in Chengdu, due to
the city's rapid expansion and development. Finding one in the future may
require some serious hunting around outside the city center.
Posted by Astrid at February 4, 2005 04:43 AM