Wherever I’ve traveled in the world, Chinese food has been my salvation.
I like Japanese cuisine well enough as a Japanese, but abroad I rarely find myself missing it. When I first started traveling as a student, Japanese restaurants were scarce even in major cities, and when they did exist, they were invariably upscale establishments. The pricing put them out of reach for a young person watching expenses, and that instinct has stayed with me. These days sushi and ramen have proliferated globally, but I almost never seek them out. After all, even in Japan, I don’t eat them every day.
Still, spend a week wandering through butter-and-olive-oil territory and your body starts craving something lighter. The salinity of soy sauce, the umami of seafood broth, freshly steamed rice, the fermented depth of miso. Not the refinement of kaiseki, but I start to crave something more humble — the flavors of what you might call “Asian comfort food.”
That’s when Chinese food becomes your best ally.
Chinese restaurants exist in the most improbable places. Not just upscale dining rooms, but casual spots you can walk into without ceremony. Paris and New York have their Chinatowns, naturally, but you’ll find them on street corners in the unlikeliest countries. Bridgetown, Barbados. Cape Town. Tromsø, Norway. Tegucigalpa, Honduras. I could go on. Once, half-joking, I said, “Watch, there’ll be a 北京飯店 (Beijing Restaurant) around the next corner,” and the moment the words left my mouth, a sign in traditional characters reading 香港餐廳 (Hong Kong Restaurant) came into view.
This ubiquity is the legacy of centuries of Chinese diaspora. A global infrastructure of dried goods and condiments, adapted to local palates, meeting steady demand, establishing permanence.
At these restaurants, I always order the same two things: egg and lettuce fried rice (蛋菜炒飯, dan cai chao fan) and hot and sour soup (酸辣湯, suan la tang).
The fried rice is exactly what it sounds like — eggs and lettuce, nothing more. A foundational dish of Chinese rice cookery. Hot and sour soup originated in Sichuan: vinegar-sharp, chili oil–laced, both things at once. Both are standards on any menu.
I started ordering this combination on the advice of a travel companion with Hong Kong roots. “The fancy dishes are heavy with oil,” they told me. “Stick to the basics and you won’t go wrong. You can actually taste what you’re eating.”
They were right. Egg and lettuce fried rice, being so spare, reveals everything: the quality of the rice, the fragrance of the oil, the richness of the eggs, the freshness of the lettuce. Hot and sour soup makes plain the balance of acid and heat, the character of the vinegar and spices. Together, these two dishes deliver the satisfaction of an Asian meal while serving as a kind of diagnostic — of local ingredients, of the cook’s skill. The flavor shifts subtly from place to place. The same menu items, but each location leaves its signature. These variations become woven into your travel memory.
Perhaps what makes Chinese food so reliable for travelers is less its adaptability to any ingredient than its straightforward philosophy: feed the person in front of you. When you’re tired and those familiar flavors settle into your system, there’s just relief. And that relief gives you the momentum to keep moving.
Back in Japan, I still default to these two dishes if available when I walk into a Chinese restaurant. The staff sometimes tries to steer me toward mapo tofu or dumplings, but I hold firm. And I imagine I’ll keep meeting new versions of egg and lettuce fried rice and hot and sour soup on unfamiliar street corners, finding refuge in them again and again. Maybe travel, in the end, is just a series of meals that connect us to the world.
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