Sure have, but I have no real idea what I'm eating most of the time.
I mean beyond beef, chicken, pork, etc. I have no idea what any of the sauces are, or what the dishes are called.
My favorites so far are a cold roast beef dish with a delicious chunky black sauce. A soup with ham hocks, and large chunks of potatoes and corn cobs, which you eat with your hands, using plastic gloves, and you also use a pointed straw to suck the marrow out of the bones. And also a kind of sweet roll with a hollow in it that you stuff with a similar sauce to the one on the roast beef dish.
Oh, and I had some sort of fried insect larvae, big ones about 1 1/2 inches long. Even the Chinese I was eating with were shocked I would eat that, and they each only ate one. And they were obviously struggling to swallow them without losing their lunch!
I'm used to eating bugs in Thailand, but I've never seen a Thai person getting grossed out by it, they love them there. COmpared to the Thai fried insects, the Chinese ones weren't spicy enough. In Thailand you pretty much just taste garlic and salt.
It's interesting the way they handle the table settings. At each place there is a dish set with a small plate, two bowls, a chinese soup spoon, and a tea cup, all shrink wrapped in plastic. You take the chopsticks and poke through the shrink wrap and peel that off, then stuff the plastic in a big bowl in the center. Then, you take some tea and pour it into the bowl and swirl that around with the spoon, transfer that to the other bowl and do the same, pour a little on the plate, and then dump it all into the center bowl.
I'm not sure if that's because they don't trust the dishes to be clean, or if it's supposed to season them.
Then, all the dishes are served in the center of the table, and everyone just eats right out of them, except for rice or noodles, which go in one bowl, and soup which goes in the other. The small plate is just to spit out bones, because it seems like they never de-bone anything.
