I woke up from a nice rest from the dizzying ride back from Mount Emei. It was already dark and it was raining. Fortunately, we are already checked in at the Teddy Bear Cafe. My headache was almost gone and I was now hungry. I wanted to go out and find some restaurant to eat in but my friend preferred to stay at Teddy Bear Cafe and find some food there.
Fortunately, Andy, the owner of Teddy Bear Cafe, is a good cook. He showed us the menu of what they serve. Somehow I recognized the menu to be the same menu as from our dinner the previous night. The prices were exactly the same. So it really was a cartel here. So there is nothing much we can do about the price, maybe they gave bigger portions. We picked a few dishes from the menu and headed to the second floor of the cafe.
You get a nice view of the cafe from the second floor. This is a great place to sit back and relax after an exhausting day of exploring Mount Emei. Finally, our food came. The first one was fish-fragrant meat slivers 鱼香肉丝. The curiously named dish is just slivers of meat with some vegetables. The sauce is sweet-sourish type of sauce which supposedly reminds the one eating of fish. I’m not really too sure about that. However, supposedly the sauce it quite difficult to get right. I haven’t had a good fish fragrant meat slivers before, so I wasn’t really sure what is a good one. Of course to my untrained taste buds, this one tasted great, it was a little spicy, but nothing deadly.
The next two dishes weren’t really anything to write home about. They were certainly quite un-Sichuan food, and they probably are. One dish was pork with mushrooms. While the other was just pork slivers with noodles. Really nothing special about them.
What came next was something I am familiar with and love. To the uninitiated, it can be downright scary. It is water boiled meat 水煮肉片. The name of the dish sounds like it is a tame dish without the spice. But the opposite is actually true. The “water” part is actually mixed with Sichuan spices of bean paste, chili and the Sichuan pepper giving it that red and deadly look. The meat is then put in this deadly broth and served. Inspite of its deadly looks it is not really that spicy. You just need to be careful of the pepper if you do not like the sensation of numbness. At the bottom of the bowl are vegetables and some bean sprouts. I really liked this dish, and I’m really happy to be able to eat it at the province where it was invented.
I was really satisfied with the meal. Although not all of the food was spicy, they were all very tasty and the ambience of eating in a log cabin-like atmosphere also helps. Service was fast too. For those who cannot take the local food, you can always ask the staff to prepare something for you. But then, it would be such a waste to miss out on such excellent food.
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