The New Beachhutman Blog

“You eat Chinese six times a week?”, the guy said incredulously. “Gee, I’d get ill man!”

There we were, the Magician, the Welsh teacher, the IT guy and BHM,  sitting in a Teppanyaki restaurant near Chaoyang park on Friday. After a heavy week for me, the suggestion from Magic had cheered me up no end. So there we were on stools along the curved side of the Teppan, supping beer - or in Magic’s case, cola - with the master Yaki chef stirring up a storm in front of us.

“Sure” I said, “I work with  Chinese team, we have lunch. It’s obviously Chinese. No big deal?” He shook his head, and made “Only in China” noises. Yes, I guess he was American. But it is true that many foreigners living here find it hard to handle a diet with almost exclusively Chinese food. As another wonderful long-standing resident had said to me over the filet mignon au poivre vert at Morels, “Zumtimes, George, you ‘ave to eat beef!!

So I’d been happy to come to Teppanyaki tonight. The shrimps were magnificent, the cubed beef steak almost soluble, the raw salmon and tuna with wasabi .... to dine for!

But the are two big snags with Teppanyaki.

The first is the hugely carnivorous nature of the food, which might, I confess, be in part to do with my fellow guests last night. I just can’t eat that much meat these days, Possibly because I do eat Chinese food so much, I find I need far more vegetables, and this is not a strength of the Teppanyaki format.

The second is the noise. Not the noise of happy diners, but the constant banging and scraping, chopping and turning, that goes on. This is achieved with two substantial flat steel slice things, and after a while I’d really quite like to escape to a table further away from the cheffing.

By the end of the meal I was unable to eat more meat, or even face a desert.

And today, I have flu, dammit. So it's agood thing I don't have to go to Shanghai today. But I do have to go to Vietnam on Friday next...... I wonder what they eat?