Dinner is served

I left you wondering what was for dinner after I arrived to the hotel last Thursday. Well, I wanted to give you a bit more thorough report about the food served here – more than just one dinner!

Most important information first: food is very tasty and freshly made, various and plenty.

For sitting in a room – more than a grown person needs, I would say. I think I would gain weight if I would eat everything what is served. I typically leave out the rice – the whole portion!

Before I continue – I did not see the difference in what is served for dinner or for lunch, so here are the meals served on both times (remember? at 11-12 and at 17-18).

On the first night I WAS hungry and finished nearly everything (!) as my last meal was the breakfast on the plane (last champagne as well 😉 )

Typically a meal is having:

Main meat

The main dish (the biggest portion on the plate) is always meat or fish. It varies every meal what you will get:

  • pork (most common)
  • fish
  • beef
  • duck
  • chicken

Sometimes the dish is a stir-fry and has some type of vegetable added, on other times it is panfried or oven backed and it is served alone.

The last picture above: the interesting part is the black looking meat with some black small balls. I did not know what that would be (a bit big for an olive, but who knows!). When I tried, it was clear, that those are hard boiled egg yolks – I am not sure if the outside is some special substance/ way of preparing the yolks or it just got like that while cooking with the meat… Anyone knows???

The egg frittata is done in a ravioli way – with the meat (I thing) filling.

I really enjoyed a sweet-sour fried chicken with pineapple as it tasted distinguishably different from the ‘normal’ serving.

The meats are typically a bit saltier, but as the vegetables are prepared in a very plane way, it is a good balance when you eat them combined.

Side meat

A smaller portion of the meat can be very various as well:

  • chicken wings
  • meat balls
  • pork belly
  • duck
  • any other stir-fry that could be served as the main meat

SUPER SIZE shrimps 😉 – they were delicious!!!! and nearly all of them had also ‘caviar’.

p.s. shrimps are actually the 3rd side dish!

2 x side veggies

All veggies are are cooked in some way (no fresh vegetables are served). Leafy greens are so to say always present, the other one can very from green beans to soya beans, from some root vegetable to zucchini & cauliflower, various mushrooms…

3rd side dish

The 4th side dish is then something with scrambled egg, sometimes with veggies sometimes with schrimp tails or meat (3rd time!). But not always the egg is present (e.g. when whole shrimps are served).

What I did not like was, that sometimes 3 out of 4 sides were actually containing meat. My least favourite was the sausage or something that was most similar to “Fleischkäse”. Nothing against it, but if you have other types of more quality meat, I do not need another variant of it.

Remember the special treat we’ve got for the Dragon boat festival (last photo)? And if you think, you see the baked potato on the first photo, you are mistaken 🙂 – like I was. Surprised too, when I took a bite – those are some sort of vegetables… no idea which root it was, but definitely not any kind of potato.

Fruit & yogurt or juice

I like the yogurt. It is always flavoured with some fruit taste, very refreshing and the portion is not too big.

Fruit until now was banana, apple, peach and mango. Not sure, how you can eat mango, if you do not have a knife with you….

When Bobi was doing his quarantine time, he got only 1 fruit per day. I am happy with two and usually I have it later in the evening, as a “night snack” 🙂 or at breakfast. At dinner/lunch time, I only now and then have space for the fruit!

Vegetarians out there, I do not know, if they offer any variations. No-one asked me if I have any special diet, nor I was demanding it – I eat pretty much everything. And I am always curious, what is on the plate. Yes. I am always trying everything. Not everything is to my liking, but with the amount of food served, I am able to select what I liked and also getting full every meal!

I hope you found something you would enjoy as well!

How do you like it:

The Breakfast

Breakfast is different here.

No coffee. Not sure, if this is a general habit. Maybe some of my Chinese readers can comment on this? For the fact, no beverage but flavoured (blueberry, strawberry …) milk was served. But this I knew already and got used to it, when I packed my Nespresso 2 weeks before the flight already (!) – I was having 2 or 3 Coffees since with the neighbours when I longed for the smell of it in the morning! I was too lazy to go to the backer next door to get one every morning! So, no, I don’t mind not having coffee every morning.


So… what is “served”???

a) Hard boiled egg and pickled cabbage

These two are always there, always the same – at least I did not notice any difference, but the packaging (red, green, blue, yellow – any meaning in it??) of the pickled cabbage, which may include some other veggies as well, I believe.

It is something between pickled cabbage (Sauerkraut) as we know it in Europe and Korean kimchi – spicy and smelly :-).

b) Buns

There are always 2 buns in the breakfast package. And you do not know which one will it be today – which makes it interesting to cut them in half: some are filled with sweet, some with savoury stuffings (spinach was very good, and meat as well), some are empty.

I always got steamed buns, not baked. So, not the consistency of what we know under ‘Brötchen’ in Germany. More sticky and moist.

At least one of them was always white. Sometimes yellowish (corn??) or brownish (wholegrain).

I liked the savoury ones better – I ate them with egg and cabbage.

c) Pancake

mmmm – very delicious!

Never sweet (the way I typically eat pancakes).

Sometimes they look like American pancake (you get 1 think piece). The first time I was surprised, as there is always some type of stuffing in it! Vegetables mostly – I do not remember until now to get a meaty one.

The others were more like french crepes, always with some herbs, once the dough was more fluffy (like pastry).

d) Porridge or congee

I am not really sure if this two words are synonyms – I could not find the “real difference” description yet…

Porridge is actually not really my preferred dish. I met it first time in Singapore already and was not convinced.

I prefer the rise to be cooked in milk, not sweet (I am the one who adds tons of sweetened cacao on the plate, when it’s served!) and it needs to have some consistency – the porridge is just too liquid and overcooked for my taste.

BUT: I must admit, I really liked one version: it seems it was some kind of whole grained rise with red beans (dark looking one on the pic). Num-num!

Oh, I nearly forgot: once I got the White fungus thick soup! I could not detect what I am eating, so my Chinese friend Mengyuan explained what it could be. So cool 🙂

e) Packed sweet biscuit

Well, not to my taste. Maybe with coffee…. and if you have nothing else on the table…. OK, when there was a munch-mallow kind of one – I ate it 🙂 it was goooood 🙂 I needed no coffee!

f) Drink

In my case there was always a pack of flavoured milk. A bit too sweet most of the times. Sometimes the fruit (flavour) was a bit weird combination: I never before had the milk with the taste of an apple… But. New is NEW!

That’s it until today…. If anything will be served even more interesting then what I described here – you’ll find out! Don’t worry!

How do you like it:

5th day of the 5th month = Dragon Boat Festival

Today is a holiday!

Well, I wouldn’t notice it actually (as the days are very much alike here in my room), but Bobi has a work free day today. I am also not (yet) watching the Chinese TV here in the room – maybe it would be good to check it a bit today! The festivities organised on the day & weekend are splendid!!

There was one more sign the dragon festival is in town: ZongZi was served!

As Wikipedia explains: “Modern media has printed a version of the legend which says that the locals had rushed out in dragonboats to try retrieve his (poet Qu Yuan) body and threw packets of rice into the river to distract the fish from eating the poet’s body.”

This is a dish I’ve met when we were living in Singapore already. It is made of sticky rise and some kind of a filling (which is optional) – in my case above: red beans. Then it is wrapped in the leaves (many options are possible there) and steamed/ cooked.

For me (already in SG) not something I would crave for, but it is a tradition dish in many asian countries and there are definitely many who really like it!

p.s. The inspiration for the Catching up (Dragon Boat ) painting came from my encounter with the dragon boat festivities in Singapore.

How do you like it: