Seth’s blog

I am a big fan of pork belly. Whenever I see it on a menu I order it. The mayor of Chongqing (population 32 million) recently made headlines with a speech whose main point was

改善民生不只是吃红烧肉穿漂亮衣服

Which means: Better living standards is not just eating hong shao rou wearing beautiful clothes. Hong shao rou is pork belly braised in a red sauce. Maybe my favorite Chinese dish. Supposedly Chairman Mao’s favorite dish. I’m glad he said “not just” rather than “not”.

Some of my Tsinghua students are in Berkeley. I took three of them to Great China, the closest Chinese restaurant. They didn’t like the Kung Pao Chicken. The sauce was wrong. It’s supposed to be a little bit sour and a little bit sweet but wasn’t. They liked an eggplant dish but complained the eggplant wasn’t infused with the flavor of the sauce.

Today I had lunch at a Beijing restaurant with no menu. You choose dishes in discussion with your waiter. The restaurant’s theme is kung fu. Somehow having no menu is kung-fu-like. A sword hung on the wall and there were other martial-arts decorations. As we left, the wait staff said an ancient Chinese good-bye loudly in unison. It meant “the mountain and river will still be here [a metaphor for enduring friendship], let’s make a concrete date to meet again.” Only one of our two dishes was really good but I’ll go back.

• Vision therapy
• Omega-3 and brain health. “Participants were 280 community volunteers between 35 and 54 y of age, free of major neuropsychiatric disorders, and not taking fish oil supplements. . . Five major dimensions of cognitive functioning were assessed . . . Among the 3 key (n-3) [poly-unsaturated fatty acids], only DHA [was] associated with major aspects of cognitive performance.”
• The rise and fall of Beijing restaurants

Thanks to Steve Hansen, Tim Lundeen, and Eric Meltzer.

Two of my students took me here, which one list said is the best fish restaurant in Beijing. (Based on our meal, that’s plausible.) Its specialty is grilled fish “Wushan style”. Wushan is a mountain, not a province (like Sichuan or Hunan), so the restaurant may have invented the term. The menu is short. There are a bunch of cold dishes and the grilled fish, which comes in seven different flavors (hot & spicy, chinese sauerkraut, etc.). Unlike any other Beijing restaurant I’ve been to, you need a reservation. (Call a week ahead.) The restaurant, which wasn’t large, was packed. The walls were covered with Post-It notes. One said: “I wish I find my dream girl and me and my friend Bob have a safe life.” Another said: “Very spicy, very tasty, makes me feel very good.” A third said: “We had to wait a long time, so we ate a lot.” I wrote one saying what one of my students suggested: “We didn’t have to wait a long time but we ate a lot anyway.”