Wuhan Breakfast Restaurant

Photo taken by Arthur Hua

This is a picture I took nearly 5 years ago in china. It’s a breakfast place under my grandparent’s apartment complex, and I would pretty much eat dinner there every morning. The dish I got was called Wuhan hot and dry noodles. It’s like a noodles that has this sort of sesame paste and has optional soy sauce, vinegar, chili oil, and green onions. My favorite topping would be pickled green beans, because it adds a crunchy texture to the noodles and You can see in the background the station where they serve the noodles. It’s the very last one. But that’s not all they serve at this breakfast place. They also serve Bao-zi, wonton soup, fried dough sticks, and green bean drinks. The 2nd picture from the right is the Bao-Zi, and that is basically these dough balls wrapped over meat. It’s a savory combination that can also be served with soy sauce and vinegar. There are many ways of preparing it, but here they make it by pan frying it to give the Bao-zi a crispy bottom, which is my personal favorite. At the middle of the counter, you can see these white drinks, and that’s soy milk. They have sweet and unsweetened versions. They also have the hot and cold versions as well. It’s usually eaten with fried dough sticks that they serve at the front of the store. One of my favorite drinks is the sweet rice drink. It uses sweet rice wine and is boiled with sugar. They also use this technique to drip the egg slowly to make it kind of look like a flower then you can drink it hot or have them cool it down for you. The store also serves light wonton soup. It’s just a basic wonton plus some vegetables with the soup that comes from cooking the wontons. This is a dish my dad would get typically. You can see how the pictures of the food are placed up in their typical pictures with a light for leaving a glow in the store. To order in this kind of store, you have to go to the front where you can pay for your food, and they will give you this slip that you can take up to the “stations” and they will hand you your food. There’s a glass wall entrance, so when I’m in there it’s usually morning, so the sun shines straight in. Usually at business hours there's a lot of people lining up even outdoors to buy these tickets. I visit my grandparents in the summer, so it is hot and humid, but thankfully this is one of the stores that have A.C so once you get inside it’s nice and cold. It’s occasionally hard to get a seat inside, so I would buy it to go but since it would cost extra to buy a take out container, my grandparents would give me to bring to the counters and ask them to serve the food into it.

The noodles I mentioned at the beginning is one of Wuhan's signature dishes, and is a very popular dish all around the nation. It can also fall a bit under Hubei’s food sections Hubei also seems to have some influence from the regions around it, and Wuhan specifically lies on the yangtze river, so it has some influence from other regions like some people like adding more chili oil into the hot and dry noodles. I want to continue exploring food regions in China and how other regions affect each other. I would also like to explore a global view, such as what kind of chinese food is more popular in different countries, and how some asian fusion recipes came to be and what food region of china they base the recipes from. This would include things such as General Tso’s chicken and Panda Express. This would also include how restaurants from other countries made its way into China such as McDonald and KFC and pizza Hut.