Business Dinner in China

 

For more than three years, between 2003 and 2007, I have attended hundreds of business dinners in China. They were a mandatory predicament on the trips to audit suppliers with my Chinese teammates. This blog describes experiences to be expected in such events.

I normally visited companies in small Chinese cities, with just a couple of million inhabitants and the infrastructure of a village. 

Once, my friend and I declined the dinner invitation and were happily relaxing with a good bottle of wine in the hotel lobby. A hurried Chinese came to the hotel asking us to follow him for dinner, explaining that important people were waiting. We tried the wine tasting as an excuse, but the person invited himself to join us. As soon as we filled his cup, he gulped down all the wine showing us the empty glass with the "Gan Bei!" toast and urging us to do the same. In Chinese, Gan Bei means empty glass. We failed our attempt to skip dinner.

At the entrance of the restaurant, we were normally flanked by the young attendants with typical clothes singing something that sounds like 'huan yin guan lin' repeated many times. It means "welcome". This reception is quite common in Chinese restaurants.

One of the attendants comes out of formation and leads us to our reserved table.

We seat around the round table with the glass rotating plate on top, always taking care of where each person would sit, intercalating a visitor with a host person. The guest of honor is placed in a strategic position of facing the entrance with the host leader by his side. 

Soon after I sat down, a waitress came with that electric racket to kill mosquitoes, excused herself, and placed the racket under the table, under the big red tablecloth that went down to the floor. When she passed the racket, it was a cracking machine gun for every electrocuted mosquito. I was startled by the number of mosquitoes under the table.

The serving sequence is the same in most restaurants. They bring green tea and serve each one a small cup, leaving the jar on the table. Then they bring small bowls of boiled or roasted peanuts and dry jellyfish cut into strips. These are typical appetizers, but there may be others depending on the restaurant.

After the appetizers, they bring Bai Jiou (white alcohol) and serve a 'hammer' to each one. In some places, in addition to Bai Jiou, they bring a glass of vinegar to drink as an aperitif.

The ritual with Bai Jiou, which is a very strong liquor that tastes like aviation kerosene, and is made with the most diverse cereal leftovers, is the ceremony of Gan Bei (empty glass). Everyone toasts Gan Bei and takes the whole glass in one gulp. You can't make a face!

After the first glass, competition begins to try to make the guests drunk and it is an art at dinners to know how to stop before getting drunk without offending the hosts. As I am a foreigner and did not want to get drunk, I usually made up that I was taking medicine. As foreigners are always seen as elderly (Lao Wai), the excuse stuck. An expatriate friend, CEO of another company, took his Scottish father-in-law to dinner. The father-in-law knocked down the entire entourage of Chinese, repeating Gan Bei until everyone fell and he was not drunk. I would like to have such a father-in-law as a weapon ...

After the appetizers, they started to serve a sequence of the most diverse dishes, but always very colorful and nutritious with vegetables, legumes, different types of meat, and fish with very different aromas and flavors.

At one of these dinners, our host commented that the specialty of the house was fish, and I thought it was a great choice. The Chinese always make a point of eating very fresh meats, so they keep fish, shrimp, shellfish, crabs, and the like alive in aquariums.

In this restaurant, the waiter asked me to move the chair away when we ordered fish. Then he opened a trapdoor that was right under my chair and placed a hammock down there, in the dark. When he removed the net, it was full of live fish. Our host chose some fish, which were separated by the waiter and placed on the floor beside us. He returned the other fish to the pond, closed the lid, and invited me to return my chair to the spot, on top of the trapdoor.

I found it very funny and obeyed. After that, he caught the fish that were hitting the ground beside us by the tail and hit the fish heads hard on our table. It was BAM-BAM and he went out with the fish towards the kitchen.

Not even 5 minutes went by and the waiter returned with the fish ready. It was a large casserole half-filled with boiling oil and the other half, floating on top of the oil, was fried girl finger pepper. The pepper layer was at least 10 cm thick. The waiter then took a slotted spoon and started to 'fish' most of the pepper that was on the boiling oil until it revealed the surface of the oil and the fish that was inside. He left us a small slotted spoon for us to serve. The fish was very spicy but very tasty. Living in China we have to get used to spicy food.

There are many other interesting dishes, but I will make another blog just for that ...

After we were satisfied, the question came about what we would want as a main course. At first, I was surprised by this but I soon got used to it that at this moment we would have to decide whether we would eat cooked white rice (Mi Fan), loose rice with vegetables, eggs, and meat (Cao Fan), or Shop Suey pasta (Cao Mien).

After the main course, the banquet was usually over, but sometimes there were dessert options as well.