Eating Your Way Across China 133them to enjoy the sauces and combines starch with meats
and vegetables in a way that they are more accustomed to. If
you would like to have rice or noodles with the main dishes,
you must ask the waiter or waitress to bring the rice earlier.
It will normally not come until the very end.
It is thought as good luck to have more food than you can
eat. If you were trained by your parents to finish all of the food
on your plate, you will be in agony by the end of the meal due
to overeating. If you are with an aggressively well-mannered
host or hostess, the only way to stop them from continuing to
stuff food into you is to feign an inability to finish what is on
your plate. You must also realise that a good Chinese meal or
banquet is usually a marathon of food, rather than a sprint.
Unlike the West where there may be three to five distinct
courses, in China, dishes can keep coming one by one, for
hours. A signal that you may be near the end of a meal
or banquet is if soup is being
served. Soup and rice or noodles
are usually the final dishes to
be served. Midway through the
meal, sweeter dishes may start
being served; although they are
dessert, the meal isn’t typically
over until fruit is served.
How to Evaluate a Restaurant
The old adage of ‘if you want to be sure of good food, go
where the locals go’ holds true in China. Whether expat or
Chinese, the people who live in the city have suffered the
bouts of food poisoning, bad service and being overcharged,
giving them an informed view that is worth following. On
a very basic level, that criteria involves going to restaurants
where they can be sure they will not suffer ill health effects,
followed by the finer points such as value for money,
ambiance, food quality and service.
Some basic rules are when in Chinese restaurants, stick to
dishes that their chefs have been trained to cook well, which
typically means Chinese. There are good reasons that most
vegetables are well cooked in China, from the way they are
It is usual in China for dessert to
be served while the main dishes
are, sometimes in the last two
or three dishes. There is not as
much of a separation of the main
meal and dessert as a person
may be accustomed to in other
cultures.