Yantai: The Breakfast Buffet

I love a good breakfast buffet: tables resplendant with the specialities of the region: things you might or might not find either at a home breakfast or at a restaurant table, the things the country offers: please taste us! and of course, there is also a selection of breakfast fare and foods to appeal to foreigners. For instance: bacon–which changes depending on which country you are in: salty, smoky, crispy, soft, fatty, and so forth. In places with large Muslim or Jewish populations the bacon might be beef or turkey instead of pork. And in many places, lush gorgeous lands with the most amazing foods, I’m thinking Sorrento, Italy, at this moment: you might just find the British baked beans on the breakfast buffet. Once in Spain I fell in love with the toasted bread, olive oil, ripe tomatoes and whole cloves of garlic: rub the garlic on the toast, splash with olive oil and top with juicy tomatoes. Best breakfast in the world, and one I’ve taken, during tomato season, as my own in the years since.

However: please don’t judge me, but i AM a little judgemental about other people at a breakfast buffet. Since its such a wonderful time to try the local yogurt or dumplings, the breads and noodles, cured meats, if you’re doing the song and dance of being the food adventurer and you’re eating boxed cereal or packaged yogurt when there is fresh homemade: i’m soooo sorry. Gonna judge you. Can’t help myself. If we’re in, say, Turkey and you pass up the chance to have handmade katmer in order to eat cornflakes, so sorry. Judged.

But in China, at the breakfast buffet the array of foods is usually so Eastern, even when they try to do western

, that really: you would have to work hard to eat breakfast as you do back home. For one thing, the lovely little cakes are topped not with cherries, but with tomatoes?

There was broccoli of the day (organic said the label; speaking with the manager he said: yes, we grow it nearby). Each day it was slightly different: always stir-fried with garlic–tons of garlic, pretty sure we were in the epicenter of China garlic-eating which made me very happy–and fresh ginger. Besides that, it was up for grabs: one day: strands of rich meat, another day shrimp, another day red peppers–both mild and spicy-hot; sometimes instead or in addition to the broccoli, there were lovely green beans: braised in a similar ever-changing way:

Because we were just across the water from North Korea with South Korea a ferry ride away, there was a selection of kimchee each morning: There was a station with a woman cooking delicate, delicious noodles, serving them in broth with local vegetables–that garden again! and really: if you think of Chinese/Napa Cabbage/Chinese leaves as kind of boring, thats because you’ve never had them in this wonderful soup! Just a few little bits of cabbage in the soup, along with the noodles and tons of green onions, seaweed, an amazement!

Next to the noodles was a man stretching dough and making crisp deliciously, oily, filled with garlic, flatbreads.

and tea eggs

There was a selection of salads, some with incredibly amusing titles such as this: cucumber of the burning flesh: with cured meat and hot chillies. And often chewy tofu salads, translucent preserved egg with vegetables, and almost always a strange jellied meat substance whose texture I just couldn’t warm up to.

There were eggs scrambled with tomatoes–a simple everyday dish throughout China, but the tomatoes were sooooo sweet and wonderful. One day the scrambled eggs and tomatoes were studded with the shellfish conch. There were simmering vats of congee with assorted pickles to perk up each bowlful, and always braised mushrooms: with bok choy, broccoli, whatever green vegetable was available. There was a big container of chow mein, and another of egg-fried rice, but even better was the rice cooker filled with fragrant, freshly cooked rice. Such a treat: hot, ready, delicious.

and the dumplings!!!!! how could i forget the dumplings?????

Chinese breakfast is an array, a parade, a veritable celebration of dumplings! there were pork and chive dumplings, seafood dumplings, pork and prawn dumplings, vegetable dumplings and my favourite: dumplings filled with black rice (Forbidden Rice).