Near our house is a Chinese restaurant — Cantonese, actually — that appears to cater to the large Asian population in the area. I've been there three times with a friend of mine, and every time we were the only white people in the place.
Half of the menu was only in Chinese, and I certainly couldn't read it. (As an aside, yesterday I heard a comic on Xm radio — I LOVE XM — who was trying to figure out the check when he and his family ate in a Chinese restaurant. "Okay, who had the broom chasing the house?" he asked.)
The portion of the menu I could read was definitely for Chinese people, with nary a sweet and sour dish in the mix: it was all duck's blood this, sea cucumber that, and all around us folks were digging in (with chopsticks, of course) to platters of unrecognizable food.
We asked for chopsticks and tea, which seemed to slightly surprise the waiter, but it really gave him pause when I ordered jellyfish as an appetizer. My friend ordered something more conventional, probably dumplings.
He went back to the kitchen (we were near the door) and I heard all kinds of loud conversation. A couple of minutes later he walked out with a plate of jellyfish, followed by the kitchen staff. They silently watched to see if I'd really eat it, exchanging glances every time I used my chopsticks to pick up another bite.
When I was about halfway through the plate they silently turned and walked back into the kitchen.
If you've never had jellyfish, and you didn't know what it was, you'd think you were eating some sort of weird vegetable. Every time I've had it it's been sliced into strips, somewhat like shorter linguine, and served cold in a light soy-sesame sauce. It has a somewhat gelatinous, "squeaky" texture and a very mild, non fishy flavor. The first time I had it — my mother ordered it when we were eating lunch in Washington, D.C.'s Chinatown — I thought it was a member of the bamboo shoot family.
I haven't yet worked up the courage to try the stewed chicken feet, though.
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