Sunday, September 7, 2008

close to a month

I've been here since Aug 18 and now my palate is berating me for the the constant serving of authentic, not Filipinised, Chinese, more specifically Guangdong dishes. Guangdong cuisine perhaps best represents the Chinese dishes we have come to know since this province down China's south is the closest to Pinas so you go figure. Authentic Chinese food can be utterly overwhelming that to keep our sanity and our taste buds intact, we pinoys here(I've 2 colleagues with me) would cycle our gastronomic pangs between Dormitory Food (whipped up by the Master Chef himself ,"Pogi") and this town's best attempt to interpreting western food served in one of the more famous restaurants pronounced only as Nyoo-pa!

Dormitory food is not bad as its description make it out to be. In fact this company subsidized food costs the most(but still cheap by restaurant standards) and is exclusively served for the managers and the big bosses within the company. We being the guests have the privilege to dine with them so our food is on the better tasting side but better tasting in China doesn't necessarily mean a chompfest for Pinoys. Our lunch diet is a merry mix of vegetables, and vegetables, and slices of pork, and oil, some more oil, mushrooms, and a local chili whose pungent odor, be forewarned, would temporarily stick to your clothes but overtime, when eaten on a regular basis would assimilate to your skin. I stay clear off the chili. If it were discovery channel you would see the pervasive chili particles polluting the surrounding space with every bite within a foot radius.

This day we had dinner in a dimsum resto. Dimsum here is served 8pm onwards. Yesterday, we made the mistake of coming in an hour early and the sight of waiters eating with half the lights of the resto lit shredded our salivating anticipation for YUM-CHA to pieces. Eating dimsum is a tradition and not a late dinner as one would normally think given the odd serving schedule-8p.m. Most Chinese, in this town at least, eat dinner at 6pm and will have dimsum around 9pm. Dimsum and tea are just ornaments to what the object of this after dinner really is-chat and leisure time. So it is normal to see people dressed down to their flip flops, and shorts, and sandos with cigarette smoking, commonplace.

We were early birds coming in at 7:30pm but this time, all lights were lit. I can barely speak Chinese and I mostly defer to my excellent :> hand gestures than actual talking but I still do get my message across. Dim sum is Chinese so I got away with that. YUM-CHA is Japanese though, I think, but I said it just the same. The waitress said Hao-le which roughly translates to Yes, OK, good, so I knew I got acknowledged and I was off to a good start. Should I fuck up with my attempts to communicating Chinese no way would I fold up and leave which was an option since the western resto is just on the next building but we wanted dimsum and we wanted it then and there. Knowing it is a traditional dimsum house made our ordering easier. Old dimsum houses like this one serve dimsum on a cart and you just point amongst miscellaneous dimsums and you're good to go. I know mi fan is rice so I got that covered. kuh-le is COLA and numbers are best communicated through fingers. Chang You? is soy sauce so practically all the Chinese words I needed in a dimsum restaurant setting, I brought along with me. Mai-tan is bill, fa piao is receipt, ta pao is take out and xie xie is the customary thank you. For 98 RMB or roughly 660pesos the three of us had 14 servings of various dimsums each consisting of 3 to 4 pcs. Dimsums here are easily 30-40% larger than its Pinoy counterparts. Included in our bill were 3 cans of coke, 3 servings of rice and the free bottomless house tea. Not bad for 220 pesos each.

1 comment:

myzha mishaa said...

yummmy...Chinese food! =)