American, British, pan-Asian, vegan, sweet-tooth, omelet station, salad bar, fruits and juices I've never seen before, healthy, heart attack-worthy, it's all right there in a massive buffet/cooked-to-order panapoly of food. It's been fun for me because, after five breakfasts, I've gotten to try a number of foods new to me...and there's much more I have yet to try.
My new favorites are the wonton soup, noodle soup, and congee bars.
Someone's busy making wontons all morning long. You help yourself to as many as you want, add broth, then the fixings, nori, dried mini shrimp, dehydrated egg strips (which hydrate back to pretty), veggies, herbs, etc.
(I have to give a shoutout here to the woman who carefully moved along this table, sipping and tasting from each service spoon in the liquid condiments, then placing said spoons back in their communal dishes. I wanted to mention this to the maitre' d. Allen said to skip it. The table attendant seemed to not care. Yuck.)
The result? My favorite part of my breakfast.
Each of his boiling bins is cooking one person's choice of noodles and veggies.
I also add some things to the hot broth from the salad bar.
Congee, I've learned, is Asian rice porridge. It comes plain or flavored (this morning's was pork with egg). There's a bar of a dozen or so things to add, and I honestly can't tell you what several of them are, although I am pretty sure they were all vegetables. In any event, it's pretty.
My bowl this morning. 9:00 cabbage saute? 12:00 pickled mushrooms 3:00 worm larvae...NO! actually a non-vinegar-y sweet/salty pickle 6:00 very salty and oily seaweed?
And there's always an assortment of dumplings and steamed buns.
Don't eat street food has been the advice we've gotten from several literature sources, but everyone we've talked to, Holm and Cuyler, a friend of a friend, say street food is fine. We ran across a long line in front of one vendor our second morning, so Allen took the plunge.
It's called jianbing, and it's usually a breakfast food. A "bing" is a fried wheat pancake. Cost: $1.
And so I got brave and had one today...shrimp, egg, cilantro, some sort of sauce...wonderful!
This guy was selling roasted sweet potatoes and unhusked corn. It smelled great!
Not sure what all the food on a stick was, chicken, frog are the only ones I'm sure of, but just loved these faces.
There are bakeries and pastry and cake and sweets shops everywhere, and honestly, they look just as wonderful as the ones in Europe. Allen is trying to maintain the one-a-day plan. So far he's 2 for 5.
We've done just a bit of grocery shopping. There are small markets tucked everywhere, just jammed with things but efficiently so, and displays are just beautiful. What isn't beautiful is the amount of plastic packaging. EVERYTHING comes on a tray or in a container, box, bag, etc., and I've not seen any recycling efforts at all (not even in our hotel, where we are provided umpteen bottles of water daily as city water isn't potable).
Allen's a squid lover; this is for him.
I'm getting off on the mushrooms myself, so many varieties and so beautiful. Make sense to me to take some home in their growing container.
McDonald's is alive and very well in China. A traditional Chinese breakfast is noodle soup (like I described at our hotel's breakfast), and McD's adds hash browns or a muffin, all for 86¢.
Allen has liked a restaurant near our hotel. I haven't. Portions are heavy and weird, but I do like the pretty pictures in the menu.
Wine makes all things palatable, including my fried anchovies with lots of bones and sugar syrup, and a weird tasteless pink noodle thinggie with black mushrooms that looked like flower.
Haven't had enough dumplings, may never have enough dumplings. They are so perfect here. Planning to study hard on the difference between soup and fried dumplings. She's making the latter.
We walked some beckoning alleyways off Nanjing Road, Shanghai's famed high-end shopping boulevard. They are filled with the back doors of restaurants fronting on proper streets and with hole-in-wall places to eat (not restaurants) that seemed almost more like family dining rooms than open to the public.
But the back door aspect of these alleys was also revealing in some less appetizing ways.
Just off the shopping boulevard, not in the alleys, are food purveyors dealing in real food. This protein shop sold duck tongue, chicken feet, pig intestine, bullfrog, and I honestly don't know what else. It was a popular place when we were there.
This is going to be hard for me to ignore. There's bacon, fried and reformatted into sheets, then sweetened and dried into jerky. OMG. That is 100% heart attack material in that case and it's heavenly.
And the Finns are in China, or at least the Moomins brand. Candy box ingredients were labeled as made in China.
On our third night here Holm joined us for dinner, and I was impressed with his knowledge of how to order, what to order, how to communicate in rudimentary Chinese, and how much he knew about the women's international curling championships going on now in Beijing, broadcast on lots of TVs around town.
And last night we just needed to get something familiar, so we traveled to Holm's neighborhood and had an Irish/British night, Guinness, colcannon, fish and meat pies made by a local Chinese woman who's famous for her cooking. We thought that rightly so.
Aaaahhhhh.
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