I once worked at a Chinese buffet in the U.S. and noticed how different the food was from the food in China.
One day, I asked my boss why it was like this, and she replied, “This is what Americans like to eat.” The funny thing is that’s exactly how it is in China when it comes to Western restaurants.
One of the strangest things about Korla is the number of Western restaurants it has: There are more here than there are actual foreigners living in the city. With so much variety, one would think it would be easy to find a decent foreign meal, but probably the most authentic place is KFC or Dicos, a Chinese fast-food restaurant chain.
I’m not saying that the other type of Western restaurant is bad, but the food, like American Chinese food, has been altered to fit the tastes of it main customers: the Chinese. In all actuality, the Western-style restaurants are some of the nicest places you could eat in the city. If you want to impress someone, take him or her to one of these places.
A meal can easily cost more than 600 renminbi, which is about $100 in the U.S. That might not seem like very much for a fancy meal, but considering that a plate of noodles costs between 10 to 20 renminbi, it’s easy to understand why people eating there could impress others.
Many people don’t even go there for the food, just the atmosphere. The restaurants know this, and they go all out with decorations and designs. For some restaurants it works, for others, it seems like they grabbed whatever foreign thing they could find and just threw it in. You can see anything from pictures and old records hanging on the walls to full-size boats hanging above you.
When it comes to food, it usually looks better than it tastes. The presentation of the food is a big deal, and each plate is a work of art that probably took more time to create than cook. The taste has been altered to satisfy the palates of the Chinese, but some dishes, I think, might just be relatively new to the culture and hard to cook.
One dish in particular is steak. I have talked to many Chinese people who think the idea of eating that much meat is not only strange but also gross. Chinese eat meat, but not like we do in the U.S. The meat is cut up and usually cooked with vegetables and served with a side of rice or noodles.
Every Western restaurant has steak, but the challenge is finding a good one. For one, many restaurants use whatever cut of meat they have and call it a steak. You can order a steak one day and a week later order the same thing and it’s a completely different cut.
Another thing is the way it’s cooked. In China, most food is cooked very well for safety purposes and a rare or medium steak is very rare (pardon the pun). There are, however, groceries stores that do sell actual cuts of meat such as rib-eye, New York and T-bone steaks, but in the summer you can’t find them because in Korla people think that if it’s hot you shouldn’t eat that much meat.
The Western restaurants here are definitely an experience, but usually when I am missing Western food, I just go to KFC and order a sandwich. It may not be as fancy, but it is a lot cheaper, and I don’t have to worry about a boat falling on my head.
David Scott, a 2008 Durango High School graduate, is teaching English in China’s far western province of Xinjiang (New Frontier) in the city of Korla. He can be reached at darysc24@gmail.com.
