Street Eats: Sanlitun Squeals for Grilled Pig's Feet

Just as our taste-buds were recovering from our street eats visit to the New Zealand Sweet Cheesy Toast shack, we encountered the latest batch of street food – grilled pig's feet (爆烤猪蹄), sometimes more euphemistically known as pig's trotters, is quietly on the rise.

At the corner of Sanlitun Back Alley (next to Aperitivo) on Saturday, there was a long line in front of Jing Shao (京勺). When fried chicken was all the rage, I already felt that was the end, biting into a greasy portion of chicken on the street while walking already sounds impossible for someone clumsy like me.

Now grilled trotters … boney, messy grilled trotters? Now this has to be absolutely the least convenient thing to become a street snack. And yet, people are accepting it quite readily. When we recently visited, on a weekend afternoon, there were 22 people in line. After half an hour, there were still 11 people, at which point we had lost our patience and decided to try again later.

So finally at 4pm on a weekday afternoon, it was less crowded, this time with only two people in the line. We delightfully ordered two trotters — a regular and a spicy, both RMB 13. By comparison, the big trotters at Meizhou Dongpo cost five times as much.

The guy put eight precooked trotters on the barbecue stove to heat them up and after 10 minutes, we were handed two warm, grilled trotters. Kindly, they also offer disposable gloves and wet wipes, foreshadowing the mess to come.

Now, let's have a closer look at these trotters. The non-spicy one was covered with a suspicious yellow powder, from which we could recognize some chopped peanuts, although we have no clue about the rest of the yellow seasoning. We could also spot a large amount of monosodium glutamate (MSG) and powdered pepper.

We took a bite. Yikes, too boney, and the skin too chewy. Notes of rubber? Maybe some leather belt? I wasn't sure I could prove there was meat on it, so I tore it apart (thanks to the disposable gloves), discovering that yes, it really was just all bone. With hardly any pork in sight, I wondered, what kind of pig is this? The toenail part was completely inedible.

I put the non-spicy trotter down, and hoped that maybe the spicy version would be better. No. Even though it was covered with a thick layer of pepper-like substances, it wasn’t spicy at all, and instead had less flavor but was even chewier. Perhaps the worst part was that I smelled like barbecue for the rest of the afternoon, but without a full stomach or happy face to show for it.

My colleague has since returned to Jing Shao and reported that the skin was soft and even though lacking a little flavor, it wasn't unpleasant to eat at all. Maybe I went on an off day or maybe the cook was asleep at the grill the first around? 

Why would people line up for this? One girl who was queuing behind us may have given an indication – upon lining up for the fried chicken next door, she then saw this second line, and just couldn’t help but join. When she spotted that there was also flower cake (鲜花饼) on sale, she then shouted to her friends to start queuing for that. Is queue fetishization a thing?

When we checked Jing Shao's reviews on Dianping, it appears that people aren't bothered by the mess, loving to stand there and oink away on the trotters all the same. Maybe people just like pig's feet. In February, the popular Taiwan hotpot chain Xiabu Xiabu launched pig's feet hotpot, so maybe we're just missing a trotter renaissance or something.

More stories by this author here.

Email: tracywang@thebeijinger.com
Twitter: @flyingfigure
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Images: Michael Wester, Tracy Wang