Nanjing Food Adventures

One of the menu items that I had been hoping to try is Nanjing’s salted duck.  During our very first meal in Nanjing we actually ended up ordering 3 foods that were quite well known in the area – salted duck, duck blood rice noodles and xiaolongbao dumplings.

The salted duck was nothing special.  In fact, it tasted very similar to Cantonese salted chicken.  The other 2 dishes were also just as unimpressive.  Perhaps I have developed an arrogant Cantonese preferred taste, as it seems like wherever I travel to in China, I never feel like the food compares to Guangdong.

The next morning, we found a really crowded restaurant close to our hotel so we decided to go in and try out the food.  It was a cold morning so we ordered some congee and a Nanjing specialy – tangbao (湯包).  I usually save the term soup dumplings for xiaolongbao, but in Nanjing, soup dumplings is definitely the more appropriate translation of tangbao.  Tangbao are supposed to be a bigger version of xiaolongbao, but in reality they weren’t that much bigger.  For me, the biggest difference is that they had a sweeter soup inside the dumpling compared to xiaolongbao.  I quite enjoyed these tangbao.

Hunan Road
This road is split into two areas – there is a section full of shopping and then there’s a section called the Lion’s Bridge, which is a pedestrian food street.  In reality, it was just a street full of different kinds of restaurants.  I was expecting a street full of street food vendors but that was not the case.

Well, we did find one stall selling some street food.

We decided to try a BBQ restaurant where we had to grill our own food.  It didn’t turn out very well as we didn’t realize how strong the heat was. Our food kept burning and finally the lady had to come over and grill it for us.