I have been to Shanghai and Beijing this year. I tried "real" Chinese food from China for the first time, after having had it in Europe, Thailand, Japan, Australia or Hawaii. I have to say that I was rather disappointed. I tried all the main types of Chinese food : Shanghainese, Cantonese, Sichuanese, Pekinese, and Shangxinese. I had already been disappointed by Chinese food in Japan, compared to the one in Belgium and Australia (the two best I have eaten in average worldwide).

Chinese food in Japan is very different from that in Western countries. Chinese usually means gyoza (jiaozi), ramen or tantanmen, shoronpo (dim sum), which is the good part. When it comes to rice dishes, it is usually less good and less varied than the best Chinese of Western countries. Japanese Chinese is pretty much limited to chukadon, ebi chili, subuta, mabo doufu and a few other dishes. Expensive Chinese in Japan serve bird's nest, shark's fin, abalone, and other typical Imperial Chinese delicacies, but frankly, it's not because it's costly that it is good.

In China, I found all the dishes I had seen in Japan, as well as many of those in the West (but not all, e.g. I couldn't find orange duck, lemon chicken, black beans pork, crsipy chicken in tomato-sauce on cabbage, fried vegetable thick noodles, BBQ pork, etc.). That is probably due to the shortness of my stay. On the whole, the food was less good, and rather poor quality. I had to go to the most expensive restaurants in town (e.g. Fangshan in Beihai Park in Beijing, and the Cantonese restaurant or Shanghai's Grand Hyatt) to find something equivalent to what I'd eat in Belgium. The irony is that it was more expensive in China, where the GDP per capita is 30x lower.

Did anybody else have similar impressions ? Thomas, Bossel, Rocklee and other that went to China ?