I've eaten in many fine restaurants in China, but never before in one where the eating utensils have included wire-cutting pliers.
I'm used to the differences in place settings between a restaurant in China and one in the US. Of course, you're not going to find a knife and fork. The basic setup is nothing more than a small rice bowl and a pair of chopsticks. In better restaurants you'll also get a tiny tea cup or glass, and a saucer-sized plate. The plate is not for your food, or more precisely, the plate is not for food you want to eat; it's what my college roommate referred to as an "off-plate." Everything you don't want to eat goes here, like sunflower seed shells, bones, and chili peppers. (Except if you're like most people here, you eat the chili peppers.)
Deb and I were at this restaurant with a party of about 20 people from our school. It was the highlight of our day-long celebration of International Women's Day, a holiday that's taken seriously in the comrade-rich environments of Communist countries. We were the guests of the Office of International Cooperation, the people responsible for taking care of us in China. This department often takes us to dinner, and the dinners are often arranged for our behalf. But this time, we were tagging along with a mostly-non-English speaking group, a crowd not especially familiar with or interested in Western habits. This dinner was being arranged for them, not us.
When we walked into the restaurant, we couldn't help but notice that the tables were completely bare, and made entirely of galvanized sheet-metal. Never mind the absence of bowls and chopsticks, or the more common lack of a tablecloth, these tables had no pitchers of soy sauce, or vinegar, or jars of hot-sauce paste. There was no roll of toilet paper in a dispenser to use in place of napkins. The tables looked more like a workbenches in an auto-repair shop than places to eat dinner.
Each table also had a huge hole cut into the center. In hot-pot restaurants you usually have a small hole in the center of the table, where the bowl of steaming broth sits. A gas burner on low flame underneath keeps the soup boiling. You drop your meat and vegetables into the broth for a few minutes and then retrieve the freshly cooked food with chopsticks. But these tables had an opening bigger than the eating space surrounding it, big enough to hold a child-sized bathtub.
This had already been a day of unexpected events. In the morning we had played a game a lot like Duck, Duck, Goose. In the Chinese version, the loser has to enter the circle and perform some act of entertainment for the crowd. Most people chose to give a minor song or dance, but one bawdy woman told a joke with a punchline, uncannily similar to an old Jewish joke I know, playing on the similarity between the Chinese words for "wallet" and "foreskin." Later, with our hands tied behind our backs, we sucked milk from baby bottles hung above our heads. It wasn't exactly like Mothers Day.
When we all sat down at our restaurant workbench, in front of each us, the waitress set a disposable plastic glove. On top of that she placed a carving knife. After months of eating in Chinese restaurants, the knife looked more like a weapon than dinnerware. Our department director calmly slipped the plastic glove onto one hand, preparing himself like a proctologist, and grasped the knife in the other. No chopsticks, no bowls, no plate. We were really confused. "This is a barbecue," he explained "You cut the meat with your knife and pick it up using the glove." Now we were less confused, but being vegetarians, we were still not entirely comfortable.
Before we could come up with a practical Plan B, two waiters arrived carrying the carcass of a small, four-legged animal wired to a metal rack. There was no head or feet, but a finger-long tail stood upright at the back end. Knowing that the Chinese consider dog meat to be a delicacy, I found it easy to imagine that Bowser was being carried to our table. Our director identified it as a lamb, but on second thought, he decided maybe it was a goat. I didn't push the matter.
The recently departed creature was eviscerated, splayed, and freshly cooked. To keep it warm, two more staff members arrived carrying tubs of hot charcoal, each about the size of a small suitcase. The rack of meat went over the hole in the table, the beds of burning coals went on the floor underneath. It became clear why the table was made of metal.
To be honest, the meat smelled delicious. The entire animal was slathered with a sauce made from cumin, ground red pepper, and sesame seeds. I have found that I have never been disappointed by any food made with sesame seeds. This promised to be a lot better than the boiled yak meat that I had to eat with the Tibetans. With some trepidation, I stabbed into the rib section and carved off a pair.
There seems to be no food in China which is not believed to have a characteristic medical or behavioral effect. At lunch, the woman sitting next to me eagerly extracted a tongue from the dismembered beak on the table's plate of chicken meat, explaining that eating it would make her more talkative. For reasons no stronger perhaps than association by appearance, walnuts are supposed to be good for your brain.
In the case of goat meat, our director told us, eating it will give you pimples. "It is because this meat makes your body hot, and the pimples release the heat," he explained. This did not sound like much of an endorsement to me. "But the taste is so delicious, we eat it anyway." Fortunately, the antidote to the acne is drinking beer, which cools your body down. We made sure we were well protected. If word on this gets out, the battle to stop teenaged drinking will be lost forever.
Ultimately, we were served roasted fish along with roasted lotus roots, potatoes, zucchini, and leeks. There were stacks of pita-sized, pan-fried flat breads, allowing for impromptu sandwiches. They even delivered us a tofu dish, which despite the truckloads of meat, the Chinese people at our table welcomed with great appreciation. But the bulk of the dinner was wired to that metal rack, and our table pretty much polished it off, cutting and chewing, dropping bones to the floor. When it came time to free the legs from their bindings, the waiter supplied the pliers.
Deb thought it was ironic that we were celebrating International Women's Day by eating like cavemen. But at the table next to us, one of the female staff members was triumphantly waving a lamb/goat/dog spine, freshly gnawed clean of flesh. For consuming this prodigious chunk of meat, she was awarded a prize of 100 yuan. Betty Rubble would have been proud.
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