Chewing through Chengdu

We had to take an overnight train and a lengthy fast train to get to the treasures of Sichuan cuisine, which we impatiently undertook, dreaming of the spicy and delectable dishes that awaited us. Also awaiting us was Ashley, an old friend who had flown from Hong Kong to Chengdu to join us on our food odyssey. Ashley owns a food tour business and tea rooms in Hong Kong, we met her five years ago when we had a stopover there. At that time, the food tour business was but a sparkle in her eye – we were something like very lucky guinea pigs for a food tour that took in the amazing wet markets of HK, incredible dim sum and a series of traditional and out of the way eating places that us Westerners would never be able to find ourselves. Here we all are, bright eyed and bushy tailed at the HK railway museum on that fateful day in 2014!

We’d had an amazing time and we clearly didn’t put Ashley off hungry tourists forever as Hong Kong Food Crawlers was born soon after. What better place to meet back up after so long than Chengdu, the most famous food city in all of China (which is probably one of the most cuisine-rich countries on the planet, so that’s really saying something). The food is known for its incredible variety, spice and distinguished history – so much so that UNESCO honoured it as its very first “City of Gastronomy”.

We started with a famous tofu restaurant, ordering very spicy mapo tofu, chicken with peanuts, spicy woodear mushroom salad and a chewy jerky type meat in chili oil washed down with one of Chengdu’s many types of beer. It was amazing.

The next morning, Ashley had arranged for us to have a private food tour with local guide Anita! First stop was extremely popular Yan Po Po crispy sandwich. We got one each of the three most famous: one stuffed with liang fen (bean jelly), one with thickly sliced pig snout and one with beef. These were seriously tasty sammies.

Next was tian shui mian (sweet water noodles) from a place so popular it was churning out literally thousands of bowls of these a day. These are super thick, bouncy noodles with a sauce of soy, sugar, bean paste, chili, garlic and peanuts. The people making these are like a slick noodle machine, and the product is seriously life-changing. It is worth flying to Chengdu for this dish alone (and it’s one of the only ones I’ve never seen in Auckland!). These are locally known as ‘first date noodles’: the thick noodles are very masculine, while the sweet fragrant sauce is very feminine making them a good choice for a first date!

We zoomed to the outskirts of town to a place Anita’s father had taken her all the time as a kid – it’s like a series of outdoor kiosks with tables and chairs squeezed everywhere. Tricycles with trailers hoon around with plates of food on the back and you can flag them down and pick out what you want to eat. It was a very cool spot, filled with gossiping old men sinking beers, and groups of friends stopping in for a quick bite. We had a tasty stir fried pork liver and kidney dish with lots of mushroom, a deep fried fish with a sweet and spicy sauce and a cold chicken dish with dark soy, washed down with more local beer! (Side note, the major Chengdu beer ‘Snow’ is the most drunk beer in the world!)

Next we headed into an open air produce market to marvel at the variety of vegetables for sale and taste some raw Sichuan peppers. They are a member of the citrus family – when you sniff them you can tell! Anita also informed us that the reason Sichuan peppers are so numbing is because they stimulate the same part of your brain that tells you when you are being electrocuted! It’s like when your childhood friends trick you into licking a 9v battery.

At the market we also had a very spicy chopped roast rabbit (delicious), some fresh vegetable spring rolls and some Chengdu spirits.

Second lunch was next – a table groaning with dan dan noodles, whipped egg with pork mince, bean jelly noodles and – of course – the infamous Sichuan chili oil dumplings.

Almost unable to move we nevertheless had one final stop. We’d noticed a lot of stands selling what looked like donuts on sticks. We asked Anita about them and she helpfully steered us to the best place in the city for these delicacies: sweet rice balls in syrup with sesame. I thought I was too full to ever eat again, but I immediately managed to scoff two sticks of these incredible goodies (and we took a taxi across town TWICE over the course of our time in Chengdu to have these again).

