Interesting...I see onions in Chinese food all the time, everywhere I go...the regular round onions as well as green onions, chives, or leeks. I don't think I've ever seen RAW onion served in a Chinese restaurant, as they are with some Western foods, but I see onions cooked into lots and lots of dishes.
Meanwhile.
I was treated to an evening at one of Suzhou's Yanbian restaurants the other night. A student is from there, had a birthday, and took his girlfriend and I out for dinner there. If you don't know Yanbian, it's a fairly large "autonomous region" in far northeastern Jilin province, along the North Korean border. It's people (and food) are predominantly Korean (they speak Korean in the home!), with bits of Chinese, Manchu, and Mongol thrown in.
The best meal I've had in China was in Yanbian. I was banqueted and baijiu'd beyond my wildest dreams there once some years ago.
I came to realize that they were trying to marry me off to one of the local girls.
I declined.
But the food is great; should give it a look sometime. Note that these restaurants are pretty widespread across China. Most of these won't say "Yanbian" anywhere in either Chinese or English; they simply call them "Korean restaurants" in order to suck in the non-Yanbian Chinese who think they're getting foreign food and won't know the difference either way.
But ask around, or ask your local Korean restaurants if they have
Yan4 Bian2 Cai4. One giveaway: Korean barbecue cooked on skewers using wire racks over a bed of charcoal instead of the iron plate thingies. Yanbian barbecue is served with a plate of what loooks like heavily-spiced bread crumbs and sesame seeds...after cooking the meat, it's plunged into a coating of this stuff. Really wonderful!
In addition to assorted barbecues, we had things like:
Huang2 Gua1 Ban4 Jin1 Zhen2 Gu1- a sort of cold salad/relish featuring cucumber and straw mushrooms with onion and garlic, in a sort of dressing with lots of chili peppers. FIERY hot but cool and piquant...a great counterbalance to the barbecue.
Yanbian kimchee is very different from mainstream Korean kimchee, but it rocks. For one thing, it has quite a bit of potato in it. For another, it's not nearly as hot as other kimchee. The Chinese word for Yanbian kimchee is
La4 Bai2 Cai4 Chao3 Tu3 Dou4 Pian4.
One interesting option on the barbecue...thin slices of the extremely fatty layered pork so beloved in China, laced onto a skewer at each end. This kind of pork can range from tolerable to disgusting in other dishes, but as barbecue with the bread crumbs it was outstanding. Ask the waiter for
Wu3 Hua1 Rou4.
Jack assured me, with a gleam in his eye, that our restaurant had real authentic Yanbian cold noodles just like back home. An enormous bowl of extremely long, rather gelatinous wheat noodles is served in a clear ice-cold dark-brown somewhat gazpacho-like soup, with bits of meat, egg, and vegetables in it and some ice floating on the top. Admittedly, it looks like the bowl the waiter was using to empty dirty dishes from another table, but the taste is superb- especially the soup. When summer strikes I may be eating this for dinner about 5 nights a week. The name is simple and straight-up:
Leng3 Mian4.
Great food worth the hunt!
