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Regional cuisines
The usual classification is the 八大菜系, the eight great cuisines. It is far more recent than it is generally said to be — the phrase reached…
Food & drink
"Chinese food" is not a cuisine — it is a dozen of them, and the version you know abroad is mostly Cantonese filtered through emigration. This section maps the real thing region by region and tells you exactly what to say to get it.
How to order
The five things to know 1. Dishes are shared. A menu is designed for a table ordering several plates to the middle. Order roughly one dish…
Street food
Breakfast is the point The best street food in China is served between 06:00 and 10:00, not at night. Night markets exist and are fun, but…
Hotpot
How it works A pot of simmering broth sits in a recess in the table, over an induction or gas ring. You order raw ingredients, which arrive…
Vegetarian & vegan
The good news and the bad news Good: China has a serious vegetarian tradition rooted in Mahayana Buddhism, going back over a millennium.…
Drinks, beer & baijiu
Baijiu 白酒 — "white spirit" — is distilled from sorghum and other grains, bottled at 40–60% ABV, and consumed in greater volume than any…
Beyond the Eight Cuisines
The regional cuisine guide covers the eight great traditions and what to order in each. This page is the layer above it: where that scheme…
Food allergies
A severe food allergy is the one dietary constraint that China handles badly, and it is worth being blunt about why: the difficulty is…
Barbecue & skewers
Almost every account of Chinese food in English mentions lamb skewers once, in a list, between the jianbing and the stinky tofu. Ours does…
Dumplings & buns
Our own itineraries send you to Shanghai for "soup dumplings" three separate times and never explain what one is or how to eat it. That is…
Noodles
There is no such thing as a Chinese noodle in the way there is an Italian pasta shape. What there is instead is a set of local traditions…
Hygiene ratings
The advice everywhere on this site is to follow the queue, and it is sound: turnover is the best proxy a stranger has. But it is a proxy…
Food markets
Almost every Chinese neighbourhood has a covered produce market, and almost no visitor goes into one. It is not a sight and nobody will…
Milk tea
Walk any Chinese commercial street and count the tea shops. There will be more of them than anything else, frequently several branches of…
Yum cha
Two pages here point at Cantonese morning tea and then walk away. The Guangzhou guide names the grand houses and what to order and says, in…
Coffee
Coffee appears on this site fourteen times, and every one of them is scenery. Independent coffee in the former French Concession. A street…
Food as medicine
Two pages here name dietary therapy as one of the four branches of Chinese medicine — the massage guide in its opening clause, and the…
Chinese wine
Two pages here touch Chinese wine and neither finishes the thought. The drinks guide gives it two sentences — a real and rapidly improving…
Caviar and sturgeon
This site says twice that a protected-species ingredient ends the conversation — once about Chinese medicinal materials and once about…
Salmon
The words salmon, 三文鱼, sashimi and raw fish appear nowhere on this site. That is a strange blank twice over: China farms salmonids at…
Whisky
The drinks guide runs through baijiu, beer, Chinese wine, rice wine and minority spirits. Whisky is not in it, and until this page the word…
Food waste law
The page on leaving food on your plate describes the Clean Plate Campaign as a decade-long push with cultural traction, which is true. What…