We wandered home via People’s Park, a fascinating and busy central park with a lot of dancing elderly people, and basically slept for 12 straight hours to digest all that food!!

The next morning we treated ourselves to more incredible noodles and dumplings (these ones were even better than the ones the day before!).

Then we headed out to the Chengdu Giant Panda Research Base – home to more than 100 giant pandas and one of a handful of facilities in China that have taken pandas from the brink of extinction to being firmly off the endangered species list. Pandas are the cutest animal in the world, so it was, of course, amazing.

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We relaxed in the afternoon at a tea shop – Chengdu is also very famous for its tea and tea houses – where Ashley educated us on the way to brew, steep, pour and drink Chinese tea.

The tea shop was very soothing, which was good considering the big night we had in store - a very authentic local Sichuan hot pot restaurant! The place was absolutely packed with people, the air was thick with chili and oil and we were shown to our pot – stacked full of chili, star anise, Sichuan pepper, lard, garlic, ginger, fermented black beans and a million other intense ingredients, which was ready to have boiling water and stock poured on it.

We ordered stacks of ingredients to cook in the boiling pot, made up our dipping sauces (coriander, sesame, oil, garlic and vinegar) and started cooking! This was a seriously amazing eating experience – so flavourful, spicy and very entertaining.

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So good, that the next day, we tried the other style of hot pot at a more low-key (but also extremely tasty!) restaurant: hot pot with skewers. This place has a cool system where you grab ingredients from the open fridge, cook and eat them and at the end of the meal the skewers in your bin are weighed and you’re charged for how much you’ve had. Delightful!

We also found stomach space for some very famous fried and baked savoury brioche type things with extremely numbing meat and vegetable stuffed in them. The pastry chefs at this place were seasoned experts.

Ashley headed back to Hong Kong early the next morning: we said our goodbyes and agreed to definitely not leave it five more years for the next food holiday! Nick and I then set off on what should have been a fairly easy day trip to Leshan on the bus. However, we hadn’t kept an eye on the calendar and got stuck in five hours’ worth of holiday traffic with people moving around for the Qingming festival – tomb-sweeping day. Han Chinese families visit the tombs of their ancestors on this day to clean them, leave offerings and pray. We had no idea until afterwards that this was the cause of the problem, but by the time we arrived in Leshan, we only had time for a very quick visit to the extremely impressive ancient Buddha (and no time to try Leshan’s very famous roast duck, much to Nick’s dismay). He was worth the wait though – this Buddha is the largest stone Buddha in the world and by far the largest pre-modern statue in existence: he’s 71 m tall and was carved out of the cliff face between the years 713 and 803. He was intended to bring calm to the treacherous river water beneath his feet, and it worked (though as I read last time I was here, whether that was because of Buddha’s calming influence or the major earthworks changing the course of the river, no one knows).

Heading to the fast train station, we rushed so as to not miss the last train of the evening. Though we made it in the nick of time the tickets had sold out and we were stranded! Thankfully, we heard a tout shouting outside the ticket office that he was driving to Chengdu. With the help of some other stranded passengers, we managed to haggle a very reasonable fare back and the traffic had thankfully eased. Nick, sitting in the front, also managed to have a full two-hour conversation with the very friendly young driver through Google Translate’s voice translation feature, which was pretty cool!

We spent a fairly low key final day in Chengdu with me trying to fight off a cold. We wandered back through People’s Park, particularly impressed with the Tinder corner – packed with classified ads and managed by what looked like professional match makers, where parents and grandparents browsed potential partners for their single children and grandchildren!

Our early start the next day to get our plane to Nepal was abortive, with our flight cancelled at the very last minute. This was no issue, giving us the opportunity to get in another series of great meals back in Chengdu, including very rich savoury blanket noodles (like lasagne sheets!)

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By the next day we were successfully winging our way out of China for three weeks and heading to Kathmandu!