MFC and other places to eat

Janet and I are still trying to settle into a routine of restaurants here.

I think if we can find 6 to 8 different places to eat and go there fairly regularly, we should become familiar with the menus and what things we like and do not like. So far, some early favorites include:

• the Macau Restaurant


• the Lantern Restaurant


• a Muslim noodle shop near Zhanjiang Normal University


• a Chinese fast food restaurant also near the university


• a Sichuan restaurant near our school


• Pizza Hut

The Macau Restaurant (actually there are two in town) is set up in sort of a cafeteria style where you walk around and choose from probably at least 100 or so different dishes and then they cook and bring the food to your table. They also have good Oolong tea, a favorite of both Janet and myself. The Macau is nice because the "point at dish" method is much easier than trying to order from a Chinese menu and the food is good. We have devised the plan of alternating Macau locations so that the staff (who already seem to know us well) do not think that we eat at the same restaurant as often as we actually do!

The Lantern Restaurant is home to good smoothies and American music. Here we are treated to a steady diet of the Eagles, Madonna, Elton John, Phil Collins, and more as we dine on spring rolls, noodles in meat sauce, eggplant (which is very big in China) and one of my favorites -potatoes sliced into thin strips and cooked in a pepper sauce.

The Muslim noodle shop (a good retreat from pork dishes) and the Chinese fast food restaurant are good bets for a cheap meal. Bowls of beef noodle soup costs about $.60 and dishes are not much more expensive.

The Sichuan style restaurant, being very close to our school, is quite convenient and the family who run the store are very nice. Being from Sichuan, they all speak Mandarin and are happy to try and speak to us whenever we eat there. Janet and I have them tone down the spiciness of the dishes, for which Sichuan is famous, a bit.

No list of great restaurants in China would be complete without Pizza Hut, which is a fine dining experience here. The interior is nicely decorated in warm colors and soft lighting and the waitresses overly helpful. The American Special (a Pepperoni Pizza) is the perfect order for curing the occasional craving for some food from home.

Additionally, there is a McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken, which leads me to talk about one of the most interesting (and not bad) of all the places to eat in Zhanjiang, MFC. MFC is just down the street from our school and looks exactly like a copy of KFC, except that the Colonel has been replaced with a semi-creepy looking Chinese child. While Janet and I have some speculation as to what "MFC" may stand for, we have not yet found out, so I will leave it to the imagination. In addition to fried chicken, they also serve some Chinese-style fast food dishes that are not found at KFC.

As we start to get a routine down for eating, things are becoming a bit easier. Though, I still feel a little like I have reverted back to a hunter/gatherer stage of civilization being forced to go out and find my food for most meals...