Restaurants available in Song Dynasty China were enormous and enormously varied. Yet the food itself was very similar to what is available today.
The large Chinese cities of the past required feeding just as much as they do today. Travel to Song Dynasty Hangzhou, for example, and find the large buildings characterised by doorways disguised by floral arches and with half a pig or some other symbol outside. This sign is clear for all potential customers – restaurant. Inside, waiters and waitresses take guests, usually in large parties, to their tables and then wait for their orders. All patrons are encouraged to call out (in typically loud voices) exactly what it is they would like – some want a hot dish, others something cooling, some meat, others fish and so forth. Large restaurants will pride themselves on their ability to provide anything that might be requested. Of course, the judicious application of rice wine, available in many grades and styles, can help persuade a guest that he actually wants a dish which it is rather easier to provide than, for example, roast swan stuffed with humming birds. Many restaurants specialized in particular types of dish, based on certain ingredients, styles or regional cuisine and, in these cases, customers expect that a limited amount of choice will be available. Irrespective of the dishes available, waiters are expected to memorise what their customers have ordered and to bring them exactly what was ordered swiftly and without making any mistake. He or, occasionally, she would call out the list of dishes to the Head Dishwarmer, who was stationed in the kitchen and who would call them out to relevant cooks.
There was a great deal of regional variation in food, although the cuisine does not seem to have changed much in the eight subsequent centuries. Cookbooks still speak of the basic seasoning ingredients of soy sauce, garlic, pepper, oil, ginger and so forth. It is the Szechwan dishes which had the reputation for being fiery – i.e. through the use of pimento (chilies were discovered by Columbus in the Americas nearly three hundred years after this). It was probably because so many officials were called up from the south to the northern Song region, with its much plainer tasting food, that led to the opening of so many regionally-based restaurants. Of course, all this food required an enormous amount of transportation. Marco Polo was among those who was amazed by the sheer scale and number of rice barges and fish containers flooding into the city every single day. It reinforced in his mind – or the mind of whoever it was who really wrote the text credited to him – just how powerful were the emperors of China.
