So Good, So Messy

The name of the game in Chinese dining is variety. Whereas in a Chinese restaurant in Finland it is customary to have one fixed portion of particular food for each individual, in China it is more common to have many small portions of different foods that all share. This worked quite well even with just Jinlin and myself but the approach really blossoms with a larger groups like the one we had on our guided tour part of the trip.

I explore some of the variety and culture of the food on our trip with photos below. You can see the full selection of my photos from China in my Google Plus public albums.

Variety in a Zhengzhou restaurant

At a fine restaurant at riverside in Lijiang old town

Restaurant in a small village near Lijiang. We had one of our tour group lunches here

Typical rotating-disk tables with multiple dishes to share from our group meals.

Even quite small children were participating in the dining in same way as adults

 The dishes on the group meals were mostly vegetable based with a minor number of dishes containing meat, fish or tofu. It seemed that fish (鱼, Yú) in particular was considered delicacy, the beautifully cooked "crown" of the table. The fish was boiled, fried or barbecued as a whole and usually served to the table bit later than other dishes, prepared as a whole.

 Lots of fresh chili in a meat dish in Xishuanbanna

Barbequed chicken

Getting the table dirty

The pictures above are from the clean and beautiful beginnings of a dinner. Not so towards the end. Eating in a restaurant, especially with a group, was a more messy activity than I had anticipated and definitely much more messy than the act of eating in Chinese restaurant in Finland.

Getting plenty of food landing on the table in a group of experienced and considerate adults arises partly from practical reasons. Sharing many dishes means that small bowls are passed around from hand to hand multiple times with the ensuing mishaps. Picking stuff from distant bowls with chopsticks seems to be occasionally error-prone even to the experts.


Part of the messiness results from the way meat is often prepared in these dishes. It is rare to have just the meat: bones, tendon, thick fat and other inedible parts are usually attached to the meat even when it has been chopped to relatively small parts. This is of course even more so with the whole-cooked fish. This excess of inedible parts can be contrasted with western restaurants where dishes usually contain clean meat other animal stuff removed. Even when some bones remain with the meat in the west, restaurant dishes usually come in rather big plates with plenty of space in the edges to place the inedible bits and pieces. The small personal bowls in China, usually already filled with rice, are not suitable for gathering the waste. So people, in relaxed and intentional way, dropped the pieces of bone, tendon and fat on the table.

I have been so conditioned through my life to keep the table clean that I was desperately trying to invent some places like empty dishes to place waste in a "polite" (in my narrow view) manner. But Jinlin was assuring me that the table gets dirty anyway so no harm is done by adding some more. So I tried to feel cool about it.

One should also notice that the tradition of ordering slightly excessive amounts of food and then leaving significant amount uneaten was alive and well, at least in the parts of China we visited. While I can understand that the food left uneaten is a polite indication that everyone got enough to eat, I could not completely dismiss the thought that in the 1.3 billion person China huge resources are used to manufacture food without everyone getting enough. In that situation wasting 10-20% on the tables of restaurants feels bit morally bad. So, on more than one occasion I found myself trying to stuff down bit more of the excess when others were seemingly already ready to leave :-) Luckily the food is so healthy that even with frequent tasty meals and really filling up my stomach, I lost some weight on the trip ;-)