Oakland Chinatown: Food

By Yesenia, Cinthia, Lesley and Olivia

The restaurants in Chinatown were very different than what we had seen in our previous visits to the Fruitvale and Walnut Creek. Chinatown's restaurants had different varieties of Food. The most common foods that we saw there were rice, chicken and a lot of different type of seafood. In Fruitvale, we saw the same food, but cooked in different ways, mostly with Mexican spices.

As we walked through Chinatown, we saw many small markets, which sold vegetables, fruit, meat, seafood and dried foods. We also saw different bakeries and pastry places that sold really colorful cakes. There were also Bubble Tea places, which was a new thing for us! They are like milkshakes or smoothies with chewy balls of tapioca at the bottom. They give you a big straw to drink it through. We also bought some to try it. We decided they taste like regular smoothies, except with tapioca balls on the bottom, which they called "pearls". The balls didn't really have that much flavor. Some of us liked it, but some of us didn't like the chewiness of it.

Chinatown didn’t really have a diversity of food, because most of the places sold some kind of Chinese food. But it seemed that there is a lot of people around that enjoy the food there. Some food we saw was chow-mien and chicken that tasted sweet (sticky orange). Some food was sweet, sour, or savory. There were a lot of steamed buns, sweet breads, sandwiches (Vietnamese), and the breads in the bakeries were fresh and sweet too.

In Chinatown, there weren’t any fast food places like McDonald’s or Burger King. We think that is because Chinese people make their own food fresh and healthy, and they put a lot of ingredients that are tasty, and it's fast anyway. The people there didn't seem them overweight, and we think that is because the food had so much vegetables and other ingredients, and not a lot of unhealthy things in it.