I have a local Chinese place, owned and run by a Chinese family. We are sometimes invited to family celebrations and have “real” Chinese food. When I ask what something is I’m often told “Eat it now, I tell you later!”
Always good though. And I have had the jelly fish thing as well.
My experience is about 13 years old, when I went to conferences in Hong Kong and Beijing. In both cities, I went to banquets where they were obviously trying to impress the foreign visitors. The food was really unlike anything that I’d eaten in Australia or the US, and I enjoyed it a lot. Yes, there was no rice or noodles served with the meal – and hardly any vegetables either. After the grandest banquet (held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing), I talked to an Englishman about how he liked it, and he said he was still hungry, because they had mostly served seafood, which he couldn’t eat. I hadn’t noticed that, but it figures: you wouldn’t serve anything as common as beef, chicken or pork at a banquet like that.
The other dish that I had a few times in Hong Kong, since I was on my own and not willing to try anything too adventurous in restaurants with only Chinese on the menu, was fried rice – which, in that part of China, gets served wrapped up in lotus leaves.
Buns up north,rice down south.
It is mostly quite revolting to our Western tastes,and it totally smells like it.
Here’s a link to Cafe de Coral, one of the largest fast food chains in Hong Kong. It has pictures of their food, along with English menu.
During my time living in downtown Seattle, a local Chinese restaurant with, I believe, a full Chinese staff offered very delicious and authentic dishes. My local Chinese friends all recommended the place.
Also, I just got back from a week in Xi’an, Shaanxi located in central China. The fried rice I had there tasted exactly the same as the fried rice I used to eat as a child at a Chinese restaurant in suburban Tijuana, Mexico.