From the Yuanshan Temple we drove a total of three minutes through the center of town to a restaurant. The street was narrow and clogged. The storefront was already crowded with parked scooters, which had to be moved so that we could park. Two men attended to this task, one older than the other by a generation. The younger man moved the scooters, the older one kept him hopping. Some things are the same everywhere.
Edward's father had already arrived in his car and made arrangements both for parking and for lunch.
Through a store-front with an opening about the size of a double-car garage, we entered the restaurant. To the right were a few round tables and a staircase. To the left, the restaurant's menu, laid out like a buffet to display food choices -- some of it already cooked, but most of it raw.
Edward's father and mother had already made selections for our lunch; but if they hadn't or if we had come on our own, perish the thought, we would have been expected to choose from this array of options. Then, given our language skills, rather than bartering or negotiating menu and prices, we would have pointed and nodded and repeated "Xiexie" (thank you) optimistically. Crude, I admit, but I am certain we would not have left hungry.
Just beyond the kitchen with its food display were three or four small round tables to the left, and a separate room to the right where we would be served.We were nearly always taken to a room out the main area, not so much to keep us hidden, which might have been a wise decision, as to follow the common practice in China. All of our restaurant meals were taken in rooms that were either private or semi-private.
In this as in many restaurants our eating space was simply an undecorated square room with a round table. For the sake of distinction, I will use the American term "family style" to describe these restaurants.
The little appliance in the corner behind Edward and Yujia is an air-conditioner, not a heater. This restaurant near the temple we had just visited, like most buildings in southern China, is not heated, and the front door -- in this case, a wide opening -- remains open during business hours, which may have been 16 or 18 hours every day. Everyone wears a coat indoors.
For the sake of keeping our diet adventures up to date, I noted what we were served. The dish in front of Yujia is won-ton soup and the the dish on the lazy-susan is roasted peanuts. Sometimes these peanuts are boiled instead of roasted. Either way, you pluck them one by one with your chopsticks, which I usually did straight-away to establish my chopsticks-cred.
We were served bitter melon soup with clams, oyster pancakes, pig stomach with almonds, broad flat noodles with bean sprouts, white fish with peppers and greens, fish dumplings, beef (in strips, of course) with green peppers, chicken soup with almonds and squid, and vegetable (swiss chard, I think).
A side note, as a reassurance of "freshness" we were told that the cow for our beef dish had been killed just the day before at 3 p.m. You have to admire that kind of precision, I think.
We were also told that the chicken for the chicken soup was killed just for us when Edward's father ordered the soup dish. Too much information, I suppose, for the average American restaurant goer. But a welcome bit of information nonetheless.
A further side note, this one in the faux pas (i.e., cultural blunder) department. The bowl is for eating and the little plate for bone, not the other way around.
When the dinner was done, one of the teenaged waitresses asked to have her picture taken with us. So we posed with her while her friends recorded the moment on their little cameras.
I know it would be easy to over-imagine this moment of celebrity. But as a story teller, I am interested in whether (or how) that moment plays out. This young waitress is, now, a small but important part of our stories of China.
I wonder how -- or if -- we figure into hers?
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