Eating out in China

China offers a diverse selection of food which varies from region to region. The local dishes can be divided into ten different categories with four main specialties known as Cantonese, Sichuan, Huaiyang and Shandong. The Cantonese cuisine is based on river and seafood but may also include birds, rats, snakes and insects with the popular dishes of snake soup, turtle casserole and cat meat.

Sichuan cuisine is highly flavored with hot pepper and spice and the specialties include sautéed diced pork, a bean curd stew with minced pork in a pepper sauce and dry roast rock carp.

Huaiyang cuisine offers light flavor dishes which include fried mandarin fish with a sweet and sour sauce, salted duck and steamed crab meat. Like Cantonese, Shandong specialties include stewed sea cucumber, snakehead eggs, and sea slugs.

Eating out in China may seem very odd in the beginning but once you know the basic, you'll be able to adjust youself. You will also find an incredible selection of vegetable dishes that have been part of the Chinese diet for centuries. You can identify the restaurants by their look and decoration and the better the decoration is, the more expensive the dishes are. Another way of recognizing the restaurants is that if you find white table-cloth, those restaurants normally belong to mid-level.

The restaurants in the four star hotels and above are quite expensive though they provide quality food, hygiene and excellent service. If you want to taste the variety of food available in China you have to go outside the hotel. One good thing about the restaurants in big hotels is that they normally provide English menus and the servants speak English. Otherwise, most restaurants neither provide English menu nor English-speaking servants unless the restaurants are located at areas where a lot of international guests live.

In china, there are many chained restaurants selling different kinds of food such as tea, porridge, baked sesame seed coated dough pastry, dumplings with several types of vegetarian stuffing, Beijing Duck dish served with small steamed pancakes, scallions and sweat soybean paste. Sliced duck meat is to be wrapped with a steamed pancake and eaten by hand. Most restaurants have Instant-boiled Mutton("Shuan-yang-rou" in Chinese) and is very popular in north China in winter.

In summer many cities sell 'fresh' (draught) beer from kegs on the street. Noodle with Fried Soybean Sauce is another excellent food anyone can try and they are available in most of restaurants in at cheap price.

Nowadays, in China's big cities, the big shopping malls are also coming up with food court at the top floor serving you fries, dumplings, porridge and other varieties of food with instant preparation in front of you.

The urban Chinese people like to go this kind of food courts where the food is not expensive. At meal time, it is often over-packed. You will also find many roadside eateries providing you typical Chinese breakfast with rice porridge, or soy milk or hundun and youtiao (deep fried strip of dough). In fact, Chinese food culture has a huge amount of contents and you can easily find the one that suits your taste.

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