Tokyo Blond Is Not Porn

Tokyo Blond is not a porn blog, about hair or even, as one pithy friend remarked, a micro beer or late 1980s glam metal band ("Dude, I just saw Skid Row and Tokyo Blond opened and played a killer set").


The purpose of this blog is to chronicle my experiences in Tokyo - poignantly, visually, irreverently - for fun.


Anybody can tag along...that is if I like you. This blog will endeavor to be entertaining and honest and frequent enough to keep those following interested including me.


Thursday, February 20, 2014

Hungry An Hour Later


They say you're always hungry an hour later when you eat Chinese food.  I found this to be true growing up.  I lived with my grandparents who lived across the street from my boyfriend Peter's house.  He was Chinese, first generation, and his dad was a professional chef for a very famous Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles called "Madame Wu's."

Peter's family ate an hour before we did.  So almost every night I'd eat at his house, and then an hour later, eat at mine.  Peter's dad was an excellent chef.  Because of him I am a bonafide Chinese food snob.   I've had homemade Chinese food, cooked by a bonafide Chinese chef, and now I'm ruined for life.  Until now.

Living in China, I am anxious to try everything.  I was hoping Beijing would be like Tokyo: a mecca of unbelievably good food.  And so far it is.  But not like Tokyo.  In Tokyo you can get any kind of food:  French, Italian, Japanese and it's outstanding.  The best croissant I've ever had was in Tokyo, which is blasphemous, considering Paris is my favorite city in the world.  In Beijing you can only get one kind of food:  Chinese.  Well, other than McDonalds and KFC.  China: welcome to obesity - it's just a matter of time.

But there are all kinds of Chinese food.  There are?  That's what I said.  I mean, I'm semi-familar with Cantonese, Szechuan, Mandarin.  But yet there's apparently way more.  There are 23 provinces in China.  Each province specializes in a different type of Chinese food.  That means there are 23 kinds of Chinese food?  From the meat laden Turkish influenced rice dishes in Tibet, to the steamy, savory goodness of dim sum in Hong Kong, to the sweet and crispy Peking Duck in Beijing.  Hello, Mongolian BBQ.  

What?  That's like saying there are 50 types of American food, which obviously there are not.  In fact, name one actual American dish.  Pizza?  No, that was invented in Italy.  Hot dogs?  Hamburgers?  These were invented in Germany.  I can't think of anything.  Wait.  I got one thing. Turducken.  Ah yes, so American.

The great thing about eating out in China is, everything is amazingly cheap.  No I mean it, really cheap.  We keep going out to the most expensive restaurants and have problems breaking $100.00.  No joke.  Geez, we break $100 at Chili's on a Monday night.  Hey, buffalo wings and margaritas are expensive.  Don't judge.

So far, by far, my favorite Chinese food are dumplings and Peking Duck.  These are not served in the same restaurants.  There are running arguments on where the best of each of these Chinese delicacies are served.  I only have 30 days but I am on a mission to resolve this heated dispute.

The Peking Duck is amazing.  My favorite restaurant thus far is called "Made In China."  How ironic considering I have a dubious opinion of anything actually made in China.  This restaurant is in the Grand Hyatt Hotel and therefore the most expensive place in town.  Truth be told, we did break $100 here.

But the duck is so devine.  The skin is so crispy it melts in your mouth, literally.  In Beijing you dip the skin in either salt or sugar, place it lovingly on your tongue, and let it slowly dissolve into a bouquet of flavors in your mouth.  They carve the duck for you table side, slowly, carefully, laying out the choice pieces decoratively while your mouth waters and your stomach growls.  

The only downside is, ducks don't have very much meat.  The first few times we had duck, Russell thought we were getting cheated, because it always appeared they only cut half the duck and swept the rest of it away.  We soon learned there isn't much more meat.

Another good duck joint is 1949 in the Hidden City at Sanlitun.  Not quite the grandness of Made in China but less tourists too.  The restaurant is in a beautiful courtyard and the duck is great.


Über hip courtyard.

Then there's the dim sum.  Ah the dim sum.  I steam up just thinking about it.  So many fillings.  Our favorite so far is a little neighborhood joint in the Embassy district called Baoyuan Jiaozi Wu Dumpling House.   There's always a line.  They serve over 25 types of multi-colored dumplings.  They're exquisite.  And the side vegetable dishes are outstanding too.  

Not just pretty - delicious!

Like Cartman I do love side dishes.

The other night I tried something new, something truly original, something wonderful.  I tried hand pulled noodles at the Noodle Bar in 1949 Hidden City, Sanlitun.  There were only two soup choices on the menu.  You can either have oxbow or another meat I've never heard of - tendon meat.  We tried the Oxbow and it was good, very good. The broth was dense and rich, the way you wish stew really was.  The noodles were firm and meaty.  This dish warms the soul.

The place is tiny.  You sit at a u-shaped counter in a covey the size of Volkswagon Bus.  Behind the counter are four guys.  Two to ladle the two kinds of soup out.  And two to hand-pull the noodles.  They start with great lumps of dough, the size of a side of beef.  From these they literally pull and twist the dough into smaller and smaller size strands, until finally they have soup noodles.  These they boil in broth until they're a'dente and saturated with flavor.  Oh my God.  Heaven.

Speaking of Heaven.  The other night we went to an amazing new restaurant called "Lost Heaven" in the Forbidden City premier restaurant area.  This restaurant features Chinese dishes from several provinces of China.  We got lost in the expansive menu.  It was indeed heaven, starting with their signature cocktails in the richly appointed wood bar.  It felt like we were back in Bali for a minute, there was so much wood and so many colors. 

Each dish was outstanding.  It was like watching the Matrix for the first time, each scene even more spectacular and surprising than the last.  We loved it.  We loved it so much we didn't take enough pictures.  Damn.  I guess we have to go back again.

