Location: Guangzhou, China
Author: My Husband
Two weeks ago, I traveled to China to work on a business strategy engagement for one of our largest clients there. In addition to the promise of interesting work, I also felt buoyed by the expectation that I would have lots of opportunity to eat good Chinese food and write many blog posts about the same. So before the trip, I gathered recommendations from friends familiar with my destination and made plans to visit those places…
The plan began well enough. After a longish 11-hr flight from Vancouver to Beijing, I found myself at Capital Airport with 4 hrs to kill before my onward flight to Guangzhou. While waiting for my flight in Terminal 3C, I saw an Ajisen Ramen outlet near my gate, so I scooted into the place to get some noodles. For 26 rmb (less than $5 Canadian), I got the following bowl of noodles plus a bottle of Coke. As far as airport pricing went, it was good value for money. The noodles weren’t bad either. Funnily enough, the ramen place was located right next to a KFC, which was just crazy hopping busy. Colour me surprised, but I’ve always thought that Chinese folks would prefer noodles to greasy fried chicken. I guess times are indeed a’changin.
Sidenote #1: Like most recent infrastructure construction in Beijing, the Capital Airport’s Terminal 3 was built on a monster scale, with soaring ceilings and long concourses that take forever to walk from one end to the other (You can hire electric buggies to ferry you around for 10rmb per pax or 20rmb for the entire cart). Just to give you an idea of the size of the place: where other airports link different terminals via monorail, Beijing Airport’s Terminal 3 requires monorails to link its three concourses together!
Sidenote #2: If you ever find yourself connecting at Beijing Airport’s T3, I’ve got two suggestions. (i) Look for food in the “C” concourse. F&B selection is exceedingly limited in the “E” concourse, which plays home to most Star Alliance international flights. (ii) Head to your assigned gate a little early. There are many gates which require bussing off to remote aircraft stands, and if you get there late, you will NOT be able to hoof it to your plane.
So, with photos of my noodles at Ajisen carefully tucked away in my camera, I headed off to Guangzhou with visions of great Cantonese cuisine dancing in my head. And…for the next two weeks, that’s where they stayed. Despite the best laid plans of mice and men, I did not once set foot in any of the restaurants recommended to me. Yeah, reality turned out quite different indeed…
The first thing was the hotel I put up at. The Shangri-la GZ (a proper right-sized Shang, unlike the *ahem* Vancouver one) is a nice place, but just too far away from the city center. Heading back to the hotel after work to change before dinner was out of the question. As someone averse to schlepping around town in businesswear after work, dinner ended up in restaurants close to the office. This is not to say the food was bad. In fact, my dinners included some Chinese culinary styles – Hubei and Hebei – that I’ve never had before. Hubei food is very much Hunanese in style, focusing on bold and spicy flavours. Hebei food, to my uninitiated tastebuds anyway, seemed to highlight both sweet and sour, with lamb being a particularly popular meat. Naturally, there were some Cantonese, Sichuan, and Shanghainese food thrown into the rotation for good measure. However, these meals were shared with my Chinese colleagues; not wanting to chance their reaction to food photography, I decided not to take any snaps of the food at all.
During the two weeks, I also had non-Chinese food on two occasions at the hotel.
The first was at Nadaman, which as it turned out, is a chain of quite well-known Japanese restaurants that has an affinity for locating in Shangri-las. I wish I could say the food was spectacular, but it was surprisingly pedestrian. I had 6 pieces of nigiri sushi, including a nugget of ohtoro that really wasn’t that melt-in-your-mouth good, a chawanmushi, some shiso-flavoured beef fried-rice, and a glass of Kirin. All at a price ($80+) that’s easily over twice what I’d pay in Vancouver. Value, Nadaman ain’t. Moderately above average sushi, admittedly in a very nicely decorated restaurant, seems to be the standard play at the Nadaman in Guangzhou.
The second was at Il Forno, the self-proclaimed best Italian restaurant in Guangzhou. I had some buffalo mozzarella salad (with pomodoro) as well as a memorable osso bucco. It wasn’t the cheapest Italian meal, but the quality was pretty good. The flavour and tenderness of the veal shank was enough to put some Italian places here in Vancouver to shame, and there was not a single Italian chef in sight. From what I can of the open kitchen, it was manned by a troupe of pretty young local chefs – very impressive I’d have to say.
Both Nadaman and Il Forno were very dark and sexy places – good places to take a date, but not good places to snap photos. So I’m afraid my descriptions above are the best I can do.
So, that’s two weeks wrapped up in one short post. Let me end by showing what the sky looks like in Guangzhou. It was like this for two weeks; I think I only saw faint patches of blue once or twice. Most likely, it was smog caused by all the industrial and manufacturing facilities that dot the region around Guangzhou’s Pearl River Delta.
And strangely enough, for a country as steeped in tradition as China, this pagoda was the only traditional looking thing around the vicinity the hotel. Granted, Guangzhou isn’t particularly known for its antiquities, but it’s a little strange nonetheless…
Sidenote #3: For those of you who share a more than a passing interest in aviation like myself, I had the chance to fly on the B772, A332, and B744 on this trip. I’m a big fan of Boeing products, and have been know to arrange my travel schedules around planes I prefer to fly. But I’ll have to say, after flying the 772 and 332 back-to-back, the Airbus is a quieter aircraft to fly than the Boeing. It’s especially good for sleep on longer flights… Do any other aircraft nuts read this blog?
