UKH

Just to say that tonight I gave in and had a Chinese meal with my son and daughter.

I don't normally have them, due to being pre-diabetic, and trying to have some restriction on intake. This meal, however, did not seem quite as sweet as other ones in the past.

Are some restaurants better than others, or was there just a more sensible choice of main meals?

What are you trying to reduce?

Calories? Carbs? Sugars? 

It's unlikely you're going to get a high fibre, low GI Chinese meal, but avoid sauces, especially sweet ones, and it may get into acceptable limits?

Be wary of you go to a real Chinese restaurant, which are rare outside cities with large Chinese populations. The food can be quite different and sometimes quite heavy, though personally I like them.

I had a Chinese housemate some years ago, a middle aged woman who was an engineering academic. She loved cooking and was very generous, unfortunately she mostly cooked dumplings which were hideous and gave you heartburn and acid reflux almost immediately after the first bite. I took her to a really good Chinese in Edinburgh (the Rendezvous) and she said "It's nice food but it's not Chinese."

Won Ton soup is one of my all time favourite dishes. I'm struggling to think of much else that might be suitable for you though. My BiL has developed type2 and he loves Chinese but it's a very rare treat for him now.

My first step in judging a Chinese restaurant is chopsticks - if you have to ask for them the food will be overly sweet, anglisized and disappointing. 

Sadly the Zing Vaa in Sheffield closed a few years ago and I haven't yet found anywhere equivalent. Very often we were the only "English" customers and the food was always outstanding with a huge variety of dishes you don't see on normal takeaway menus.

Chinese food has moved on a lot over the past 30 years - it used to be that every town had a takeaway/restaurant serving up what most Brits expect (prawn crackers, chow mein, sweet and sour pork etc), but better quality and variation have spread from the strongholds of London and Manchester. Good signs for me are: Chinese customers (especially families eating out), when the menu says fish does it actually mean fish eg a nice whole sea bass steamed with ginger and spring onions, and do the wontons have prawn in them, not just pork. If I was in Malaysia now, I’d be thinking of char kway teow (flat rice noodles) for breakfast - not healthy but a vast improvement on bran flakes…

The sugary, gloopy, greasy mess we call Chinese here bears no resemblance to actual Chinese food. After living in HK for a few years, I can't eat it anymore.

​​​​​​Proper cantonese food is wonderfully light and fresh, dim sum, seafood etc just cooked simply. Find a proper dim sum place in the Chinese quarter of your nearest city and give it a whirl. 

​​​Crispy duck pancakes is the only thing that bears some resemblance to an actual Chinese dish, but the authentic style roast duck hasn't had the fat all incinerated so it's tender and juicy still. 

Of course they are.   French, Italian, Greek, Lebanese, Japanese, English, Turkish, Moroccan etc., etc., etc.,

As a couple of other posters have mentioned, 'foreign food', is much better in foreign countries.  Eaten in this country foreign food is often nothing like it is abroad.

More authentic doesn’t necessarily mean better. Personal preference and quality of the cooking determines “better”, not whether you might get the exact same dish elsewhere.

I’ve had plenty of great, totally inauthentic, meals based on cuisines from other parts of the world. And I’ve had some awful, but undoubtedly more authentic, meals while abroad. (Not that I would regard most takeaway meals as great, regardless of authenticity).

It’s also just not a very helpful observation to repeatedly make since it’s reasonably safe to assume that nipping over to actual China wasn’t a viable option for the OPs Sunday evening meal. 

Maybe not, but a couple of other people made the same point.  I was simply agreeing.  The OP asked whether some restaurants were better than others.  And they are.  Having not eaten at this restaurant I can't comment on his meal. Perhaps I should have simply answered; "yes".

I'd say that's an outdated assumption in a lot of urban areas, especially since the adventure of giod street food vendors pushing the quality side of things 

Sesame Prawn Toast.

That is all.

I thought I hated Chinese food but I'd only been to cookie-cutter Chinese takeaways my entire life. Got taken to the Mayflower in Bristol (which is really popular with other chefs because it's still open when they finish their shifts) and was pretty much blown away by how good it was. Deep-fried soft-shell crab, szechuan hot pot (possibly the hottest thing I've ever eaten), fish belly tofu, cured pork and water lily - all out of this world. There was some REALLY exciting stuff on the menu if you fancied being brave, but pork shanks and jellyfish served cold will have to wait for another time. Possibly another lifetime.

