Cooking up Storms

The conventional way of eating certain customary Chinese dishes, namely hotpot and barbeque, is to cook it oneself, even in the case of eating such fine food in a restaurant. The Beijing Chinese Restaurant, located in a renovated house just 10 metres off Bole Road, up a side street by Fantu Supermarket, opened about four months ago.

The only dishes on offer are hot pot or barbequed meat and customers cook the food at their table themselves a kesel mandija (a pot in which charcoal fires are made for cooking), or, in the case of their culinary preparation skills failing them, the waiters can assist.

A charcoal fire is made both under and in the bowl of the kesel mandija. A cylinder is placed over the fire in the bowl and the soup poured around it. The fire is made outside the restaurant and placed on the table in a tray of water, flames burning out the top of the cylinder.

The customers select the ingredients they prefer from the menu, which offers different vegetables and meat and noodles and sauces to choose from, and these are placed, in separate bowls, on the table and boiled in the soup at will.

Once cooked, one eats it with piquant dipping sauces and tiny bowls of bland, steamed rice, which can be ordered separately, using black, plastic chopsticks. Forks are also provided to ease eating. It is quite a filling dish and a single portion is plenty for two people.

The regular soup costs 30 Br while the hot (spicy) soup costs 50 Br. It contains ginger, garlic, black pepper corns, Chinese spices, and chilli. The spicy soup is available in two degrees – hot and medium. However, the medium is still hot.

In Chinese cities, the hotpot is usually cooked on gas plates, and some restaurants offer the ingredients in a buffet style setup. Hotpot ingredients typical include thinly sliced meat, leafy vegetables, mushrooms, and dumplings (stuffed with meat or vegetables), usually eaten with a dipping sauce (in this case garlic in oil and brown, nutty sesame sauce at six Birr each).

The Ethiopian waitresses provide excellent service: they are friendly and fast to bring both the food and refill the hotpot with water as it boils away quite rapidly. On ordering the food at 7:20pm, it starts arriving within six minutes, with the fire following 10 minutes later.

Initially the pot is so hot that the meat and vermicelli (thin, white, almost see-through noodles at 25 Br) that touch it, burn onto the cylinder and shrivel up from the heat.

The thinly sliced lamb meat does not take long to cook, and in the beginning, when the fire is still very hot, the food cooks quickly, so much that the bowtie-shaped “butterfly” noodles (eight Birr a portion) soon become too soft. It is thus advisable to designate one person at the table to oversee the cooking, since people can easily become distracted and leave the food, which does not need much cooking time, in the soup for too long.

The tofu (30 Br), soft white blocks made of bean curds, with very little flavour or smell, and which the restaurant obtains from other operators of Chinese eateries in town, more-or-less retains its firmness but takes on the fiery flavour of the soup.

The bitter, fresh spinach (25 Br) one does not want to overcook. Yet, the fire lasts for more than an hour and towards the end one can leave the food in for longer.

In the case of opting for the meat barbeque, one cooks the meat on a hot plate instead of a kesel mandija.

The owner, who is from Beijing, does not speak either English or Amharic.

“We communicate in broken Mandarin Chinese,” said Edom Wubishet, the head waitress of the restaurant, who lived in China for about four years working as an English teacher.

There are two sections: inside what used to be the house, there are two rooms containing one table only for private parties and a big room with many tables. In a big room by the entrance, there are 12 wooden tables with bench seats meant for larger groups. The tables each have holes in them for the kesel mandija. However, on this Tuesday evening, September 7, 2010, there are not that many eaters.

The restaurant is large and, judging by the sizes of the tables, caters to large groups. Ideally everyone would share the food, which is cooked in the centre of the table. While the decor is simple to the point of being completely undecorated, self-cooking the food contributes greatly to the festive mood that most of the customers seem to be enjoying.

Eriza Pradipta, from Indonesia, misses the food of his home country. The Chinese restaurants outnumber the Indonesian ones, which are underrepresented in the city, and he eats at Beijing Restaurant about once a month, he told Fortune.

Soft drinks cost seven Birr each and bottles of local beer 12 Br while imported Chinese alcohol, Beijing Erguotou (Chinese white liquor) at 80 Br is also available.

Most of their clientele are Chinese, followed by other foreigners and some Ethiopians, according to Edom. The busy times are on the weekends.

“On Friday to Sunday it gets really crowded,” Edom told Fortune.

On the downside, the bathrooms, though very clean, have no toilet paper or soap, but the management is happy to supply these on request.

The restaurant is open for lunch from 10:00am to around 2:00pm and again from 5:00pm until 10:00pm, for dinner, every day.