Rou Jia Mo, Wo de Pengyou (Muslim Burger, My Friend)

Kevin Jones


Maybe it’s because I’ve attended Loyola for my first two years of undergraduate work, a campus that is a 10-minute walk from a coffee shop and an hour’s walk from the nearest Chipotle, but I could not be more impressed with the amount of food that is located right outside of the willow tree-line property we attend in Beijing. Our campus has 15,000 students, and as I am constantly reminded by an embarrassed Chinese roommate, it’s a teeny-tiny, itsy-bitsy campus for China. Regardless, the square block we populate is surrounded on all four sides by over 100 restaurants, cafes, bakeries, and people just standing outside with a grill trying to make a buck.
If I walk down the six flights of stairs from my room after 6 p.m., make a left out of the building, pass by the school store, the basketball courts, and finally the guard who checks everyone’s temperature as they walk in with a broken thermometer, I’m harassed immediately by a smell combination of skunky body odor and burnt hair. Its English name is stinky tofu, and Chinese people absolutely flock to it. A man seems to have fashioned his own George Foreman to grill the delicacy, and he does it directly in front of our gate. No one says anything, not to him, or the woman hawking jewelry right next to him. Across the street from this pair is a man toting a metal trashcan with a coal fire in the bottom. The whole contraption sits in a wagon. Overtop of the fire he has a covered pan in which he makes popcorn. The man next to him is leaning against a glass case, that has also been placed in a wagon. The glass case is full of warm, unpeeled, whole potatoes on a stick. Next to him is a woman selling books as far ranging as Bill Clinton’s My Life, to Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History in Time. She also has her supplies in a wagon, but her wagon is connected to a bike. I’ve only seen a police officer drive by once when she’s been there, but when it happened, she took off like those books were heroin and she had two strikes.
I make it to a restaurant. Today I’ve chosen one of my favorite Muslim eateries, a place aptly named “Big Orange Muslim place” because it’s one of the larger restaurants on East Gate, serves Muslim food, and is decorated like the inside of Little Caesar’s. Chinese food is diverse and, usually, delicious. China has 52? 56? 57? I always forget ethnic minorities, each with a different language and different cuisine. On the East Gate this proves itself in Muslim food with over four restaurants that refuse to serve beer or pork on one block. My favorite dish, Da Pan Ji (literally "big plate chicken") is served with garlic, potatoes, onions, and various spices including Zanthoxylum seeds which give my entire mouth a vibrating and numbing sensation. Of course, the meal also includes chicken. Actually, an entire chicken. Head, feet, liver, heart, everything. And, to top it off, instead of cutting the actual meat, or, at least, what we would consider the edible meat, off the chicken in slices, the cook/butcher just cuts directly through the bone. It’s kind of like chicken nuggets without the exterior breading. And if the chicken nuggets weren’t in any particular shape. And if the nuggets still had bones in them. OK, maybe it’s not that much like chicken nuggets. It’s fine though; I just pick up a piece of chicken with my kuai zi (chopsticks), pray that it’s a piece of meat, not an organ, and bite down tenderly. If I hit bone, I just spit. Anywhere. It’s like a steak house with peanut shells; just throw ‘em.
If I don’t make it sound delicious, I apologize; it truly is. And, it’s a fun experience. It does, however, understandably, take a couple tries to get used to.
Right outside the Muslim restaurant is a stand that sells rou jia mo, affectionately termed “Muslim burgers.” They are lamb. I know this for two reasons. 1) It’s a Muslim restaurant, so it can’t be pork, and 2) The lamb is on a rotisserie spit in clear view of the patrons. My consistent order is liang ge (2) and the server, an 18-year-old girl who works 16 hour days, takes a butcher’s knife in one hand and a gardening trowel in the other and slices the meat so it lands perfectly in the hand shovel and tosses it elegantly into a shallow metal bowl. She says a series of words that I have yet to understand but have taken to mean, “Do you want everything on this?” To this, I almost always nod my head and wave my hand irregularly over the fixins she has in front of her. She puts in lettuce, onion, la jiao (which is a type of spice from crushed up peppers and pepper seeds), scallions, tomato paste, and something that looks like chocolate sauce that is absolutely, without a doubt, not chocolate sauce. She takes her trusty butcher’s knife in one hand, and trades her shovel for a 2 pronged fork and flips and spins the entire batch slicing and turning and slicing in a blur of movement and clank of metal. Voila. She takes two buns from the steamer that keeps them warm and stuffs each full with product. She then asks for 7 kuai. 1 dollar. I gladly relinquish it.

The next day, after a three hour class, we’re released into the afternoon air like a pack of scrambling hyenas, all of us trying to pounce on the nearest bowl of jiaozi (dumplings), plate of gong bao ji ding (kung pao chicken), or street food chicken wrap egg thing. This time, we go out the West Gate and turn right. To hungry eyes that haven’t had American food in three months, this is almost more temptation than we can bear. West Gate is on the Western side of our campus, and, coincidentally, is the location to get any Western chain offered in China. Turn left, and it’s KFC and McDonald’s, go straight, and it’s Subway and 7-11. After three months, even convenience store burgers look good. But, today, we press on; we know what we want.
We pass the 24-hour noodle place that usually tastes like the noodles have been sitting out for at least 23 of the 24, pass the China Construction Bank, one of the occupationally-themed, government-owned banks of China to match Agricultural Bank, Merchant’s Bank, and Communications Bank, and stop at the stand to buy some drinks. It looks like a snack shack: made of wood with an open window rather than a door. An ice cream freezer sits in the front, refrigerators stocked with drinks are in the back, and packages of cookies and chips are to the left. To the right, however, are various cuts of meat. Tun (pronounced with a harsh Twar sound in Beijing, and most closely related to kabob in English) sit out with cubes of meat pushed down onto a foot long toothpick. What looks like octopus legs lie directly next to the meat. None of it is covered in any way. We buy our drinks (I have taken a liking toward a peach flavored soda with some Chinese name) and leave. We’ll be back later.
We head to Jiaozi, Baozi, the first restaurant I ate at in Beijing, and even after a bout with food poisoning from the establishment (I ate there four out of five meals), I can’t stop myself from going back. Outside the door is a grill with what appears to be a cylindrical tower of wood placed over top of a pile of coals. The owner, or at least the guy who greets us at the door every single time, no matter which hour of the day, is a round faced man in his mid twenties. He is perpetually smiling. There are only five tables in the ten foot wide, fifteen foot long restaurant and the bistro doesn’t have a door, rather six inch strips of plastic that hang from the top of the jamb and fall to the floor. We step through, and, as always, I get the sensation we’re going through a dirty carwash. The tile is dimpled with little craters; whether that was the original style or a product of time, I try not to think about. Regardless, dirt is caked in each and every valley. We sit down at a table and glance at the menu, written entirely in Chinese placed on the wall at the far end of the room. It’s a force of habit; we’ve known how to say jiaozi since day one. It’s hard to survive in China without knowing the word.
We turn to the man and order two trays for everyone in the party. He repeats the order to confirm and goes over to the cylindrical tower of wood which is used to keep the premade jiaozi warm. He grabs the order and brings it to us immediately, placing a stack of steaming, circular trays in the middle of the table. He goes to roll more dumplings at a countertop next to our table; not hesitating at all to replenish his depleted stock. A stack of ceramic bowls is at the end of our table. I give one to everyone, then grab an open beer bottle that’s also sitting at the end of the table. I pour some of its contents into the dish: vinegar. I pass the bottle around and in turn I receive a cookie jar full of la jiao and spoon some into the vinegar. I grab my chopsticks and stir the concoction, take my stick out and suck on the end to confirm the spiciness. Perfect. I ask the owner for some da suan, and when he returns with the bulb of garlic, I break a clove off for everyone and start peeling the skin off my own.
A TV is on in the upper left corner playing Lamb Lamb, a Chinese version of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, and I take my chopsticks and pluck a dumpling. They always stick to the bottom of the tray because the base is woven wood that allows the steam from the heater to go through the entire tower of trays, keeping every jiaozi warm. I dunk the dumpling in the sauce, take a tiny bite of garlic, and pop the dough and meat into my mouth, biting down tenderly. It’s like magic. The bitter of the vinegar, the spice of the la jiao, and the garlic of the garlic combine with the salt used in the jiaozi recipe and it’s like a volcano on tastebuds. My lips unconsciously curl into a smile. I eat the last 19 jiaozi that come in my two trays, barely looking up or talking to the friends I’m with. This is my moment to savor. When it’s over, my eyes are still closed as I happily ask the jolly host/waiter/owner for the bill. 8 kuai. The unconscious smile remains on my face.
We walk outside, back to the snack shack. We can hear the crackling of oil from the minute we walk through the plastic drapes and we can see steam rising from the fryer as we approach. A woman stands behind a circular griddle. A tub of batter sits next to her and she spoons some out onto the hot metal and lets it seep out to the edges. It looks like she’s making a crepe until she cracks an egg on top and uses the ladle to make sure every inch of the frying dough is covered. She lets it sit for a second before taking something that looks like chicken out of a bag and placing it on the burner. She pauses again, this time for a minute or so. She takes a metal spatula out and slides it quickly under the dough. She asks, “yao jiao ma?” and I answer “yao” because I love the spice, even though I can still feel it tingling on my lips from my dumpling dipping sauce. She spoons some crushed peppers onto the chicken, puts the chicken on the crepe, takes a piece of lettuce from the bench sitting next to her, places it on the chicken, folds the crepe in on itself, puts the whole thing in a plastic bag, spins the bag for good measure, and hands it to me. 3.5 kuai.
Sold.