Restaurant Advice
It’s western New Year’s Eve and Chef Xu and his wife are kindly packing our suitcases in their car and driving us to Chengdu which will be the last city we visit before making our separate ways home. Although I can’t understand anything unless anything they discuss between them, I understand all the common group travelling issues - trying to overfill the boot with luggage arguing over directions! But Xu and his wife seem like really calm, sweet people. I’m excited for them to come to England and really want to get some more mandarin under my belt so I can do more than just point at stuff and say thank you! Especially with Xu’s wife who won’t be learning as much English as Xu. I’ve still got a slight burning sensation in my chest from my selections from the hotel breakfast buffet: chilli beef noodles and garlic cucumber. Their selection makes me realise that our carb heavy breakfasts just aren’t proper meals!
The food down here is Sichuan isn’t what Johsy nor Georgina are used to from their Northern China roots. Often they can’t even understand the locals when they speak quickly with each other in their thick accents! We were discussing last night over dinner at a steamed fish restaurant designed by Xu just how many cultures there are to explore in this vast country. The landscape on this journey is so much more what I wanted to see; we’re passing farms, tiny villages with washing hanging from verandas and bamboo fences and a tiny old man at the side of the road with a basket on his back - Joshy tells me the Sichuan people are the shortest in China.
Over dinner Xu was advising the management team, well, more giving them a deserved bollocking. There are 5 ‘managers’ but the service is a shambles in peak times and they tell us that they’ve been getting complaints about the lack of consistency with the food - great one day then a disappointment another. Xu, who has a vested interest in the place not least because the marketing involves the use of his name; he warns them that he’s pissed off, his reputation is on the line. Joshy calmly but sternly discusses the processes involved in service and the importance of attention to detail in these systems to make things flow smoothly. I’m still amazed to have the chance to have yet another deeply ‘real’ experience here, with real people facing real problems.
