Chinese Food: An American Dish in Harbin (Part II)

Authentic Chinese food, in my opinion, is awesome, and awesomely cheap. However, despite all the options, sometimes you just get sick of Chinese food...or rather, your stomach does. So you look for the next best alternative. I've only been to McDonald's once, but when I did I ordered 3 sandwiches (the portions are that small and I was that hungry).

So, starting off with breakfast. I usually go to the college supermarket and pick up more than enough hot pastries/"stuff I don't know what is" for about 25 cents...not only because it's cheap, but also because it's delicious. Thus, I only go for the cereal when I have class starting before the supermarket opens. But these are your basic options--as you can see Nestle has a stranglehold on the market. The Strawberry Milk Stars on the left is especially good.

Sandwiches, an American staple, are pretty hard to come by. The majority of dishes here are eaten out of a bowl. A classmate and I were able to find a western-style restaurant called Hamamas, which was opened by a guy from South Africa. The food was the real thing, and we got to chat with him for a while. It was kind of weird at first to find out the he too had come to study Chinese. You sort of get this idea that only people from English speaking countries come to study Chinese. I don't know where that idea comes from, but it just sort of happens.

Besides that delicious double cheeseburger from Hamamas, you kind of have to make your own, sandwiches, like the one you can see in the 2nd picture. A little ham and delicious fresh brown bread gets the job done.

The pizza at the college supermarket is not your standard American pie (3rd pic). It's kind of like a salad on breading. There's no sauce, a little cheese, ham, carrots, peas and some peppers/lettuce (hard to determine).

If you want to go out and really splurge on some American food, then you've got three main choices: KFC (the biggest chain), McDonald's and Pizza Hut (I hear Papa John's is moving in, and I've seen many Starbucks in Beijing, but none in Harbin). If you're going for class, then you've got to head to Pizza Hut. This Pizza Hut experience was unlike any other--completely opposite of the ones in the States where you walk in, seat yourself, and have a server, who's wearing an aged uniform that doesn't look quite clean enough, get your order screwed up because she wasn't paying attention to you in the first place.

No, when we first walked in I thought it was Cheesecake Factory. There was modern art hanging on the walls, which were painted in dark shades of red and yellow, and live plants interspersed throughout the restaurant. The modern hanging lights had a dim setting and the entire premise was spotless. The bathrooms were the nicest I've encountered in China, and the sinks were of the basin type. Compared to the other customers, we were under dressed. A couple in the other booth was snapping pictures (apparently it was a big occasion--not that unusual: my Chinese teacher at Vandy tells me that when McDonald's first opened in Beijing you might have to wait up to an hour in a line out the door, and people were even getting married there).

All the servers sported long black skirts with white-collared shirts and a black bow tie, completed with makeup and their hair pulled back. It is Chinese custom for the server to give you the menu and then wait at the table while you look it over and decide. In my opinion, this is a bit annoying--like they expect you to have the menu memorized. With my Chinese reading abilities, of course it takes me a while to decide (it takes me long enough to decide in American restaurants with English menus!). One time one server got so mad that I was taking more than 2 minutes that she let another server serve me. I think this method of waiting at the table comes not only out of custom, but also the fact that labor is so cheap and restaurants are overstaffed, thus leaving each server with little work.

So back to the point: at Pizza Hut, they let you look over the menu on your own--almost like they had been instructed to do so--after all, it's an American company. Looking over the menu, we saw that under the 13 inch Supreme pizza, it said it serves 2-3 people. The 9 inch pizza said it served 1-2 people. What is this amateur hour? Maybe those are what serving sizes are "supposed" to be, but who are we kidding? Despite my warning and suggestion that a 13 inch and 9 inch wouldn't be enough, we ordered anyway. I was right--we ended up "politely" fighting over the last half piece (we had 3 guys and 1 girl). I easily could have eaten both the 13 inch and 9 inch myself, and still hit the salad bar at the same time. Thus, although the pizza was pretty good (still sans tomato sauce), I left hungry and broke. The meal for me was about 3x what I'd normally pay for dinner. But all in all it was an interesting experience, and I'll probably go back so that I can use the bathrooms.