The problem is not that good restaurants are hard to find. It is that the tools most visitors reach for cover perhaps one per cent of them.
Why the usual tools fail#
Google Maps is blocked and its Chinese business listings are sparse and stale. TripAdvisor covers the places that court foreign visitors, which correlates poorly with quality. A search in English returns the same dozen restaurants in each city, written up by people who found them the same way.
Dianping is where the actual reviewing happens, at a scale nothing in English approaches.
Using Dianping without Chinese#
- Search by characters, not by English. Paste 火锅 (huǒguō, hotpot), 面 (miàn, noodles), 素食 (sùshí, vegetarian) or 早餐 (zǎocān, breakfast) and let it sort by distance.
- Ratings are out of five and are harsh. Anything at 4.5 or above is genuinely good; below 4.0 is worth skipping in a city with this much choice.
- Read the photographs, not the text. Users upload enormous numbers of dish photos, which tells you what to order as well as whether to go.
- Prices per head are shown, so you can see what a meal will cost before committing.
Meituan (美团) is the same company and overlaps heavily; if one is being awkward, try the other. Both work on a Chinese connection with no VPN.
The three rules that need no app at all#
Follow the queue. A line of local people at 12:30 is the most reliable signal in China, and it costs nothing to join.
Favour the specialist. A shop that makes one thing — one noodle, one dumpling, one soup — will almost always beat a restaurant with a laminated forty-page menu. The long menu is a warning sign here in a way it is not everywhere.
Eat what the place is known for. Every Chinese city has a dish it is famous for locally, and that fame is not a tourist construction. Ordering the local speciality in its own city is the single highest-return habit on a trip.
Signals worth reading#
- A full room of people who look like they work nearby at lunchtime beats an empty room with better decor.
- Turnover on the street stalls matters more than appearance — food cooked to order in front of you is both better and safer than trays sitting warm.
- Mall restaurants are safe, consistent and usually the least interesting option in the neighbourhood. They are a reasonable fallback on a tired evening and a poor default.
- A hotel recommendation points to where hotels send foreign guests. Ask the staff where they eat instead, which is a different and much better question.
One habit to build#
Screenshot the restaurant's name in Chinese characters before you set off. Taxi drivers, Dianping's own map and passers-by all work from the characters, and the transliteration will not get you there.
For what each region does best and what to order once you are inside, see the regional guide to Chinese cuisine and the guide to Chinese street food.