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October 31, 2009

Ghost Street - a Halloween post even if it wasn’t Halloween at the time.

Dinner is one of the most difficult things about business travel – sometimes you can organise dinner with colleagues but all too often you end up fending for yourself, alone. Room service or dining in the hotel restaurant is pretty much the same anywhere in the world. I like to try out the local cuisine and when you are in China, and don’t speak Chinese, well things can get interesting.

Beijing’s Gui Jie (Ghost Street) was listed in the hotel guide as a famous street of restaurants – the photos looked interesting and I had just figured out how to use the Beijing subway (very easy and very cheap) so I decided to have a go – it’s a fairly long strip of restaurants and an absolute hive of activity. Barkers were inviting me in… mostly in Chinese but a few hellos in English. I noticed some, but not all restaurants had picture menus… and some were crowded and some were empty and I kinda wanted some sort of noodle dish and saw a bit of that so – picture menu, busy but not too crowded and some indication that they serve noodles was what I was looking for.

What I found was a plaque on the side of a restaurant that was all about the history of Ghost street – in really good English too – inside I was sure I saw someone slurping some noodles down and it was pretty busy but a few table available so I walked in. I was seated in a booth – the table had a large hole in the middle of it with a gas hob underneath – I had heard about ‘hot pot’ restaurants and without trying it looked like I found one!

Hmm, no picture menu and it took the waitress (who was trying her best to communicate with me) brought an English menu for me… It was confusing to say the least. Best I could tell you order a hot pot with some sort of meat and then vegies on the side – I pointed to ‘spicy shrimp’ and the waitress seemed a bit worried… kept pointing to the word ‘HOT’ in hot pot and saying “Hot!” – I got the message, it’s spicy, I’ll take it. Beer was much easier to order – phew!

Dinner arrived – clearly family style – a huge bowl of prawns (these were way to big to be called shrimp) and chili – oh, my – so much chili – pepper, cloves, and I’m not sure what else but if it’s spice it was probably mixed in with what must have been two dozen shrimp. Now, I’m quite proud of my ability to pop the head off and peal the shell off a shrimp using chopsticks and a spoon so I dug in right away. It was slow going but as I got into the grove there the waitress brought me some plastic gloves and gestured that I could eat with my hands. I was having fun with the chopsticks so I smiled and said xiexie. I should say it all tasted beautiful – the prawns had been sliced open so the spices really permeated the meat. But waitress was persistent with the gloves! I’m not sure if she was being nice or just wanted me to eat faster so she could turn over the table! So fine, fine – I donned the gloves and dug in. Side effect of eating faster – the spice builds… ‘it tastes like burning!’ but oh, so good.

I filled myself up – just about the right amount of heat in the shrimp too as I don’t think I could have taken one more. Total bill for huge bowl of shrimp, some bok choy and a large (600ml) beer – 120RMB – about 20AUD – yeah, noodle soup would have been cheaper (probably 20RMB) but the experience was priceless.

Posted by yankinoz at 11:41 PM | Comments (2)