asiatisch a Asian
People in Stuttgart go crazy for a chain of pan-Asian (let’s say Chinese-y) take out counter called Hotalo. Any given lunchtime, the lineup outside its outposts can reach up to sixty people, winding around the transit station or shopping centre. Heaven forbid you should attempt to breach this line, say to get to one of the lunch counters with a more reasonable 4 or 5 person queue. Luckily, many Germans have a 1 or 2 hour Mittagspause or lunch break built into their day, so if they want to spend 30 minutes in line for some chicken chowmein that’s been sitting under a heat lamp for several hours, they have all the time in the world do it in. On a weekend it’s as popular as an ice cream café (and that’s saying a lot – dairy is like a religion here - more later.)
I’m not sure what Hotalo’s draw is – it doesn’t even have that delectable, greasy, steamy, MSG-laden smell that could lead a blind man to a food court. On first contact, I had to muster as much non-threatening, anti-budging body language as possible as I made my way to the front of the line in order to peer through the glass and figure out what kind of food it was. The smell, for me, is half the mouth-watering experience. Although I’m not sure that my familiarity with cheap sushi and late-night Chinatown fried rice make a strong case for me being a connoisseur of pan-Asian delights, I think I can safely say that there is a lot less exposure to and expectations from the whole Chines.e food experience And considering that the Udo-Snack counter has to supplement its Japanese street food fare with Currywurst and hamburgers, I get the feeling that Stuttgarters are happy to limit their experience with Asian food to Hotalo for the time being.
In fact, so loyal are they to Hotalo that they seem to have no interest in trying to recreate the magic at home. The bottles pictured above, which you may recognize as soy sauce and sesame oil respectively, two of the most important ingredients for imitating decent Chinese food, cost me a total of 5,90 Euros in the international section of the discount superstore Kaufland. Never mind that soy sauce is available in about fifteen different brands, viscosities and sodium content at my local No Frills in Toronto, where it is shelved alongside the red wine vinegar and olive oil. Never mind that, on the other hand, Kaufland gives as much floor space up to salty, fizzy, foreign and local types of bottled water as to produce. Let’s think about the fact that I spent $9 CDN for half a cup of sesame oil and one cup of soy sauce. I get more soy sauce free with takeout sushi. Seriously, the sesame oil is the size of a minibar bottle, and even the airlines have come around to recognize that 100 mL is a miserly size.
Sadly, I’m going to have to ration my home-made Chinese food intake. Luckily, my video store categorizes all of its Japanese anime rentals under the title “Asian Food”, so if I could just learn to like manga, I would have a plentiful substitute. Or, I guess, there’s always Hotalo.
No comments:
Post a Comment