A bowl o' green...

[khiemtran]

Not far from the hotel was a cluster of restaurants with spruikers out front doing their best to snag customers from the stream of tired, hungry geeks that emerged each night and lunchtime, like bears at the annual salmon run.

One of them was a Hunan restaurant, and I was duly snagged with the question of whether I liked "spicy" food.

The first dish I was recommended was "fried pork". Pressed for a little more information, the waitress explained that it was "Small fried pork" ("Xiao chao rou") and then "Green chilli fried pork" ("Qing jiao chao rou").




As you can see, what I ended up with was a bowl of fried green chillis, with a few shreds of bacon-sized pork thrown in. They take their chilli seriously in Hunan province. Still, it was quite nice, even if it wasn't quite what I was expecting.

Next door was a "Hong Kong" restaurant where the girl out front snagged me twice by striking up a conversation in Mandarin.

I actually ended up eating here three times. It was close to the hotel and pretty good value considering a set meal and a beer cost less than the price of the beer alone inside the hotel.

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

How hot were those chilis?
And in the second picture, what's in the wooden bucket?

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

The chillies were only about jalapeno standard, maybe a little hotter if I'm being generous. I think they had actually been pickled first.

The wooden bucket had chicken covered in more chillies, this time red dried ones. (The bucket is something of a prop. There was a metal dish inside that only extended about as far as first metal band on the outside, so there was a lot less chicken than there looks.)