Chinese Cuisine

Before my husband met me, he thought Cantonese food means Chinese food. His family does birthday celebrations at the same Cantonese restaurant for years. The restaurant is a good one, I have to admit, but I was tired of its food after several meals. Anyways, I started to take my husband to try different style Chinese food. He absolutely loved the experience. Now his favorite is Sichuan cuisine.

Officially, there are eight main regional cuisines: Cantonese, Anhui, Fujian, Hunan, Jiangsu, Shandong, Sichuan and Zhejiang. However, even in Los Angeles, the most common ones are Cantonese, Hunan (spicy), Sichuan(spicy) and a mix of Shanghai/Zhejiang/Jiangsu or Yangzhou cuizine. I am from Yangzhou, a city in Jiangsu Province. There is absolutely no good Yangzhou restaurant in Los Angeles, probably not even in the whole US. There is a restaurant in Arcadia, California that serves the similar type of food from Yangzhou. The wait at that restaurant is usually over an hour but the food is not even half as good as the the real Yangzhou cuisine. I told my sister if she wanted to come to the States, the best way to make a good living is to have a real good Yangzhou restaurant.

Anyways, if you like spicy food, you probably want to try Sichuan and Hunan restaurants. If you are not that adventurous, you can never go wrong with big Cantonese restaurants. I will list some good restaurants by its cuisine style in some big cities.

Sometimes Chinese Cuisine makes you think about monkey brain, snake, dogs and other wierd stuff. I will make a confession here: I did have dog meat one time. That's about it. Dog meat is actually not that delicious and it was pretty gross to me when I thought about what I was eating, so I never tried again. As a matter of fact, dog meat is definitely not a common dish. Snake meat is very common, especially in Canton and Hongkong. I had snake skin once. It was very delicious, crunchy and chrewy. I will never try money brain or cat meat, or chicken eggs with small chicken inside (this is actually quite common). I do still eat wierd stuff, including fish brain. There is an old saying: Eating the same organ of animals nourishes that part of the human body. Therefore, eating fish brain is supposed to help with the development of my own brain, in another word, makes me smarter. I don't know if that's why some people eat Cow penis for the performance enhancement-:).