About 20 meters from the entrance of the apartment building where I grew up, there was a Chinese restaurant. Maybe 100 meters away, there was another. The waiters looked like any Spanish waiter, and the highlights included dishes like pork in a radioactive orange sweet-and-sour sauce. Both places were well integrated into the local community, especially the closer one: during league games, they displayed the biggest Athletic Bilbao flag in the whole neighborhood by the door. For lunch, they offered a menú del día with dishes like alubias con chorizo or ensaladilla rusa. It seems to me that in Spain, in the 80’s and early 90’s, all Chinese restaurants were like that. I also don’t think that they were very different in Bonn or Toulouse while I lived there in the 90’s and early 2000’s—though I am not sure I ever went to one.

When I first arrived in the US, I was amazed by Chinese food. People complained about it being greasy, but I was impressed. Some of the people I hang out with said that the restaurants weren’t “real” Chinese, that they were totally Americanized, but honestly, those people didn’t know what they were talking about: there was no ensaladilla on the menu. And they were open for Christmas. A plus if one really does not like all that happy holiday stuff. Thank god The Cove was also open during Christmas, proving that I was not the only one trying to scape it all.

I visited China first in 2009. I loved it all. Everything was so interesting. And yes, I had to accept that the food there was completely different from any Chinese food I’d had before. It was so unexpected. Outside the university, it was almost impossible to communicate with anyone. So ordering food usually meant pointing at pictures or at what others were eating. You often ended up not knowing what you were having, and when you were expecting something spicy, it sometimes turned out to be sweet. When you thought you were getting beef, it could be some undetermined animal. And what it was remained a mystery, because, how were you going to ask? Then there was also the issue of quantities: in Xi’an, we once pointed to some lamb skewers, and we ended up getting 50 of them for two people… The food was amazing. The vegetables and the stocks were incredible. I went back to China 10 years later and, while it was much easier to communicate, the food was the same.

In Vancouver, Chinese food was everywhere, and it was really good, even in the most basic looking places. My mouth still waters when I think of the pulled noodles at a small place near City Hall station. When my cousin visited, we went there together, and we both struggled with the technicalities of eating those kilometer-long noodles. It must have been obvious, because at one point, a waiter passing by to deliver food to another table left a pair of scissors on ours… It was also easy to find excellent sushi, Korean food, Malaysian cuisine—you name it—but what I miss most of Vancouver is the Chinese food. And I really miss it. When I moved to Rennes, I found myself missing even the Chinese restaurant with the Athletic Bilbao flag and the menú del día. There wasn’t a single restaurant that served tofu. At all. It just didn’t exist. The pork in radioactive orange sweet-and-sour sauce did, I suppose.

So, I decided to try cooking Chinese myself. There’s a decent Asian grocery store here, and while I was in Vancouver, I got Fuchsia Dunlop’s book Every Grain of Rice—it’s a fantastic cookbook. I’ve found other good Chinese cooking books since, and I like the recipes from sites like The Woks of Life, but next to Ottolenghi’s books, “Every Grain of Rice” is the best cookbook I own. Now, I cook Chinese food quite often. I love soups, especially the simple vegetarian stocks. I’m making some today. I love mapo tofu. For a while, I made tofu at home, it is an amazing science experiment, but I got lazy and now I mostly buy it. I also love Sichuan dry-fried green beans, hand-torn cabbage, bok choy with shiitake, and eggs with tomatoes—one of those dishes you make when you’re out of ideas and need something fast.

I’m not sure how “authentic” any of it tastes, but it seems to me that if you add sesame oil and Sichuan pepper to any food, it becomes Chinese. I mean, at the end of the day, if you add pimentón to anything, it becomes Spanish. As you see, I don’t have a very sophisticated palate. But I like what I cook.

My daughter is learning Chinese at school, and I promised her that when she can order vegetarian mapo tofu for me, we’ll all go to China. To speed up the process, I insist she does her homework! Anyway, I’m cooking Chinese for dinner today or tomorrow. This weekend, I’m also preparing some basic stock to make soups later in the week.



P.S.: Now there are much better Chinese restaurants in Spain. Here are two I like, one in Madrid and the other in Barcelona.