Me No Speaky Chinee

One thing that I was looking forward to heading to China more than most was eating traditional Chinese style dumplings. I haven't had much of an opportunity, but tonight a couple of us decided to go. I bought a few travel books before I got here, and one of them named Xian'r Lao Man the best dumping house in all of China. This HAD to be the place to go, so we asked the receptionest at the desk of the hotel to talk to the taxi driver, and explain to him the directions on how to get there (if you haven't gotten it already, it is almost impossible to communicate with the taxi drivers in Beijing).




We arrived at our destination a short time later, and we hadn't written the name of the restaurant down before we left. We were dropped off in front of a building with about ten different storefronts, all serving dumplings. We had no idea which one to go to! Luckily, I had the directions to the restaurant in my pocket, so we started asking random Chinese people where the place was. After talking with four or five people, we were able to understand which one it was. It was a huge restaurant, and we were definately the ONLY Americans in the whole joint. In fact, I'm willing to bet we were the ONLY people from outside of China! Of course, they didn't have any English on the menu, so we asked the waitress to just keep bringing plates of dumplings out to us (Mind you, this wasn't an easy request. It took five people hovering around around our table to piece together what little English they knew to understand what we had asked. One word I learned the first day was pijiu. We ordered a round of pijiu (beer), and anxiously awaited the arrival of the caravan of dumplings that was sure to arrive shortly. Then the dumplings began to arrive, ten to a plate. Plate after plate of delicious dumplings with fillings such as pork and scallion, seafood, egg and greens, etc. Some were fried, some were steamed, others were wrapped in a delicious pancake and grilled on a flattop. And they just kept coming. In all we polished of eight plates of dumplings, and a couple beers each (always 22 oz. beers at this joint). As we slowly finished off the last plate of dumplings the bill arrived. But before I get into that, let me just say that this was an EXCELLENT dining experience, and was everything that I had hoped for in Chinese dumplings. We will be back there.... soon. You know how I said that I had a fantastic meal the other night, and only paid about $14? Well, tonight I had an even better meal, in a better atmosphere, with better company, and guess what we paid? Remember, this was a dinner for four people....