Longhua Pagoda, Shanghai, 2017.
“Ummm, I think we might have accidentally ordered intestines” is not what you want to find yourself thinking when you’ve just bitten into what looks like beef. Mainly because you shouldn’t talk with your mouth full, but also because intestines are the last thing I’d want to eat when I’m tired and hungry. Yet as we meandered through the streets of Shanghai, stumbling into restaurants and not speaking a word of Mandarin, this scenario became all too familiar.
Following a 16 hour flight, we arrived in Shanghai hungry and running on fumes. We stayed near the famous Yu Garden and headed straight there to get some street food. However, overcome by very foreign and often unpleasant smells, and also in awe of the people and buildings around us, we returned to the hotel a few hours later with no food.
After a suggestion from our concierge for a traditional “Shanghai food restaurant” we walked into what looked like an office building. We followed signs up the elevator to a restaurant that surely had a name which I could neither read, write, nor pronounce. The restaurant itself looked oddly familiar to what you’d find in US: colonial era decor and an overt sense of “Chinese-ness”. What did stand out, however, and what the restaurant was famous for, was the kitchen. A glass-enclosed room with a large furnace and seemingly endless ducks hanging from meat hooks, two sophomoric chefs chuckled with each other as they diced some ducks. As is it turns out, Shanghai food is known for its duck dishes as much as its dumplings.
Yu Garden Roof, Shanghai, 2017.
Thus, despite my affinity for live ducks, we couldn’t help but try a duck dish (or what looked like duck in the pictures) and some dumplings. We also sought out a vegetable— both of us feeling a little weary of fried foods after traveling— and settled on okra, simply because it was the only vegetable that we could both identify from the photos. After some strange-tasting rice wine, the food came out it and it was all delicious. The duck was exceptional and they piled so much okra on a plate that I don't think we finished half of it. The food looked and tasted exactly like you'd expect from the photos in the menu. We took this notion, that the photographs of the foreign food matched what one was ordering, for granted— a grave mistake.
On the second day of our trip we got up early and took a train ride out to Suzhou, a smaller town outside of Shanghai. After wandering through the overwhelming and exotic gardens in Suzhou, I was extremely hungry and ready to eat just about anything.
Street Scene: Suzhou, Suzhou, 2017.
On a quiet side street a man was encouraging passersby to come into his restaurant, or at least that’s how we interpreted him yelling in Chinese at people and motioning for them to come closer. No one in this little restaurant spoke a word of English, so we were going solely based on hand gestures. We should have realized that we were in for a treat when they filled our glasses with hot water. Or maybe when they served us with plastic wrapped dishes. Or maybe based on the motley crew of Chinese men smoking and scarfing down bowls of food.
The waitress hurried over to our table, blushed, and handed us menus full of photos of the food. They had this amazing looking beef dish: stir-fried beef with peppers and veggies in a brown, glazy sauce. To be safe, we also ordered a chicken dish, just in case we didn’t like the beef for whatever reason. The waitress stared at us awkwardly as we handed back our menu, nervously bowing before scurrying away.
Fresh Food Delivery, Shanghai, 2017.
I’m sure we would have loved the beef dish, if it was beef. The sauce and vegetables were delicious and almost countered the rubbery, intestine-like quality of the mystery meat that I had mistakenly ordered. I took a few more bites just to see if I had gotten a weird piece or what not, but the more the slippery mystery meat slid around my chopsticks like a piece of bacon fat, and the more I chewed, and chewed, and chewed the rubber meat, the more I realized that we were definitely eating intestines. “Well at least we ordered chicken,” I thought to myself. I scooped up a piece of chicken and took a bite—into a mouthful of tiny, sharp chicken bones. I tried another piece—more chicken bones. Every single piece of chicken had a handful of chicken bones too small to be easily removed by hand, much less with chopsticks.
Between the lack of cold water, the intestines, and the chicken bones, we’d struck out—our complete lack of Mandarin could only get us so far. While the photos were either excellent examples of trick photography or my own naivety led me to believe that beef looks like beef, the photos led us astray. Defeated, I resigned myself to eating the rice they had provided. It was, all things considered, pretty good rice—plain and bland.
Shanghai Skyline, Red Boat, Shanghai, 2017.