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All you have to do to have fun in Boston is buy Red Sox tickets online!

A continent of food porn

By Lingbo Li ⋅ July 14, 2009 ⋅ One comment

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First, let’s begin this food porn journey with a blast from the past – my Bostonian past. Remember that time I ate bull testicles? (There will be a video of me saying, “Mmm! Tastes like chicken!” when I head back to school and into the arms of that devious den mother, The Harvard Crimson) I also got a cool shot of our complimentary little peanut butter fudge dessert. Thought it was worth throwing up on here when I was browsing through my 304034 shots of fried rice and cartilage on skewers.

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How I ended up at a Teppanyaki place in Puxi, Shanghai one Saturday to take this phot of the grill being set on fire by a long-suffering female chef with yellowing teeth and red lipstick is another story. Often, I stop and ask myself, self, how is it that I am sitting here, outeating a group of rowdy Aussie men I do not know? Oh well, keep picking at that fried banana. Life is strange.

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Eggplant is probably one of the most underappreciated vegetables. It can soak up flavors so nicely, especially in a dish like this one, or seasoned on skewers. Better than meat, I say. Found near Century Park in Pudong, Shanghai.

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I adore congee. I love it like men love Megan Fox’s bathwater. This was a particularly good pot found in Shanghai’s Dingxi Lu, a wonderful food street. We had prawns and eel in it, not such a fan of the eel which seems grainy, flat, and underwhelming compared to its fatty, barbecued Japanese preparation.

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Fried mantou (steamed bun) with a sweet sauce made with condensed milk. Donuts? What are those?

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On 1025 Nanjing Xi Lu, find a shikumen (traditional Shanghainese townhouse) lane where there are random cafes and stores hidden amidst the residential housing. One was behind the most unassuming of wooden doors, with nothing more than a plain, lettered sign on the door. A slender girl asked me if I was hungry, so I wandered into the tiniest, dirtiest, and most cramped of kitchens.

A young man was hurriedly stir frying a handful of cabbage with giant cartons of brown eggs at his feet, fish halves, vegetables, oil, and other materials littering the counter around him, all the cutting services still smeared whatever it was before. It made me worry about food safety, so I decided to have dinner there. The waitress recommended this dish.

It was something special. Since it’s Hunanese food, it’s very spicy, but a deeply aromatic, peppery kind of spice, reminding me a bit of Sichuan peppercorn in initial flavoring but without any of the numbing effect. The heat is more insistent and persistent, but not painful. For a humble dish made of cabbage and fatty bits of pork, pretty damn good.

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The remains of an epic Japanese meal. My review will be out in the next City Weekend.

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Children are most adorable when they’re small, dirty, and have their Crocs on wrong.

Crocs are really, really popular in China. I especially love it when I see couples unironically wearing matching, schoolbus-yellow Crocs with little cartoon character pins in the holes. Or when people wear them as gym shoes – no joke.

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Remember my Henanese restaurant friends? I caught them cutting up lamb bones one night, which have a deeply unappetizing scent when raw. These will make the bone soup I love so much. This freaked me out a lot for some reason. Especially the flying bits of debris.

Why is there a tranny in my underwear?

By Lingbo Li ⋅ July 14, 2009 ⋅ 4 comments

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Now, I don’t know about you, but I generally like my butterface underwear models to not look as if they are hiding a surgical scar beneath their cleverly located scarf. With a jaw line that looks like the sure marker of a Y chromosome lurking beneath a terrible dye job, I find myself left only with the feeling of dread that I’ll sprout an Adam’s apple and an inch of dark roots as I stand vulnerable in a pair of pink granny panties packaged inside. I understand that “high fashion” underwear companies don’t have a lot of money to hire Doutzen Kroes to make kitten eyes at the camera, but I don’t know a lot of women that aspire to ladyboy status.

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Also, this creature appeared in a coworker’s noodle soup. She had already eaten half by the time the bugger floated, juice-drained and legs splayed, to the top of the whole soupy mess. The restaurant’s response: “We know that there’s cockroaches. What do you want us to do about it?” Oh, China.

Fun with dining advertorials

By Lingbo Li ⋅ July 9, 2009 ⋅ 6 comments

The crazy thing about my job as a City Weekend intern is that I’m often given tasks that my title really shouldn’t allow. Like take over a dining advertorial that another freelancer dropped. Thankfully, it was a pretty straightforward job – set up photo shoots with two chefs and their signature dishes through their PR people, make sure the photos were uniform and attractive, then write the blurbs.

The Langham, a boutique hotel near People’s Square, did a very nice lunch before the photoshoot. Witness:

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Appetizer…

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Here’s the chef’s signature dish – a pan seared turbot with vanilla (the stuff on top), dark chocolate, and eggplant puree. An interesting flavor pairing that worked.

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A white chocolate mousse made with olive oil rather than cream, and with some tomato embedded inside, since tomato and olive oil is the classic Italian pairing.

Then the next day was the Hyatt’s chef, this time, no three course lunch, but some amazing views from their restaurant:

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Here’s my favorite photographer, Mao Dou, who is really a big sweetheart and a great food photographer.

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The main event: rolled veal carpaccio stuffed with goat cheese, side salad of artichoke, red onion, pea shoots, hazelnut dressing. Very fresh, simple, delicious.

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Here’s the chef getting test shots taken. He eventually agreed to wearing a hat, but before giving me a heart attack when he refused at first. He hammed it up nicely for the camera.

Now, I’ve gotten the copy written up, talked to the designer, and I’m extra excited for it to appear in the next issue of City Weekend. Yay! If you’re in Shanghai, be sure to pick up the most recent copy of the magazine with the “expat evolution” cover – there are tons things I wrote in it.

Now, for a cultural aside,

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Also, just for good measure, this is the proper way to wear your backpack to ward of sticky-fingered thieves in China.

The problems I have with China are usually these frustrating moments when the bus driver starts driving away as I have one foot on to board – and is blatantly apathetic to my rage. Or when I realize I’ve gotten ripped off since I’m not well versed on what things are supposed to cost here. Or like this morning, when I hailed a motorcycle cab, agreed to a price before I got in, then the driver suddenly jacked the price up 2 yuan. I tried to negotiate down a yuan, but he angrily demanded his full 6 yuan. Finally, we ended up in a screaming match, where I finally relinquished the last, pathetic yuan he demanded.

I was overcome by my linguistic paralysis – I know next to no curse words in Mandarin.

And well, a yuan is all of 15 cents USD.

I guess, despite my unpleasant experiences and daily near-deaths from aggressive traffic (no such thing as pedestrian right of way here), I’m lucky that I can afford to get ripped off a few dozen yuan and never really feel the pain. But that doesn’t make me resent that motorcab driver any less.