Touchdown in Beijing: Pork Spine
Driving into Beijing I was a little apprehensive. Vast, drab buildings gave me the impression I was entering some sort of post-communist desert, while the thick, impenetrable smog that blocked out the sun put me in mind of the industrialised Victorian London so savagely described in my current doorstop of choice, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House.
Yet beyond the motorway off-ramps and tower blocks, an entirely different world awaited. The ancient alleways and thoroughfares that characterise Beijing’s hutong districts (in one of which our hostel is located,) abound with activity and so far have proved a fantastic introduction to Chinese life.
In Nan Luo Gu Xiang Hutong, the sights and sounds are many and varied. Shirtless and potbellied old men stand around smoking or playing games. Bikes and motorized rickshaws careen through haphazardly. All around, people seem to be engaged in either tearing things down or building them up.
Somewhat surprisingly, a modern vibrant edge to the city is also present here in the small independent boutiques and trendy speciality shops that sit easily among the traditonal craft shops and tea houses.
Included in the chaos (happily) is street food. I found these guys (what I assume to be pork spine) curled up and smoking on a one man grill, when we ducked into the side of the road to avoid a monsoon downpour.
The pork spine had been coated in a spicy and sweet spare-rib style sauce that was charred in some places and sticky elsewhere. The meat came off easily and in substantial chunks, but nevertheless encouraged the kind of cheek-smearing bone-gnawing that makes one’s girlfriend stand a few paces away.
This was one grill, in one street, in one block of a thouroughly massive city. Tonight we’re off to Wangfujing snack street in search of lamb kebabs and flat bread.
I honestly feel like I’m in heaven.

Up until now, my Tokyo food experiences have largely consisted of the the sporadic grazing mentioned in the previous post, and a few excellent tonkatsu sanwiches from the convenience store. As such, I was beginning to think I was being priced out of the bulk of Tokyos food hotspots. A trip to the tourist mecca of Asakusa on Sunday changed that however, as I came across some unexpected street action and got a glimpse of Tokyo life into the bargain.

As one of Tokyo’s oldest areas and the site of the Senso-ji shrine, Asakusa positively heaves with tourists (and the kinds of businesses designed to cater for their every need.) Here you can buy everything from Kiminos to rides in people drawn rickshaws (jinriksha.) To cater for the hungry masses, numerous Japanese restaurants line the narrow streets, and the area directly in front of the shrine is home to a small collection of street carts and food tents.

It was in the later that the fancies of my over-active imagination finally began to take physical form. Trays of roughly hewn takoyaki stared up at me from the carefully arranged cart of one vendor, while skewers of sliced scallops, chicken and pork begged an introduction to the grill at another. Further on, a hotplate heaved with a writhing mass of yakisoba noodles, and an old man fried up a heavy batter of what I guessed to be okinawaki, the thick heavy pancake not dissimilar to my own beloved pajeon.

Yet despite everything on offer something held me back. Amid the trinkets and the touristsm, the food seemed somehow laboured, a way to spin a couple of hundred yen from the passing temple trade rather than anything authentically Japanese. With a hefty price tag starting at about a quarter of my meagre budget for the day per item, I made an executive decision to walk on by and see if I could score something else instead.

But that’s not to say I haven’t been eating well. Since arriving yesterday afternoon we’ve spent a fair portion of our time peering and gesturing our way into some of the most interesting meals I’ve had in a long time. Tokyo heaves with little nook and cranny eating joints and food halls, and though they may not be strictly street, I think they nevertheless deserve a write up.

Freshly checked into our traditional Japanese inn (i.e. expensive and lacking in amenities) we popped our Tokyo cherry by ducking into one of the many ramen joints that line the main street of our new hood, Takodanababa. These places have a novel way of keeping human contact to a happy minimum by requiring you to purchase a ticket for your meal at a vending machine. As everything is in Japanese, this could easily have turned into a hit-it-and-hope situation save for the friendly cook who came out to give us a helping hand.

When the smoke had cleared, I ended up with a crispy tempura of onions, carrot and potato on a bed of thick round noodles (not shown in picture.) Surprisingly, everything on the plate was cold, which perhaps has something to do with how everything there seemed to be focused on a speed – a few customers came and went in the time it took for Sarah and I to fumble through our own meals.

Later that night, we decided to hit Shinjuku and Kabuchiko on the the hunt for food and sleaze. Unfortunatley, Kabuchiko didn’t turn out to be the all-out assault on morality we’d been hoping for, but foodwise things went a little better. Our first stop was a small beer and yakitori izakaya close to Shinjuku station. I ordered a skewer of chicken thigh, another of crispy chicken skin and one of pork cheek. The meat was tender, flavoursome and daringly pink, coated with a slightly sweet/spicy “Japanese sauce” and infinitley morish.

We kicked off Saturday in the upmarket district of Ginza for a cruise of one of the many upscale department store basement food halls called depachikas. My search turned up a couple of free samples and an exceptional olive, anchovy and cheese calzone that cut me to ribbons with a sharp/salty edge that made me think I’d momentarily left Asia.

Later, we rounded off the day with a Tonkatsu, the breadcrumbed pork cutlet closely related to the Korean doncass that used to brighten up my Friday lunchtimes. The cutlet was thick and juicy, covered with flaky golden breadcrumbs and swimming in a curry sauce that reminded be fondly of my teenage half-and-halfs (half fried rice, half chips and curry sauce at the bus shelter)

You know the bit in Goodfellas where Ray Liotta’s cooking dinner, transporting coke and dealing with his family while off his nut and getting tailed by a helicopter?

Well apart from the hard drugs and felony, that’s kind of how I’m feeling at the moment. This week we’re pretty busy with clearing our apartment, getting our travel details in order and preparing our jobs for the next teachers to take over from us. On top of that I’m trying to switch Street Foodie to WordPress without losing everything I hold dear, and the rainy season has just hit BIG TIME.

As such all I’ve got to show for myself is the above photo of a dukbokki/soondae hybrid I recently discovered in Nampodong while scouring the area for a fix. This thing is swimming in so much corn syrup it looks like the creepy plastic food you get outside some restaurants. As such I had kind of expected this to be a medley of the worst features of both dishes, but something in there surprisingly worked. The soodae was a little less gelatinous than I’ve had it before, feeling somewhat more substantial between the teeth than previous incarnations, and the dukbokki wasn’t that bad.

Every Wednesday evening a guy sells rotisserie chickens out the back of a van outside our apartment complex. Despite a recent jump in price from 5000 to 6000 won, these little babies are exceptionally good value and I always find it hard to resist bagging one on the way back from school (it helps that Wednesday is my worst day for classes.)

These things are as versatile as they are delicious. Fighting the temptation to tear it apart and eat just with the accompanying sachets of mustard and salt is always hard. I’ve had this with potatoes and vegetables as part of a mini-roast, wrapped in tortillas with a spicy tomato sauce, and just last week in some chicken sandwiches on the way to Seoul (the last image our fated camera shared with us.) The chicken is usually super tender, falling of the bone and possessed of just the right amount of lip smacking greasiness.