in expert hands

They call it an alley but it’s really just a small stretch of street so crammed with bicycles, and cars, and random people who’ve stopped to sell one kind of fruit or another, that the already small space narrows into something smaller and more intimate. The alley is really a neighborhood, a trillion-celled organism that thrives in the heart of a giant city, and both sides of this stretch are relentlessly packed with restaurants ranging in size from small to tiny.

It was raining when we went there for lunch this week. We were walking through something between a fine mist and heavy drops and we just kept walking until we almost reached the end. This is where you find the restaurant that Shi-wen came home talking about last week.  

We sat on plastic stools and ordered off the menu on the wall. Or better said, we asked the 10-year old server some questions and listened as his mother yelled answers from the kitchen. Together they figured out what the foreigners wanted and then brought the plates to our table.

I absolutely got what I wanted: 辣面, spicy noodles, the foundational fast food of Sichuan and of my lunches. I eat them so often that I’m used to explaining to waiters and restaurant owners that despite being a foreigner I somehow still manage to eat spicy food. And because we foreigners are still so memorable here, and because I have a habit of going back to the same places, I find it both kind of charming and kind of alarming how quickly the staff at these places remember me and what I like to eat. They see me and ask, “Spicy noodles?,” and I nod, yes. And if there is someone I don’t know working that day, any person I do know will automatically pre-empt the inevitable question, telling their colleague that yes, yes, this foreigner does eat spicy food.

It could just be me but I find people here to be friendly and warm, especially when you’re obviously in need of Chinese attention. Like when I was trying to mix up my noodles in the alley. My efforts caught the attention of the waiter’s mother, the cook, who was already interested in me because I was one of those peculiar foreigners who take pictures of their food. 

As I was mixing up my noodles she stepped in and told me that I needed to do a better job. I needed to whirl that pile of deliciousness sitting on top of my noodles into the depths of the pile. In essence, I needed to be able to use chopsticks, and use them to manage multiple meters of noodles, with much more finesse.

But there was a better solution. She took my chopsticks from me, and standing beside our table made what can only be described as beautiful love to my noodles. She carefully stretched them, rolled them, lifted and spun them. Her rhythms were regular with occasional surges, and I’ll be damned if by the time she was done those noodles hadn’t been transformed, each length now coated in its own beautiful cloak of spice and meat. "See," she said, "every noodle now has the flavor."

And they did. They absolutely did. Every bite was what she promised, a balanced mix of spice and salt, with slashes of cilantro and nut. And after I told her how much I loved them she returned to the kitchen, satisfied. We were then left alone to eat while her waiter ran around out front with another kid. At one point the two boys were tossing a coin back and forth and it found its way into the hood of my coat before tumbling onto the floor. The boy apologized, and through my noodles I garbled, “没关系,” no problem.

This is exactly what I like about these places. They’re normal. But they’re a different kind of normal. A normal I’d never before been a part of, but that’s now just down the street. Chengdu normal.