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One of the down sides of dining out in Beijing is the amount of MSG you have to deal with. They put MSG in everything. Noodles, rice, soup, you name it. Except milk of course, where the preferred ingredient is usually melamine.
The general equation that I have learnt in Beijing is that the price of the food has an inverse relationship with the amount of MSG. The cheaper the food, the more MSG. So if you are thinking of losing a lot of hair soon, it's a good idea to save on your meals.
Yesterday, I found the MSG depot of Beijing. It pretends to be a restaurant, but really, I believe it is the place where they store all the MSG supplies for the capital. After my regular sophisticated night out at a China Philharmonic Orchestra concert at the Forbidden City Concert Hall, me and some friends just wanted a convenient, quick bite. A Hong Kong-style cafe was what we needed - cheap, fast, tasty. We wanted to go to this place (below) but it was closed.
So we ended up in this MSG dump. It is called Station Kitchen （又一栈）at Wangfujing's The Malls at Oriental Plaza (东方新天地). What a horrible experience. The food was shit. My char siew+chicken rice was bland and dry. The rice was hard. The only thing the restaurant could stir fry to perfection was MSG. To me, if you want to add tons of MSG, then at least make the bloody food tasty. Despite dumping the whole crate of food additive, the food still struggled to have any flavour.
Service sucked too. Perhaps it was because we went in an hour before closing. But hey, there was still an hour. The waitresses rushed through our orders, couldn't wait to snatch the menus off us and asked us to pay up while we poisoned ourselves with more monosodium glutamate.
I downed two big mugs of water when I got home and still felt thirsty. So if you are on a suicide mission, here is its contact: 10-8518-6181. Bring lots of water and plenty of hair nourishing cream.
3 comments:
Ya tell me about it. It's the same in Jakarta too I think, I can taste the copious amounts of MSG especially at the Chinese restaurants (hello Crystal Jade!) here. But in addition to hair loss, you can acquire diabetes here. Everything (even nacho chips that are made here) is so sickeningly sweet. Sugar syrup is no longer a condiment, it's a way of life I tell ya. Having said that, the different types of sambal belacan available here is wayyy better than in SG, when you come, we will go and eat some nice Sundanese food!
I dun understand why the Indons like their stuff so sweet. When I was there, I was shocked by how much sugar they dumped into their tummies. But then again, the sweetness of JCo donuts makes them great companions of strong bitter coffee.
Why isn't there a new post? As a result I have nothing to read at 7.30am in the morning on days like these when i can't sleep. I'm sure you must have eaten more shit grub between Weds night and now. C'mon!
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