Dinner - Suzhou

One of my favourite cities on this China trip was Suzhou. 

It's a beautiful city with 2500 years of history. You can't help picturing yourself thrown back in time to Imperial China when you stroll in Suzhou's beautiful Classical gardens and enjoy a boat cruise on the scenic Grand canal while being serenaded with Suzhou Pingtan.

Lingering Garden's iconic rock "Auspicious Cloud-Capped Peak"

(There's a hawk's beak at the top of the rock and a turtle at the bottom)

 

The Grand Canal Cruise

After the Cruise and the Suzhou Pingtan musical performance, we walked from the dock to the restaurant: 

Chicken cubes with potatoes and carrots

Interesting dish and quite good with rice. The potatoes didn't fully absorb the flavour from the sauce.

Tofu in egg sauce

Not really appetizing - the egg sauce was kind of bland.

Eggplant

This was super tasty! The eggplant were perfectly cooked & juicy and the sauce was really good.

Squirrel Fish in sweet and sour sauce

This type of fish is a Suzhou specialty and it was delicious! The fish was deep-fried awesomeness since the little fried rectangles of meat were tender on the inside and packed with flavour and crispy from the outside. The pineapples and carrots added great colour to the dish and sweetness to the sauce. 

Ham and Fish soup

A little on the salty side, but still really good. 

Ham and Egg Pancake and Pork Knuckle

The pancake was crispy on the outside and yummy overall. 

The pork knuckle was amazingly tender and succulent: it was melt-in-your-mouth goodness. I even tried to polish off the fatty meat (which was even better since it totally soaked in the flavour of the sauce) - Delish!

Another soup with tomato and egg

Choy

Definitely not as oily as some of the other places. 

Overall: In the words of the Suzhou dialect, the meal was "Ai Che" which means delicious. 

Snacks: 

 

Roasted Ginkgo biloba known in Chinese as 白果 (White fruit) or 銀杏 (Silver apricot) are a popular snack in Suzhou

The first thing I noticed when I bit into the nut was the waxy texture outside the nut. As I kept chewing, I got more of the soft nutty taste, but then at the end, the nut quickly shows its bitterness and you're left with a lingering bitter aftertaste. 

Our guide also told us the history of the ginkgo tree: the leaves with a cleft in the middle (making the leaves look like pants) are from a male tree and the leaves that look like a dress are from a female tree.

White peach

Huge, really sweet and delicious!