Eating Out in China

On the 10th, we had our third wedding anniversary.  Adam asked his translator, Vivian, for her opinion on a good restaurant to go to.  So Mr. Liu drove us there, and then a waitress took us to our table.  After that, we didn’t really know what to do.  We established with the waitress that we didn’t know very much Chinese when she asked us “Ji wei ren?”  And I had totally forgotten that “wei” is the polite counting word for people so I stared at her blankly until it came back to me.  She was just asking how many people there would be.  After I told her two, she served us tea and then never came back.  I think she didn’t know what to do with us.  We wondered why no one was bringing us a menu so we called Vivian and had her talk to the waitress.  It turns out it’s one of those places with a 3-D menu, where they have all the dishes on display in one corner of the restaurant.  We prefer that to a normal menu anyway.  So we picked our dishes and they were all freakin’ fantastic.

Tortilla-like things

Lamb and asparagus

Not sure what to call this but every time we’ve had it, it’s been amazing

Then this week, Kevin (Adam’s boss) came to Rui’an, so Mr. Yu (the general manager) took him, us, and a couple other people out to a seafood restaurant.  Being right by a river and the ocean, seafood is big in Rui’an.  Next to the bathrooms with no stall doors that we encountered in Xi Shuang Ban Na, this restaurant was probably the most “foreign” place we’ve been to yet.  It was out in the ghetto, so that was kind of scary.  But I knew Mr. Yu wasn’t going to take us somewhere sketchy so I wasn’t too worried.  This restaurant also had a 3-D menu, but about half of it was still alive.  The other half was laid out on ice. 

An assortment of fish and snails

No idea what these are

Scary fish heads and stingrays

We could not figure out what the bottom two were or what the stuff in the pink basket was.  The upper right bowl was full of chopped up fish and the upper left tray had eels.

Crabs

A fish head cross section next to some cuttlefish

The chopping block

 

Luckily, Mr. Yu didn’t order anything too weird, and the dinner was pretty good.  I also got to try yangmei jiu, which is wine made from that fruit I was raving about back in July.  It tasted a lot like red wine.

And then of course, there’s Do & Me, my favorite KFC knockoff chain.  Here’s the logo:

We eat there more than we should.