Everyone has hit up Chinatown at some time or another for a bite or a few interesting ingredients. A piece of lemon grass goes for $3 and, when steeped overnight in a bottle of vodka, makes a mean cocktail with a little lime and sour mix. But better than anything yummy you’d find in Chinatown are the foods you would never dream of touching. Because of Chinatown’s budget prices, I decided to search out the most disgusting foods I could eat for $10, which turned out to be far more than I had bargained for.
Most of the shops in San Francisco’s Chinatown smell like a container of General Tso’s Chicken, a can of tuna and a bottle of soy sauce left under the radiator in the men’s bathroom at Yates for a week.
Despite the smell, little Chinese grandmothers swarm like flies to the fish carcasses, scrutinizing their perspective suppers, and bark orders to the butcher. A woman slams a whole plucked duck, head and all, onto the scale before the young man ahead of her has even received his change. Looking over the scene and, inevitably, sniffing it along the way, one can only wonder, why would anyone actually buy food from this place?
I start off easy with something simply called, “Brown Candy,” which is really a block of brown sugar. Luckily the “White Bunny” candies are delicious, just like a creamy starburst. There are dozens of cake flavors, each one resembling an exotic Fig Newton that crumbles away from the tough jellied center, which taste like saccharin-sweetened grass clippings.
The individually packed jellies are a better way to go. From Lychee to Strawberry, the thimble-sized jello cups pop from their containers straight into your mouth. They are deliciously sweet, cool and just a little slimy.
Unfortunately, I must follow these treats with pickled duck eggs, easily the scariest item on my menu. Twice the size of normal eggs and blackened from the pickling process, their whites are bruised green and gray and their shiny yolks harden into black, chewy centers.
Gagging, I try to cover the flavor with something labeled “Soft Cake.” It looks and tastes like fried wontons cooked into rice crispy treats. The wontons melt in your mouth forming a gluey lump that sticks to the roof of the mouth and their aftertaste is reminiscent of dried fish. Feeling nauseous, I decide to raise my limit to $11, and buy two bottles of tea to wash away my lunch’s flavors. The first drink, aloe green tea, tastes poisonous, like after-sun gel. Luckily, the chrysanthemum tea is amazing, tangy and crisp, like berry lemonade. I chug half the bottle and swear off Chinese food for the next year.
D.C.’s Chinatown, little more than a Hooters and a bus stop, may not be much compared to New York’s or San Francisco’s, but with a tenner and a little luck, you might just find some pickled duck eggs of your own.
