Cuisine AuntDai is set out to provide authentic Chinese food to all customers and also encourage our customers to embrace Chinese culture around dinner tables.
\nIn a typical Chinese dinner table setting, all the dishes are placed in the middle of the table, everybody around the table will use their own chopsticks to pick up food and bring to their own plate or bowl. Nowadays people use serving chopsticks or spoon to take food from the dishes in the middle. You can image the use the serving chopsticks was very common in noble families hundreds or even thousands of years ago.
\nThe main idea is that we put all the food in the middle to be shared by everybody.
\nAs the owner of Cuisine AuntDai I am very proud of Chinese food culture and hope to promote Chinese way of eating Chinese food. Sometimes I see our local customers order a dish for themselves and I feel I should write something to explain this especially some of our dishes are not meant for one person only such as the braised pork belly with sweet potato noodles. One time I saw three customers orders three bowls of braised pork belly I was really shocked.
\nLiving in western society for almost two decades I am familiar with western dinner table etiquette and my family just went to a nice Italian restaurant last weekend. Each one of us ordered one main dish for ourselves. It surely is a very different dining experience which makes me think a lot.
\nBeing a Chinese immigrant to Montreal, I see different cultures and I am always amazed by the different way of thinking. To raise it several levels up, philosophically, could the food culture be related to the tendency of individualism or collectivism.
\nLet\u2019s start with western way.
\nYou pick your own plate,like it or not, it\u2019s your own choice. You like my plate, no, don\u2019t touch mine. We may all end up ordering similar food, not so many choices at least for this specific time.
\nPros: simple, responsible for yourself, no interference, individualism.
\nCons: can\u2019t try different dishes, lack of variety, lack of fun of choosing.
\nThe Chinese way.
\nEverybody picks a dish to add into the food pool when ordering. When it\u2019s time to eat, we take food from the pool to our own plate and you try different dishes and flavors.
\nPros: fun to choose dishes, foster the collective decision making, bring family and friends even closer by sharing and caring for each other, can taste more different dishes, waste less believe it or not (like sharing economy).
\nCons: Complicated!!! when the dinner is very formal and some people are pretentious, they will decide or try to let somebody start to take food first or even take food to your plate (this is very common for our parents\u2019 generation). When a dish has very few pieces left, nobody wants to take the last piece. They sometimes order more food intentionally to impress their guests with generosity and hospitality. It does NOT look good to have all plates empty at the end. It\u2019s a food waste by design. Not only you need watch your own plate, you have to be aware of others\u2019 status and also how much left in the food pool, it\u2019s kind of politics on the table. But, but when you are eating with a bunch of your roommates, it\u2019s a different game, it\u2019s the survival of the fittest. From the very beginning, you need to pick quickly from the pool especially the dishes you <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cuisine AuntDai is set out to provide authentic Chinese food to all customers and also encourage our customers to embrace Chinese culture around dinner tables. In a typical Chinese dinner table setting, all the dishes are placed in the middle of the table, everybody around the table will use their own chopsticks to pick up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[27],"class_list":["post-1776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-blog","tag-chinese-food","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.auntdai.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.auntdai.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.auntdai.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.auntdai.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.auntdai.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1776"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.auntdai.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1779,"href":"http:\/\/www.auntdai.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1776\/revisions\/1779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.auntdai.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.auntdai.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.auntdai.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}