It was an early afternoon in October when we drove into the parking lot of a food street in a tier-III city 400 kilometers south of Beijing. "Time for lunch, and it's up to you to decide what to eat," I told my wife and son as I locked the car.
We had just driven through the food street, passing dozens of restaurants on both sides, so I was not worried about finding a place to eat. My wife wanted to savor a local delicacy while my son suggested we try Shandong cuisine as the province was just a few kilometers away.
Soon, we found out we were being too optimistic. After walking for about 300 meters and passing dozens of restaurants, we realized that most of them served either the oily barbecue or the spicy hot pot while the rest served beef noodles.
We settled for Lanzhou beef noodles that taste the same anywhere in the country, just like burgers at McDonald's outlets anywhere in the world.
That simple lunch reminded me of my previous experience of seeing lots of barbecue, hotpot and noodle restaurants in many other cities, leading me to realize a phenomenon in China — food homogenization.
China has a long and colorful dietary culture and Chinese food is well-received worldwide. When I was younger, I believed that China had four major cuisines, represented by food from Sichuan, Shandong, Guangdong and Jiangsu provinces.
When I grew older and began earning, the number of acknowledged major cuisines from China grew to eight, with food from Fujian, Anhui, Hunan and Zhejiang provinces joining the list.
Each Chinese dish uses special local ingredients and is cooked in a special way. Apart from the traditional methods of steaming, boiling and roasting, a good chef must also be adept at special kinds of frying — pan frying, stir frying, quick frying and deep frying. Some cooking courses are so in-depth that one might take days to learn.
All cities have their famous restaurants serving different cuisines.
Even in a remote city, locals will tell you which restaurant to go to for a certain flavor.
Things began to change for good or bad when hot pot — until then popular only in Sichuan province and Beijing — invaded the whole of China three decades ago.
The Sichuan variety of hotpot was known for its numbing and spicy flavor. Next came the beef noodle soup. By some estimates, China is now home to hundreds of thousands of beef noodle restaurants.
Hardly had traditional restaurant owners accepted the new challengers when barbecue, for hundreds of years popular only in the western Xinjiang region, stepped in. Statistics show that among about 7 million big and small restaurants in China by the end of last year, about 500,000 were barbecue restaurants and about 450,000 hotpot joints.
Most of these 7 million restaurants are small-scale family restaurants or food stands hiding deep inside community compounds.
Barbecue, hotpot and beef noodle restaurants, in turn, stand out at busy street joints and are able to draw tourists and young customers. Though not really huge in number, the way they are scattered gives us the impression that they are monopolizing the whole food industry.
I personally don't care much about barbecues and hotpot, believing they may not be good for my health.
But I trust there must be a good reason why they are gaining popularity: they are served hot and the Chinese like to have food hot; perhaps because they are tasty and affordable, quick to cook and easy on the pocket — most ingredients can be preprepared beforehand and a restaurant doesn't really need a specialist cook to rustle up such dishes.
The more reasons I found for the increasing popularity of barbecue, hotpot and beef noodles, the more worried I become about the survival of traditional Chinese cuisine.
Already, such restaurants are disappearing from their earlier prominent addresses, moving to the upper floors of buildings or somewhere further away. Some, I believe, have even vanished.
When our younger generations are fed up with barbecue, hotpot and beef noodles, will they remember the earlier eight major cuisines and be proud of them?
When I raised this with Chen Hailiang, a master chef who has guided a number of young Chinese cooks to win gold medals at WorldSkills competitions, he laughed at my worry. "Once the youngsters are older and their wallets become thicker, they will come back to our traditional cuisine," he concluded.
I hope he is proved right.
The author is former deputy editor-in-chief of China Daily.
kangbing@chinadaily.com.cn
