Demystifying Food in China: An Introduction
Filed Under: When we talk to people about our travels in China, we sense their fear.
No, not political or economic fear:
Didn’t you have trouble with the language? How about the food? Chinese food in China is terrible, isn’t it? Don’t they eat a lot of dog?”
All fair questions and sentiments, particularly if you’ve never been to China. We have a real story to tell about food in China. Armed with frighteningly limited Mandarin language skills and a sincere disinterest in dining on dog or innards, we managed to eat like kings on a pauper’s pence during the three months we traveled across China.
So how did we eat - on the street and in inexpensive local restaurants - so well without knowing the language? A few tips:
- Picture Menus: They are cliche in the West, but a godsend in China. Same goes for restaurants with food photos plastered everywhere. Take your waiter and point to what you want.
- Keep Your Dictionary Handy: Translating a dish from the menu into English with most pocket dictionaries is an exercise in the absurd. Instead, we kept our dictionary dog-eared to the page with “We are vegetarians.” Eating meat is a sign of wealth in China, so our request for vegetarian food often struck people as odd. However, aiming to please, folks complied; we almost always ended up with something new…and something tasty.
- Go Into the Kitchen: Walk into the kitchen and point to the ingredients you want. This may sound strange and intrusive, but it works in China. It will also earn you a few laughs from wait staff and cooks along the way.
Food in China Series
In our five-part series, we aim to give you a taste of what people in China eat with the 45 billion disposable chopsticks they consume each year.
Note that when entered China from Central Asia, we adopted a defensive eating philosophy in the form of the mantra, “Mystery vegetables are better than mystery meat.” So, vegetarians rejoice: you’ll notice vegetarian dishes highlighted throughout the series. Meatatarians, don’t fret. Pork, beef, chicken and fish all make appearances across the following segments of our Chinese food series:
- Xinjiang Cuisine - rather un-Chinese food of the Uighur people in Western China
- Hot Pot Fever - the beauty of boiling cauldrons of fiery broth
- Dumplings - could man live on dumplings alone?
- Sichuan Cuisine - there’s a good reason it’s known the world over
- Chinese Grab-Bag - a catch-all for Beijing bites, tofu and other dishes from throughout China
If you missed our post on photos of Chinese food, you can check that out here. Otherwise, go straight to the Around China on a Plate Photo Set.
September 29th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
The photos of the food make my mouth water. I have ever been a fan of Chinese food but your photos make me think Chinese food in the States is very different!
September 30th, 2008 at 3:31 am
Diane: You’re right - the food we ate in China was really so much more varied than what you find in restaurants in the States. We also didn’t find a lot of heavy, gooey sauces with tired vegetables. The stir fry dishes in China were fresh, lightly cooked with flavorful and spicy, but not heavy, seasoning. Our pictures make me hungry too!
October 6th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
That all looks delicious, I look forward to more in the series.
Did you ever try food from street vendors or did you stick to restaurants?
October 7th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Austin: Good question.
We are big street food fans. To the extent that street food is available, we try it. In China, our dining ratio was probably 40/60 street food to restaurants (i.e., a place with a roof). That we ate in restaurants a bit more often than on the street during our first go-round in China (late fall-early winter) was primarily a function of the season/weather.
The street food scenes in Urumqi (Xinjiang Province), Beijing and Xi’an expand with the warm weather. However, we found Beijing’s Wangfujing and Donghuamen markets and Xian’s Muslim Quarter street food scenes to be somewhat contrived and clinical. I suspect that the Chinese authorities are trying to pull off what Singapore has done with its street food hawker centers. In the process, the Chinese authorities seem to have sacrificed a bit of authenticity and diversity for the sake of “cleaning up” street food. Regardless, we still found some great street food snacks on the back streets of both cities.
The most diverse, full-blown street food scene we experienced belonged to Kashgar’s night market (Xinjiang Province).
The “restaurants” that we tended to visit were informal, small, family-run hole-in-the-wall establishments where the kitchen is the dining room and the whole thing spills out onto the sidewalk and into a street market. We did eat in some larger, more sophisticated places, especially in Beijing, but we generally prefer eating in local low-key restaurants when we travel.