What We Ate In Zhuhai

We were in Zhuhai ('pearl sea') for a night and day only. It's a pleasant city, but there's not much you can do there. Except eat.

For convenience, we ate lunch at our hotel's Chinese restaurant which features different types of mushrooms in every dish. When the black chicken mushroom soup came, the waitress politely told me that pics taking is not allowed. Hmm. Never encountered that before. All food bloggers would shudder at that. A lesson to remember is: big chunky cameras are giveaways. Another lesson is : do not eat in hotels. For four small dishes and a soup, the bill came to RMB275 (US$40). Expensive for China food.


Front: mushrooms with duck gizzards, back: mushroom with duck breastmeat.

If you pick up a book on the food of China, it would most likely tell you that Chinese food is divided into Sichuan (numbing hot), Cantonese (freshness, light with little oil, stir-frying, exotic meats), Northern (oily, wheat-based: dumplings, noodles) and Huaiyang ('red-stewing', which is marinading meat in soy sauce, sugar, ginger, wine etc and cooking over slow fire. My MIL's very good with red-stewing). However, we found that Chinese people don't divide their food into regional specialties. Instead, they often ask if we would like xiang cai (meaning fragant, such as Hunanese food), la cai (meaning hot, such as Sichuan food), huen cai (meaning vegetarian food),
These are some of the food we ate in Zuhai. Most are xiang cai.

Dim sum. that ubiquitous Cantonese breakfast.



Pork ribs


Ducks' webs


Steamed fish head


Left: fragrant fried tofu; right: fragrant fried pork shank