#92: Lunch Rhythms
Fried Tofu and Chili Rice at the Beijingya
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This week’s newsletter continues March’s loose focus on food and eating, at one of the better Chinese canteens in downtown Brussels.
Thwack. The sound of a cleaver hammering through a piece of meat.
I can’t see who’s wielding the knife. Across from my corner table, where I’ve tucked myself in next to a warm radiator, is the restaurant’s prep station. Contents: a steaming oversized industrial rice cooker, a pile of plastic laminated menus, and by a foggy window two rows of four bronzed lacquered ducks hooked by the thorax and hanging from a dewy metal rail. And, somewhere I can’t see, behind a microwave, a hidden butcher.
The restaurant is not full - it’s late in the lunch service, the diciest time to try and eat in a Brussels restaurant, because you never know exactly if you’re welcome or if they’re shutting down for the afternoon. It is not noisy either, but it is loud.
A tubular windchime tinkles when the front door opens. The waitress - black jeans, black jumper, black apron and taut bun of straight black hair on top of her head like a crown - taking my order giggles when she sees me blowing into my cupped palms. She tells me to turn on the radiator even though I’ve already told her it's already on. “C’est froid, non?” she giggles a second time when returning with a Coke, and she lays the back of her hand against the heating and turns the knob.
Someone bangs their fist on the blonde wood of her table, a woman on the other side of the dining room doubled over her half-empty plate and her companion opposite cantilevered over one side of her chair and clutching at her ribs.
An unseen radio plays melodic Chinese-language pop, and staring at the Beijingya’s stubby plastic Christmas tree the pulsating green blue yellow and pink lights seem to flash in rhythm with the music.
Nǐ hǎo says a departing family of three, plump in their thick puffy winter coats, to the hidden butcher. A woman emerges from behind the microwave, cleaver in hand and like my server dressed all in black though her hair is tied back in a ponytail - reciprocates with a high-pitched nǐ hǎo of her own, and a smile.
A rotund man in a white shirt in the closest occupied table barks into a phone held to his right ear. His shirt has a broad collar and the two uppermost buttons are open, even though it is January and almost snowing outside. Folds of back fat roll out the top of his high-backed chair, and his glasses are perched halfway up his balding scalp. He is sitting at a table with people - colleagues? - who are talking about car parks, I think. Another of their company - not the fat man on his phone, or the younger man with a musketeer beard and Arizona shirt alongside him - stands and enumerates in a loud voice the communes in which their business has issues. An announcement to the others that lunch is over.
A new customer pushes the door open again. The windchime trills but no sound from the streets outside follows in their wake; we are insulated from the low grey clouds and the cold and the constant wet slurry falling on the footpath outside on the quiet Rue Melsens.
At the table furthest from me, an older man with grey hair and brown shoes and a thick herringbone duffel coat folded over the empty chair next to him, sits alone in front of his bowl of noodles and silver tea pot and grasping his chopsticks in his right hand.
The giggling server returns with my order of deep-fried tofu, coming back a second time after filling a ceramic bowl with fresh rice from the steaming cooker opposite. I dose it with a little of the viscous, dangerously red chili oil from the small glass jug on my table. And then a little more, and a little more, mixing it with the rice until it turns rusty. I realise my mistake only after the first mouthful. My lips catch fire, and then my throat. The fried tofu cubes are scalding hot too. I am momentarily dazed and the room goes quiet and I can now only concentrate on my lips, my tongue, the back of my throat, and my now-running nose. I cannot process anything else.
Second, third and fourth mouthfuls follow, alternating precarious mounds of tofu and chili rice on my black enamel chopsticks. The room has regained volume, and focus, though there is not much to see; a couple of paintings of plants, a red calendar with gold calligraphy hanging by the cash register, and behind me on the bar counter a silver toad with coins jammed in its mouth. I look at the goosepimply, glassy, caramel duck flesh hanging in the window. I read the ingredients of the unbranded bottle of soy sauce on my table and, slowly, I adjust to the heat and the tofu cools down.
The windchime jangles. Another round of loud nǐ hǎos and a couple of hearty bonne années as a woman a thick red and black tartan scarf and a bald (or is he shaven-headed?) man enter and place takeaway orders at the prep counter. She sits down at an adjacent table to mine and dawdles in her phone. He does not, and the woman behind the counter puts her cleaver down to come out again and stand next to him for a quiet conversation while he waits.
I was warm now, my mouth certainly so, and drowsy in my corner next to the heating. It would be a wrench to leave. When the bald man tinkles the windchimes as he departs with his foil container in hand, I can see the weather has not improved. But my plate is empty.
Thwack. I stand up to gather my things. Thwack. The woman returns to her work station by the window.