Swirls of goodness.

I can't remember which provence this dish was from.

It was the first and we were so smitten we forgot to take pictures of the other five dishes.


Happy Eater.
 Happy to be hungry again in an hour so I can have more!

But if none of this appeals to you, there's always the "Hello Kitty Cafe." Yes, they have a "Hello Kitty Cafe."  It's located in the mall adjacent to our apartment building in Sanlitun.    I couldn't believe it when I walked by it.  I didn't venture in because it reminded me of a Hooters but for pedafiles.  But from the outside it appeared to be a frothy confection of pink clad baby doll dresses worn by winsome Chinese girls, serving dreams in a sundae cup, complete with a cherry on top.

It's just a matter of time before we knock this off and bring it to America.


Really?



Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Made In China

It's official.  Starbucks is poisoning me.  I've been here for two weeks now and every afternoon I'm bent over in pain from the crunchy curlies.  You know, abdominal pain that makes you start praying.

At first I thought maybe it was the food.  But I realized that can't be because I cooked it.  And more importantly I bought the ingredients from the expat market.  Yeah, originally I thought I could shop at the locals market, like I did in Tokyo.  But one trip to the local market and I realized that was not just a very bad idea but potentially life threatening.  The thing is - it was actually a wet market.

Have you ever been to a wet market?  I hadn't either, until now.  It started out promising enough: aisles of rice, noodles and canned goods, all in writing I can't understand.  But I could recognize the pictures - kind of.

When I got to the produce section I started to get a little wary.  There were a lot of things I had never seen before.  Usually this would excite me, inspire me to try something new.  But something didn't seem right.  Perhaps it was the temperature.  It was unusually warm in there.  There were no plastic bags or scales or sprays to temper the fruit and vegetable, just bins of tepid, droopy, foreign vegetables.

And then there was the meat department. Although "department" was clearly not the right word for it.  Slaughter house would be the appropriate term here I believe.  I have abstained from showing any pictures because a) they wouldn't let me take pictures (I can understand why) and b) they would make you sick.

In America we don't ever want to know our food was actually alive and breathing.  We don't call it cow or pig.  We have different names for the byproduct of quaint farm animals like beef and pork, or bacon.  We just don't discuss it. Everything is cleaned up (no blood or veins) and packaged into nifty little unrecognizable pieces that pretty much looks like it was made in a factory.  We don't leave the hoofs on, or the heads.  Not so in China.

The first thing I noticed was the redolence of fresh blood, that thick, heady, unmistakable fetor.  My stomach rolled.  Then I saw the butcher block, in the middle of the room,  still bloody.  In fact, a red runny matter was dripping onto the floor, like heavy syrup down the side of a pancake.  Except this was a bloody pancake.  I took a double take.  That's not, no, it can't be. Is it?  It is.  My stomach lurched.

Then there were what I like to call the "bloody bins."  Yes, bloody bins.  There were no signs on the bins, not even in Chinese.  I guess you don't need a sign to tell you this bin contains dead baby ducklings.  Yes, dead baby ducklings.   Not only that, but you had your choice of flesh colored or black.  Black?!  What the?!!!

The ducklings were just one of the atrocities I discovered in the bloody bins.  The other bins were filled with many heinous acts of barbarity: chickens (again black or flesh tones), head still on, or bins filled with just the clawed chicken feet.  There were bins of pig feet and various mystery meats I didn't dare guess at.

Oh my God.  It was like a Wes Craven film. I half-expected Freddy Krueger to jump out from behind the dirty plastic curtains with a hack saw.  My exodus was fast and efficient.

You know I'd heard of wet markets.  But in my mind they played differently.  The markets in my head were filled with bags of spices, colorful tents filled with baskets of alluring strange fruit.  The vendors grinned happy toothless smiles and handed out samples.   Sure there were live chickens and ducklings.  But I could still convince myself these would soon be pets, not dripping off a butcher block.  Ugh.

So yeah no local market shopping for me.  I found April Gourmet where the meat is actually pre-cleaned, under glass, and refridgerated, with signs that not only tell you what it is but where it came from.  And I don't mind paying five to ten times more than the local market.  I want to live. Sigh of relief.

This is why I knew the stomach aches were not coming from the food.  I realized they were coming from my local Starbucks when I stopped drinking coffee for a few days and the mysterious illness went away.  When I started drinking it again, the illness came back, just like pigeons when you throw them bread crumbs.

Yeah well, I followed the bread crumbs and they lead me to the horrible realization that my local Starbucks, the one I depended upon every morning, was in fact, counterfeit.  I'm not kidding.  I had read that most of the Starbucks in China were counterfeit.  Of course I didn't believe them.  Until now.  The realization made me pale.

And not only this, other things started to make themselves known.  The lobby of my apartment building, the one I so charmingly compared to a W hotel.  Well the other day I was walking through it on my way out and I noticed an alarmingly large piece of  marble on the floor.  Apparently it had fallen off the wall of the elevator bank.  Nobody had seemed to notice it.  Nobody noticed it for several days.

Then a couple days later, buckets appeared in the lobby to catch the dribble of a mysterious fluid dripping from the ceiling three stories up.  A couple of days later, after I repeatedly asked when the leak was going to be fixed, a giant hole appeared where the leak was, or rather, still is, and more buckets have appeared to catch the offensive liquid.

Then I discovered that most of those beautiful buildings erected for the Beijing Olympics, were falling apart.  Falling apart even though they had been built less than ten years ago.  It seems the Chinese build beautiful structures that don't last.  At least the new structures that is.  I mean the Forbidden City is still standing.

Suddenly "Made In China" has a brand new meaning for me.

But more importantly, what am I going to do about my coffee?