The Restaurant

The Restaurant was the first place I ever ate in Shijiazhuang, less than 12 hours after getting off the plane. I remember my first horrified, jet lagged, culture shocked reaction: all I could see was shabbiness, grubbiness, and an astonishing lack of hygiene.

I couldn’t eat much of the food that visit, and I couldn’t imagine that by the time I left I would rather eat there than at a fancy, expensive restaurant. I couldn’t imagine how I would sit, back in the UK, and fondly remember the beer poster decorated walls, the friendly family who ran it and the delicious Sichuan dishes, that I despair of being able to find here outside of Chinatown.

I miss being able to text or skype a friend for dinner or lunch, and then five minutes later ordering our favourite dishes, perhaps kung po chicken, perhaps vinegar potatoes and garlic green beans.

Baijiu anyone?

It was one of the few places I could happily eat at alone too, as I knew the owners would send any drunk Chinese guys who were ‘being friendly’ away with a flea or two in their ears.

I remember how surprised I was in the first few weeks when I saw men knocking back a bottle or two of baijiu at lunchtime, and our own students, even the thirteen year old ones, enjoying a beer or two or more. (The school did, however, have to stop turning such a blind eye to student drunkenness after some of the junior students tried to set fire to the school in a drunken stupor.)

Vinegar potatoes.

I was amazed too, at first, that you could buy a big bottle of beer for the equivalent of 3p. Although seeing as one of the refrigerators was used to store staff clothes, you couldn’t always be sure of getting a cold one.

Kung po chicken. My favourite.

We liked to mix our dishes with our rice, unlike most Chinese people who prefer to have their rice plain at the end of the meal

Disposable chopsticks. You could get round ones (like these) or square ones. We much preferred the square ones and were quite miffed if only round ones were available.

You might not believe me when I tell you that the photo of the fish tank was taken at its cleanest. When a customer ordered fish, the chef would come out from the kitchen, reach his hand in, grab one and take it, still flapping pathetically in his hand, to its doom. If the fish managed to leap out of his hand, it would writhe on the floor, sometimes managing to cover a surprising distance before being recaptured. Every time this happened, I would have to stifle the urge to scream and stand on my chair, which is probably slightly strange. Once, after a particularly spirited struggle between man and fish, my friend was horrified to find she had a patch of fish scales in her hair.

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