I had the worst Chinese meal I've ever eaten in Chinatown in London. I suspect it was very authentic.

Inside the door, the establishment had about 4 domestic cookers, each with a big cauldron of rice covering all the rings.  There were butcher's rails in the window, with cooked duck pork and beef hanging from them.  There was a big chunk of tree stump standing on the floor as a chopping block, with a meat cleaver stuck in it.

You had beef, duck or pork, or all three.  The 'chef' pressed a gleaming dome of rice into a hemispherical ladle with the palm of his hand and turned that out onto a plate.  He then chopped your chosen meat into pieces, bones and all, and placed it on your rice.  Done. Wash down with green tea.  Pretty much inedible. 

Chinese people think we're mad to eat the bland breast meat and leave all the tasty stuff on the bones. You get used to eating it, just slurp the meat off and spit the bones out. Chicken feet are alright actually if you can get past the appearance!

Jellyfish has a really odd texture, slimy and crunchy. Not unpleasant, but not much flavour either. 

The only thing in China I genuinely thought might come back up was something made with fermented fish guts.

Most of it is excellent though, especially seafood. The soy and ginger steamed white fish....and all the sichuan. To OP, I don't blame you for not liking most British Chinese food, but the real thing is much better! 

Yeah, my favourite chinese meal is proper Sichuan chicken, which is best prepared with the chicken pieces still on the bone with piles of dried chillies and sichuan peppers. You grab the bone with chopsticks and eat the mean. Amazing.

These I couldn't get on with. I detested the flavour.

I’ve never been a fan of English Chinese food. I had a house mate at University (more than 25 years ago) who’s parents where immigrants from Hong Kong, they had a takeaway, but the stuff he brought in to the house and shared with me wasn’t on the menu.

I’m now working just around the corner from Manchester’s China Town, maybe I should give it another go, I’ve not eaten there since I was a kid.

Agreed. The mayflower changed everything I thought i knew about Chinese food. Amazingly good stuff and a shock if you head there with the usual expectations of 'Chinese food'

I still visit when in Bristol and look forward to it. Never been brave enough to order anything off the last page though... 

When I visited my daughter in Hong Kong I had two fantastic bowls of noodles, one bought on the street and eaten in a nearby park and the other bought from a cafe in Sai Kung and eaten on plastic stools at a table on the pavement. Both were hot and full of flavour. From the cafe, if I'd wanted even more flavour, I could have gone for one of the optional offal additions that were hanging in plenty and in view above the counter inside. I now wish I had.



 

Are some Chinese restaurants better than others? 

Yes!  Try larger cities - Chintatown Manchester/London fro example and be prepared to spend some money.

Not in a city but very good if your'e in the NW https://trungsrestaurant.com/

“I’d be thinking of char kway teow (flat rice noodles) for breakfast - not healthy but a vast improvement on bran flakes…”

some years ago I was yet again forcing down some home made organic museli one morning when I had one of those moments . “ this is f£&king disgusting …. I’m never eating it  again “ . For a normal day I either eat nothing or  ,Malaysian or Indian . For a big day on the hill porridge with dark fruits or veggie fry up . 

. 

I really struggle with Chinese food. Apart from a few very top end places I've been to I find it disgusting. I've been to China a few times, and I have say the real thing is even worse! Yes, I had great Peking duck in Beijing, and snake in Shanghai that was amazing, but those were highlights surrounded by endless days of trying to force something inedible down. In China they seem to throw away all the decent parts of the meat and serve up the bits that belong in the bin. At least with British Chinese food they don't do that.

I'd have killed for some muesli for breakfast when I was in China. 😂

My brother-in-law and sister-in-law went on honeymoon to a Kung Fu training camp in China (takes all sorts eh?).  Being from a semi-Chinese family we were all expecting them to have amazing food.  This did not come to pass.  The family still dine out on the stories they told about the awful food they had to put up with before another hard day of Kung Fu training haha, I don't think she has ever forgiven him. "But I could have been in the Maldives".

More generally to the thread I am going to pass on some UKC love - many years ago someone recommended Fuschia Dunlop's Every Grain of Rice as an excellent, authentic, Chinese cookbook.  Could not agree more, head out and buy a copy if you want to skip the middle person. 

The wonton frozen in my freezer just waiting to be scoffed down in garlic and chilli sweet soy sauce agree with me!

