Menu of adventure on food journey leaves me hungry for more

I'm convinced there's a family somewhere in Beijing who've been talking about me.

It was the end of June, I'd been in China about four days, it was getting late on a Sunday and I'd no food in the flat, so I stepped into the first restaurant I came across (which in Beijing means walking for about 0.5 seconds in any direction).It turned out to be a hotpot place. I'd never been in a hotpot restaurant before, in China or anywhere else.

Sitting down at a massive table, I immediately got stuck into the 3-liter bottle of water in front of me while starting a frantic attempt to communicate, "Just feed me whatever is in the kitchen".

But the young waiter was a study in patience. No matter how long it took, he was determined to see I got exactly what I wanted. Problem was, I didn't know what I wanted.

Roughly an hour and two translation apps (one English-to-Chinese and another Chinese-to-Irish) later, we had kind of got to the point where we knew what I was eating, or the waiter had.

Then, the cooking started in the big pot in front of me and it turned out the bottle of water was for that, not me. The waiter brought me some diluted fruit juice to drink while I watched the food cook, not being able to resist moving my head almost inside the pot. The restaurant was empty but for me and a family over by the window, who had slowed their eating right down to decide what was wrong with me. By the sound of it, they had competing theories.

It's lucky the place wasn't busy because the waiter kept having to come back to stop me lifting raw meat out of the pot to eat. But the real nightmare began when the meat was ready and he watched me disgrace myself with the chopsticks for several minutes before asking me via his phone, "An feidir liom cabhru leat foghlaim? (Can I help you learn?)". So the family across the way, who had completely stopped eating by now, got to watch the prolonged painful lesson, sticks and fingers flying everywhere, before he gave up and started mixing the cooked meat in some sauce for me.

I had to draw the line when he — and I committed a journalist's cardinal sin here by forgetting to write down his name — asked, "An feidir liom do nudail a mheascadh duit? (Can I mix your noodles for you?)".

Fast-forward four weeks, and Li Hai says he has a fish order in for me from Tianjin, his native city. Not only that, he says he'll take me fishing there in the autumn. In Beijing, people only fish in the canal or in the Liangma River for fun, not for sustenance, he insists dismissively.

I met Li at a restaurant not far from where I live. I was walking home from the local library and, as usual, remembered I had nothing at home to cook, so I stepped off the street and into the small, packed neighborhood joint.

I pointed at the wall to a photo of noodles in soup that looked like what some people were eating and sat down where I could, at a table with Li, who was more than happy to have me.

He laughed when I ordered a bottle of beer and offered me his bottle of water. This man is seriously into healthy living, I thought, as he insisted I drink. My mouth lit up, followed by my throat. It wasn't water. Li laughed again as I gulped the baijiu (white liquor) down and felt the heat spreading to my chest.

We attempted to communicate haltingly — in Chinese, I managed to tell him my name and where I was from, then we laughed at each other's incomprehensible jokes — until we resorted to the translation apps on our phones.

"I fish once in a while, but I'm not good at it," he told me.

"Tianjin seafood is relatively simple, but because of the mud coast the seafood from there is more delicate than sandy places like Dalian and Huludao (Liaoning province) or Beidaihe (in Hebei province)."

I'll have to wait a few days, he says, seafood is still fattening around this time, but from Tianjin he's going to get me sent ocean crab, conch meat, shrimp and "a kind of yellow insect from the sea that's very tasty. You shouldn't be afraid to eat them".

"Locally, we call the yellow bug a lynx. To this day, I don't even know the academic name."

When my soup arrived — it turned out the specialty of the place was zhajiang (fried bean paste) noodles — and I turned down the offer of a spoon to maneuver my chopsticks like two articulated lorries, Li nodded and smiled in approval. As he gave me the thumbs-up, I thought of my friend in the hotpot place. If only he could see me now.

As I was leaving, Li sent me a final message to translate on WeChat, "There's a real reason to cook food without boundaries."

The app had mangled his meaning in translation, I thought. Or, maybe, I'm still acclimatizing.

Contact the writer at maxwell@chinadaily.com.cn