Country Dining

One of the necessary components of an afternoon out in the Beijing Countryside is dining in one of restaurants that have been opened up in the past few years as tourism has increased in these areas.  Before the Beijing tourists "discovered" the countryside, most of these villages did not have any type of restaurant at all.  As Peter Hessler observed first-hand in Sancha ( and related in the second book of Country Driving), once the village is accessible to the outside world, tourists will find their way there. Farming villages become talked-about destinations. Suddenly there are needs for restaurants and guest houses.

Many of these restaurants serve very similar menus, and these menus are different from regular Beijing restaurants because they are based mostly on the home cooking of the region.  There are a few significant differences, one in particular being rainbow trout.  So many rural restaurants serve grilled trout as a signature dish, some even stocking artificial ponds at the restaurant with them, and yet, as Hessler describes, "the fish are as local as a cuckoo clock." Rainbow trout are not at all indigenous to the waterways north of Beijing. In fact, the Beijing countryside rainbow trout actually come from Switzerland.

Our favorite dish is probably the most humble of the dishes served in the countryside, that is, of those that don't contain elm bark noodles (sorry, Hessler reference). It's called 炒饼, chao bing, and when I describe it to folks back home I call it Chinese Haluski (sorry, Pittsburgh reference).

It is basically pancake dough cut into noodle-like strips, cabbage, onions, and garlic all fried together. Like haluski, it is a dish clearly born out of times of scarcity.  But man oh man oh man is it good.

The first time we had chao bing was actually not in a countryside restaurant. It was on our first family trip to Beijing, months before moving here, and the place where we were eating near our hotel served it.  As I recall, it wasn't something actually on the menu but offered to us as a substitute for the rice that for some reason that night they were unable to serve.  A Chinese American friend with us (and his girlfriend of the time who was from Hubei) were both unfamiliar with it.  Randy and Myles and I probably ate more of it than the other dishes we ordered.

In the months since we moved to Beijing, we've been trying to get a feel for what kinds of restaurants serve chao bing.  At the Roadhouse it has sometimes been on the menu, and sometimes not, but still available.  Most Changping town restaurants do not make it; when we arrived and tried asking for it, waitresses would laugh at us.  If we were Chinese we would have picked up on the cues that clearly the restaurant was much too nice/urban/removed to cook it.  There's a certain type of Muslim-run restaurant in Changping that do have it, and one near the mosque is locally known for their chao bing.  Sometimes Randy gets a helping with his company-provided "catered" lunch that he brings home to eat and share.

It has only been since after we started heading out to the countryside frequently, though,  that we have been able to order it regularly.  Sometimes it isn't even listed on the restaurants' English-language menu, but when I ask for it, it is always available.  Our favorite one, Kui Po, makes it best, in our opinion.

Katie has tasked Randy with learning how to make chao bing before he goes back to the US for a few weeks in July. He has already asked one of the women at work how to cook it.  Her initial reaction was similar to the waitresses in our early days in Changping, "Why on earth are you interested in that dish?"

Because it is so good, is our answer.  Chao bing is a culinary Great Wall-- so much an unexciting part of every day life for so many Chinese people for so long that they still don't understand our appetite for it.