Day Four: White Sauce Has A Reason
January 24, 2007

« Day Three: Authenticity In Question | Main | Day Four: Beijing Duck »

Buildingtop We get up very early and eat quickly so that we can head into the office and do some last minute printouts and organization of materials before we start training. Upon arrival, we find that the office still isn't open. It's 7:45 a.m. and no one is here except for janitorial staff. Between yesterday and this morning, I'm beginning to suspect that the Hong Kong office doesn't actually exist, that our trip here is part of some elaborate con, and that back in Sunnyvale, Tom Cruise with facial prostheses custom-designed to make him look exactly like me is leading an Impossible Mission to root through my desk for a critical bit of intel or a giant green gemstone.

After about a half an hour, a very friendly guy named Alex gets out of the elevator. Unfortunately, he's forgotten his badge this morning, so we all have to wait for a little while longer. But he does a much better job of convincing the cleaning lady that we should all be let into the office, which is very good because we still have some photocopying and printing to do before we can get started for the day.

The morning session goes very well, and we find ourselves at lunch with a large part of the team -- probably around 25 people! This restaurant is the first place that reminds me of what I would consider to be a "nice Chinese restaurant" back home: a large, open room, huge, round tables with a large lazy susan in the center, etc. The menu, too is quite familiar, and there are no shockers among the dishes that are ordered, though I'm sure that is partially done for our benefit.

Firstrestaurant The BBQ pork is very good, as are the other dishes, but there's one thing that deserves a special mention. There's a whole class of Chinese dishes that I've always thought of as being a complete waste of time. You know the ones that I'm talking about: lightly steamed vegetables, maybe some of the whitest pieces of chicken breast on the planet, and a sauce so transparent and flavorless that it doesn't even refract light. The domain of food-fearers, picky eaters, dieters, and brown-rice-eating crypto-vegetarians everywhere.

So here's the thing: Those dishes are actually good here.  They look exactly the same as in the U.S., so I almost didn't try the one that rotated past me, but nothing else had been served for awhile, so I needed something to do. Whoa! the sauce was made with a very flavorful chicken stock, with a definite ginger presence -- not enough to make it spicy, or to dominate the taste, but just to add depth to the flavor. I guess there's a reason for those dishes to exist after all, besides to distract people from the good food.

January 24, 2007 in Hong Kong | Permalink

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8345589be69e200d8353d817a53ef

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Day Four: White Sauce Has A Reason:

Comments

Post a comment