In Suzhou: I've always loved bento boxes, where everything has its place.
In Nanjing: I love duck, though eating meat off the bone while also using chopsticks always challenges the line of how to eat in a lady-like fashion
Ditto for challenging eating in a polite tableside manner with ribs and chopsticks in Shenzhen, though these ribs were quite tasty
I prefer them like in this fashion in Hong Kong: this crispy pork and peking duck is much easier to eat, though I won't mention how much fat I had at this meal. I know crispy pork looks terrible for you (and it is) but it is so richly melt in your mouth.
I was actually thrilled when this was ordered by the Chinese co-worker in Shenzhen, since I was suffering from severe lack of greens in my diet. These were stir-fried with garlic and unidentified little black caper-like things.
How can you make tofu taste better? Deep fry it and stuff pork in the middle. These tofu "bricks" were incredibly tasty with the mix of the firm tofu, the flavorfully seasoned pork inside, and the sauce outside was a mix of sweet and sour in a way that is not like traditional sweet&sour sauce- it was less thick in texture and had a lighter taste, definite improvements on sweet and sour sauce.
Hotel Breakfasts: those hash browns were at *every* hotel I went to. They must be making lots of money. Generally, I could not resist those damn things, as well as the cheese and the rest of my meal was usually very traditional Chinese offerings. I was surprised to see the cheese: most Chinese don't eat it, but that's what they offer anyway for the tourists who stay in the hotels it seems. The New Jin Jiang hotel in Shanghai actually had a cheese dome whose offerings included blue cheese, which I know for sure most are not a fan of. Oddly, my ability to get cheese is what allowed me to keep my daily interest in Chinese food, because cheese is usually the first thing I miss.
Street Food:
Nanjing's
,
Honeymoon Dessert, one of the few times I had dessert (though in this case, I had it as a "snack" before going up to the Big Buddha. This is a mango pancake with cream. Their setting and offerings reminded me a bit like Finale, a famous dessert chain in the Boston area.
Finally….