I've been living in China (Shenzhen and Guangzhou) for 6 months now, and I try to explore restaurants every day. But also my girlfriend complains that there's nothing here that she wants to eat, so she ends up at McDonald's as the only "safe" option.
My bad experience is:
- Many coffee places seem to use powder milk, which ends up tasting disgusting, but the milk tea seems okay.
- The "spicy" food options appear to be giving me, and Chinese people, a severe "allergic" reaction where they start sneezing and having to blow their nose (but instead they inhale and spit it out). So I've stopped eating spicy food.
- The "burgers" here are made from a weird processed meat that resembles what you find in chicken nuggets, i.e. likely made from "pink slime" ("Lean finely textured beef or LFTB").
- The "pizza" is so disgusting I couldn't even eat it, and is worse than frozen pizzas in Europe.
- Every mall has maybe 20 restaurants but every menu looks identical: red spicy soup, noodles, slices of meat, 2 pieces of leafy vegetable.
- If they sell fruit, they first have to dip it some powder that is sweet and spicy. I'm frustrated that I can't even buy fruit that hasn't been manhandled to the point where it's no longer resembles food.
My good experience is:
- I've found a few places that basically serve European-style food, and they're really good, serving fresh salad, meat that tastes like meat, and so on.
- I've also found some shops that sell smoothies made from mango/banana/avocado/coconut, as one of the only Chinese healthy options.
- "Barbeque" places sometimes serve unadulterated food, although some of them sluther everything with sweet sauce. The restaurants run by people from Xinjiang are highly preferable.
I'm considering to stop eating out entirely and just learn to cook my own food and make my own smoothies, but I travel a lot and it's inconvenient.
So what's going on? What life hacks am I missing?
Update:
I can't say that I'm surprised by the comments, but I was really hoping for constructive suggestions from people who might have had similar issues.
Perhaps a more polite way to put it, is that I'm a picky eater, I don't like spicy, oily, unhealthy, or industrially processed food.
I love Thai, Vietnamese, and Indian food. So, are there any options that emphasize more natural/vegetarian ingredients, like coconut, raisins, garlic, mango, avocado, and so on?