Imagethief

The Shanghaist's Peijin Chen beat me to writing about Diaozha Shaobing/Tujia Shaobing:

Some of you have probably already seen stores and street vendors selling these things for about 3 yuan apiece. Apparently it's caught on big in Beijing and other big cities. The provenance of this "pizza" is supposedly from one of China's ethnic minorities, known as the Tujia (土家族) minority, who mostly hail from Hubei province. According to this article, in May of the last year the first Tujia pizza (土家烧饼/掉渣饼) franchise opened up in Hubei's provincial capital, Wuhan. In the next eight months franchises spread all over China -- costs of franchising vary from 3,000 yuan to 50,000 yuan, though this article claimed that you could open one up in Shanghai for a 30,000 franchising fee. We won't tell you much about the taste -- we haven't had one yet -- but evidently it's popular with people looking for a quick kebab type meal on the go, which means it might also be good for the post-shitfaced munchies, if they're open that late.

I'd like to thank him for the public service, and slap him for being so quick about it. But being jumped isn't going to stop me from a little rant. I just love Chinese street food fads. One of the few charming things about my traffic-clogged, rapidly industrializing neighborhood is that there is a long row of local, hole-in-the-wall snack counters at the corner of Xi Dawangu and Jianwai. On the space of about 100 meters there is a Chengdu Xiaochi style low-rent gaifan joint; two chuan stands (naturally); a fried chicken place (麦肯炸鸡, which, for my overseas readers, is a chain that cleverly uses the first characters from the Chinese names for both MacDonalds and KFC without being connected with either); a duck-neck joint (my wife loves this); two places selling deep fried beef pastries (西安香酥牛肉饼 or 千层饼); a jianbing cart; some kind of fried, meat-stuffed pancake that I don't recognize; a couple who make egg-filled pancakes on an overturned oil-drum; a place selling fried chicken sandwiches; a bubble-tea parlor; and probably two or three other places that I don't recall. In the morning this strip is redolent with the odors of cooking oil and burning meat, and is total insanity.

Many of these restaurants eke out enough business to survive after brief blossomings at the crest of Chinese food fads. Some have more endurance than others. 麦肯炸鸡 seems to be something of an institution, and the one around the corner on Chaowai always does ripping business. The first deep fried beef pastry place opened just over a year ago. It still does roaring trade, especially in cold weather, with a fifteen minute wait not uncommon. They never have managed to keep up with peak demand, although it might be simply clever marketing. They do the same thing at Mao's tomb by opening it for just a few hours a week. The natural reaction when you see a long line outside a Chinese food place is to think, Goddamn, I bet that's good! Look at the fuckin' line! (or , Cool! Mao's corpse!) and queue up to get yourself one of...whatever they are. Of course, Chinese taste in snack foods, this can be risky, as a foreigner who stands in any old line runs the risk of ending up with Beijing's very best wombat thymus on a stick.

The deep fried beef pasty really is good, although it's so greasy you dare only eat it in cold weather. Eating it in summer feels pointlessly self-destructive. Imaging a piroshki in filo pastry (千层饼 means "thousand layer biscuit") with a dash of Sichuan peppercorn, and you get the idea. Finger lickin' good! Mrs. Imagethief and I refer to them as "nuclear beef buns", in deference to the energy content per unit mass, and I think I've managed to work myself up for about five in the past year. One of the squawkiest moments I ever witnessed was a loud bitch-session between the auntie in front of me in the line and the two young women who, in a moment of perfect Chinese solipsism, somehow managed to completely overlook the forty-strong queue and simply went straight to the head of the line like they held the nuclear beef bun gold-club member card. When you gotta have one...

The success of the first nuclear beef bun place soon spawned an imitator around the corner that has never managed to recreate the success of the original. Truthfully, I've never tried the pretender because, well, it doesn't have a line so clearly it can't be as scrumptious. Or maybe they just manage their supply chain better, which is obviously a stupid thing to do and just shows their poor grasp of marketing.

While chuan are timeless, and 麦肯炸鸡 survives on stolen brand power (and, I hear, decent fried chicken), everything else comes and goes. In truth, the nuclear beef buns have had a spectacular run. Duck neck's day in the sun is clearly past. The other places do well, especially in the morning breakfast rush, but none has commanded the neighborhood like nuclear beef buns.

Until the diaozha shaobing (essentially, "super-delicious pan-fried bread") came along.

The first sign of something new was a growing drift of oily, brown paper envelopes on the sidewalk and a new line at a previously undistinguished snack joint. Within days, everyone in the neighborhood seemed to be munching on flat pieces of pan-fried bread. By the end of the week, the envelopes were starting to appear in the office as my colleagues started buying them. This weekend another place on my corner started selling them, cheekily right next to the first shop. Both places had long lines. I couldn't resist. I bought two and took them home.

Now, I'd like to address some of the points that Peijin Chen made.

First, they're good. They're not nuclear beef bun good, but they're pretty good, in an eat-em-while-they're hot, slice-of-pizza kind of way. Salty, oily, with just a dusting of savory mystery meet and herbs. The crust is chewy and satisfying, and does a nice job of holding the grease.

Second, they are undoubtedly the treat for post-shitfaced munchies. The chuan, or meat-stick, is currently king of the Beijing late-night, drunk-ass snack scene. Cheap'n'savory, chuan are like good friends: always there when you need 'em. And, like good friends, they can sometimes betray you, in this case with a monumental case of the roaring shits, thanks to the scraped-from-the-slaughterhouse-floor quality of the meat. But anyone who has ever staggered out of a Beijing bar at 2 AM in the testicle-shattering depths of winter with a powerful post-beer hunger can tell you how good the "串" character looks picked out in friendly, flexi-lights down some dusty alley. Variety is good, though, and pizza-crust, as everyone knows, is good for retarding alcohol absorption. And shaobing bread is basically pizza crust. I predict stiff competition for chuan if the fad doesn't burn out.

Third, three kuai a pop for shaobing is another Shanghai ripoff. They're two kuai in Beijing, and worth every fen.

Now it's debatable whether the shaobing is evidence of the Chinese invention of pizza. Maybe the Tujia were roastin' them up back when Western Civilization meant Xi'an. Or maybe every tribe that has mastered fire and grain at the same time has, at one point or another, discovered that shit tastes good on bread.

But if you want to dig into the story for yourself, you can check out the official website for one of Beijing's vendors at http://www.bjdahl.com/ (in Chinese). If that makes you hungry, you're only two kuai away from salty, greasy bliss. Unless you're in Shanghai, in which case you're three kuai away.