We all ate like little big fat piggies at China Sea last week. Six people at the table, twelve dishes, bucketloads of soy sauce, and bellies that had stretched past the point where popping a button or doing a quarter-pull down on a zipper just wouldn't have cut it. If you want to eat at China Sea, arguably one of the oldest authentic Chinese restos in Dubai, then elastic’s the only way to go.

I'm not even going to bother with my usual blog pleasantries and ramblings and unrelated stories and rants...partly because I'm lazy this week, and partly because every time I look at these photos, I get that stuffed-up happy groggy feeling. The one that makes the few oiled cogs in my brain come to a slow dragging halting pace, ch-chug...ch-chug...chhhh...UGG....until they screech to a soy-seduced grinding halt...and then my eyelids droop down to my keyboard and my fingers dangle down to my toes and all of me slumps into limp unproductivity. All that's alive and functioning is that dang cursor on the screen, angrily blinking back at my flaccid mentally-food-drugged body, blink-blink-BLINK...until my toshiba eco-power-saver kicks in and wipes the sorry face of that angry blinking cursor off my screen and lets me lie there in happy limp sleepy dangling unproductivity.

So before THAT happens, I'm going to shove out our Chinese feast in front of you. Special thanks to the fantastic five that dozed through this line-up with me: @faridaa, shebanx, @nervetoxin, Potson and Sunny D, thank you for lending me your tummies and humoring my wildly gluttonous tendencies that night.

Stack of scallion pancakes. Teenier versions than the ones I've eaten at other Chinese joints, and thicker too, with the same sort of crunchy flaky Indian parantha-like crust on the outside that makes scallion pancakes so irresistible. I'd have liked these with some soy sauce or maybe something like the leek chutney I had at Xiao Wei Yang, but no matter, I enjoyed mindlessly munching on them anyway. I'm sure China Sea would humor you with some sauce if you just bothered to ask them. It's just that when there's warm bready stuff on the table, I just instinctively transport it to my mouth. My brain may start sprouting ideas on 'mmm, the bread would taste better with this...' or 'hm, should I ask the server to heat the bread?' or other such somethings on how to improve the bread-munching experience. But my jaws don't usually wait for my brain to execute the thought.

Garlicky chewy crispy fried chunks of sauced up sizzling beef with soft caramelized cloves of sauteed garlic. This is your signature Chinese dish - nothing crazy unique compared to what I've eaten else where, but quintessential Chinese comfort food in the absence of which my chopsticks would have felt somewhat inadequate.

So cliched, but so lickably good...sweet and sour shrimp. A pool of glistening orange shrimp half moons, crunchy in some places, mushy in others, and fat and plumpy with that deadly addictive sticky sweet and sour sauce. I don't know why sweet and sour sauce doesn't feature more often in my life. It really should. Maybe because it makes me super happy -> dreamy -> distracted -> lazy -> droopy -> mushy brain -> unproductive. But honestly, I think productivity is overrated. Here's to oodles more sweet and sour sauce for all of us. And a ton of unfinished blog posts because I'm too fat and blubbery with sticky sauce to get around to doing anything useful. But at least I'd be happy. And happiness is King.

A garlicky soy heap of Mandarin chicken. This is one of those dishes that doesn't need to make the table unless you're really pushing for additional ways to stuff your face with the same sort of garlic-soy concoction that gets used in a bunch of other dishes. As a food blogger, it's safe to say that I am always pushing...but for the rest of the normal dining public, this baby ain't anything that exceptional that it'd  rock your taste buds.

The token plates of veggie fried noodles and chicken fried rice. I didn't really give them too much importance, not because they weren't yummy, but because the Peking Duck landed on the table right after and temporarily obliterated everything else.

See those crispy glazed chocolatey brown sheets of duck skin skirting the meat...THAT is what you're looking for. Those caramelized bits of skin on chunks of fatty duck meat are Works of Gluttonous Art. Slop them on those thin pancakes, with a few slivers of cucumber and scallion, and some thick pastey hoisin sauce. And now you know why ugly duckling had a happy ending after all.

Now here's a first for me, a plate of duck bones left over from the Peking Duck.