People tend to lionise authenticity and forget that there's often a reason why foods get anglicised in the first place - to suit the palates of those who've grown up with different foods. Ramen bowls aside, I definitely prefer Japanese food in the UK to the Japanese food I ate while in the country, which involved a lot more fish flakes and weird custard things than I was expecting. Even things like how thickly you slice your sashimi - it tended to be thicker in Japan and as someone who didn't grow up eating raw fish, I found it texturally quite challenging!

You probably know, but occasionally people don't.   Early stage T2 diabetes mostly boils down to diet and exercise (and can be reversed by stringent application of the same).  Within diet, it boils down to glucose and particularly peak bloodstream glucose.  On that basis, white bread (or other white starch) is more diabetogenic than sucrose.

tl;dr rice and white noodles bad; stir fry veggies and wholemeal noodles better; sauces have sugar and starch - minimise

Bonus edit pop factoid: freezing white bread lowers the glycaemic index

having lived in China on and off for 10 years, I can assure you that it was indeed authentic!

I'm a little offended by your lofty tone.

I have not had a Chinese meal for probably 6 years, prior to this one.

I never ate white bread even before being categorised as pre-diabetic, let alone after. If I get chance, I make my own bread with loads of Spelt in, and Buckwheat, along with the wholemeal bread flour and pumpkin and other seeds.

I was asking if the slant on Chinese food had changed since last time I tried it.

My big weakness, is probably Cheese, and so I try to eat only hard cheeses like Jarlsberg. I never buy the soft ones. I go through phases of not eating cheese at all. I am considering doing that at the moment.

My other problem is eating late due to work, which makes me more likely to eat more: Yet my body weight index is pretty good. I am of 77Kg at the moment, and I'm of the order of 6'2" (cannot remember my metric equivalent).

If you pay good money and go to expensive restaurants Chinese food in China can be great, Chinese street food or from cheap restaurants is mostly terrible, whereas in places like south east Asia cheap street food is mostly amazing. 

I guarantee if most of the people on here were forced to eat at average restaurants in mid level chinese towns and cities they would very quickly be changing their tune about how much better authentic chinese food is!

Sigh.

Don't be offended, it wasn't "lofty" just some info about T2 diabetes.  As I said 0 you probably already knew.

Also, I didn't say that you were pre-T2 through eating white bread; but white bread is a shocker.  Cheese of almost any sort is low GI compared to that.

Eating late isn't the best, but aerobic exercise each day can compensate.

As I say, don't be offended.

Okay. I did think afterwards that I may have been a bit hasty. So I rescind the previous. I just cannot stand white bread.

Sorry.

Doing exercise is very difficult on a basis of anymore than a couple of times per week, just due to living on my own (so no load spread of chores), and working very long hours, both at work and at home. Sometimes I may have the time, but due to work, I'm tired both because of the long hours, but also because I have not taken sufficient water during the day, so both make me feel weak.

The main problem with cheese is gaining weight, which is part of the general bulk of the problem with keeping the weight below the threat of DM.

I’m a bit surprised by this. When I went to Japan I’d only eaten Japanese food in the U.K. about half a dozen times, but found the food in Japan very approachable. Both in Tokyo and out of the capital (spent some time in Nikko and the Japanese Alps). Only exception was breakfast, didn’t really fancy fish porridge first thing in the morning. 

Three years ago I experienced Red Cooked Pork (Hong Shao Rou) at a good restaurant in Shanghai. Even now, I sometimes wake up in the dead of night with the memory of that devine dish at the forefront of my consciousness.

Nom.

Curries are made milder by the addition of sugar. There is a surprising amount of sugar in Chinese food. 

I have a Ken Hom cookbook. In the introduction, he talks about regular visits to China to find different regional recipes. And discusses the issue of different tastes; the example he gave was quick-braised ox penis, which he thought might not go down so well...

Hi Linda,

I hadn't really thought about that, but it makes sense; however I mostly go for Bhunas, and Madrases. Even then, I think that nowadays, I probably only have a shop bought Indian meal about once, possibly twice per month, and a proper one about every 6-8 weeks. So I'm not keeping the Indian restaurants going.

They're probably   better on the Oldham side, than the Holmfirth side, are they?

That would be a bit chewy.

I don’t eat curry- unless I make my own as I have a mouth problem that reacts to chilli and curry spice. Italian food is my preference ( or French- but that’s in short supply around Saddleworth! )