Having filled our memory cards with endless photos of giant pandas, we made our way out of the Giant Panda Breeding Research Base in Chengdu. Watching those adorable pandas continuously eat made me hungry too. Outside the research base was a queue of taxis waiting for visitors to exit. For once we had an easy time getting a cab. We asked the driver to bring us to the the Wenshu Monastery since it was near central Chengdu it took us a while to get there.
The monastery itself was was still a walk inside but we were already hungry. Along the way, we saw old style Chinese buildings which may or not be really old but they were nice. There were a lot of shops selling Buddhist related stuff. We were going around the compound when we stumbled into some sort of food street. We hit the jackpot! We’ve been wanting to sample the famous Sichuan street food and here we are on one of those streets.
The street was lined with rows of hawkers selling small snacks like dumplings, noodles and barbequed stuff and I mean stuff. One of the snacks we tried was the amusingly named Brokenheart Cold Noodles 伤心凉粉. It is said that if you are brokenhearted, you can eat this and feel better. I can’t say it works but it was nice. The “noodle” didn’t actually feel like noodle but it was more similar to jelly. It came with Sichuan spices and it was cold.
My friend ordered shaomai 烧卖, a common snack made famous by the Cantonese the world over. But what we needed to try was the barbequed stuff here in the food street. The stalls here display everything they can barbeque on their table and you basically point at what you want to have and they will barbeque it for you. Squid, fishball, chicken, beef, port, mutton and even vegetables are all barbeque-able. While being barbequed they are liberally sprinkled with chili powder and some cumin to great effect.
It is great to just point at what you want to eat here but I have my limits too. One of the stalls along the road was serving much more exotic stuff – insects skewered and put inside a refrigerated display. It was a little intimidaating and I lost my nerve to eat them. There were grasshoppers, crickets and beetles on display and all are edible. The lady at the store asked me to try it, “Very nutritious” she said in Chinese. Yeah right.
I read a funny article about how a blogger observed during a trip during the Olympics last year how he noticed that the locals don’t eat these delicacies. But it was rather the foreign reporters who had to eat them since they had to show something to their viewers back home. He called them reporter food and were there solely to be fed to some poor foreigner.
As expected the Sichuan street snacks are very good. Despite it being considered street food, it is possible for one to have lunch or dinner here. I’m sure that the nearby office folk all come here for their lunch since it is a cheap way to fill your stomach. Actually rolling snack stalls used to be much more common in Chengdu, but for better or for worse, the city government has cleaned up the streets along with the street stalls. But the street food culture lives on places like these in Chengdu.
It is really a wonder to bear witness to the wonder of Sichuan food from formal dishes to streets snacks like this. It is one of the great cuisines of the world, and the Chinese know it.
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