Dining in Beijing

Being the capital of the country, Beijing has foods from all over China. There are quite a few types of foods which are unique to Beijing, and while you are here you should try to sample as much of the local cuisine as you can.


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Chinese Eating Custom

Table Manners

The main difference between Chinese and Western eating habits is that unlike the West, where everyone has their own plate of food, in China the dishes are placed on the table and everybody shares. If you are being treated by a Chinese host, be prepared for a ton of food. Chinese are very proud of their culture of food and will do their best to give you a taste of many different types of cuisine. Among friends, they will just order enough for the people there. If they are taking somebody out for dinner and the relationship is polite to semi-polite, then they will usually order one more dish than the number of guests (e.g. four people, five dishes). If it is a business dinner or a very formal occasion, there is likely to be a huge amount of food that will be impossible to finish.

A typical meal starts with some cold dishes, like boiled peanuts and smashed cucumber with garlic. These are followed by the main courses, hot meat and vegetable dishes. Finally soup is brought out, which is followed by the starchy "staple" food, which is usually rice or noodles or sometimes dumplings. Many Chinese eat rice (or noodles or whatever) last, but if you like to have your rice together with other dishes, you should say so early on.

One thing to be aware of is that when eating with a Chinese host, you may find that the person is using their chopsticks to put food in your bowl or plate. This is a sign of politeness. The appropriate thing to do would be to eat the whatever-it-is and say how yummy it is. If you feel uncomfortable with this, you can just say a polite thank you and leave the food there, and maybe cover it up with a little rice when they are not looking. There is a certain amount of leniency involved when dealing with Westerners, so you won't be chastised.

Eating No-no's

Traditionally speaking, there are many taboos at Chinese tables, but these days not many people pay attention to them. However, there are a few things to keep in mind, especially if you are a guest at a private home.

1. Don't stick your chopsticks upright in the rice bowl. Instead, lay them on your dish. The reason for this is that when somebody dies, the shrine to them contains a bowl of sand or rice with two sticks of incense stuck upright in it. So if you stick your chopsticks in the rice bowl, it looks like this shrine and is equivalent to wishing death upon person at the table!

2. Make sure the spout of the teapot is not facing anyone. It is impolite to set the teapot down where the spout is facing towards somebody. The spout should always be directed to where nobody is sitting, usually just outward from the table.

3. Don't tap on your bowl with your chopsticks. Beggars tap on their bowls, so this is not polite. Also, in a restaurant, if the food is coming too slow people will tap their bowls. If you are in someone's home, it is like insulting the cook.

Eat Local

You can get expensive, delicious meals in any of the large hotels, but if you are looking for atmosphere, you have to go to a local joint. Not only is it cheaper, but you can get a good look at the locals and what normal people are like. And what the food lacks in presentation is made up for in the taste. Some restaurants have English menus, but don't count on it. A good way to choose dishes is to look at what others are eating and point at it for the waitress. The other option is to play "Mystery Dinner", where players randomly point at items in the menu and wait for the surprise dishes to come. Whoever orders the braised dog heart with scallions in shark vomit sauce wins!

Also, be sure to sample the local brew, Yanjing Beer.

Drinking

Gan Bei! (Cheers!)

Alcohol is a big part of eating in Beijing. Especially when dining with Chinese hosts, you can expect the beer to flow freely and many beis to be gan-ed. (Gan Bei literally means "dry [the] glass") Besides beer, the official Chinese alcoholic beverage is bai jiu, high-proof Chinese liquor made from assorted grains. There are varying degrees of bai jiu, and some are quite good. The Beijing favorites is called Er Guo Tou, which is a whopping 56% alcohol. More expensive and less formidable are Maotai and Wuliangye, which go far about 300-400 Yuan per bottle. In comparison, Er Guo Tou costs a modest 4 or 5 Yuan per ping (bottle). If you are not a drinker, or don't feel up to the challenge, just say "wo bu hui he jiu" (I don't drink). It is generally acceptable to use Coke or tea as an alcohol substitute.



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Best Beijing Food

Peking Roast Duck

Peking Duck has the reputation of being the most delicious food Beijing has to offer. Some find it a bit too greasy, but others get hooked after one taste. In any case, a Peking Duck dinner is usually a fixed item on any Beijing tour itinerary. Eating Peking Duck is also one of the two things you are absolutely supposed to do while in Beijing. The other one is climbing the Great Wall.

The place that offers the best Peking Duck is the Quan Ju De Restaurant, which has outlets at Qianmen, Hepingmen and Wangfujing. It was established 130 years ago and, if you count from the time when founder Yang Renquan began his duck business, it is 160 years old.

At Quan Ju De, ducks are immersed in condiments unique to the restaurant and are roasted directly over flames stoked by fruit-tree wood. The best roasted duck is date-red, shining with oil, but with a crisp skin and tender meat.

The chef than cuts the meat into thin slices, each having a piece of skin. Then the meat is served with very thin pancakes, Chinese onions and special sauce. The way to eat it is to coat the thin pancake with sauce, slap on a few pieces of meat and roll up the pancake. Chopsticks are optional: it is much easier just to grab the thing with your bare hands.

Another famous restaurant offering Peking duck is the Bian Yi Fang (Cheap Restaurant), which opened in 1855, nine years earlier than Quan Ju De. At Bian Yi Fang, roasting is done in an enclosed container fueled with crop stalks.

There are now hundreds of restaurants serving Peking Duck all over the city. Most of these restaurants offer ducks for 38 Yuan a piece, cheaper than that at the larger places.

Imperial Court Food

Imperial Court Food is a style of Chinese food that has its origins in the Imperial Palace. It is based on the foods that were served to the Emperor and his court. Now, it has become a major school of Chinese cooking and there are several places where you can sample this unique flavor. Fang Shan in Beihai Park and Ting Li Guan in the Summer Palace are the best ones. 150 years ago you would never have been able to eat this stuff, so give it a shot. It is a little expensive, however.

Imperial Official Food and Medicinal Food

This first type of food is particular to Beijing. In the past, Beijing officials were all very picky about what type of food they ate. The most famous type of Official food is Tan Family Food, which can be had in the Beijing Hotel. This is the preferred food of the Qing Dynasty official Tan Zongling, and was later introduced into restaurants. Another type of food is that which is described in the classic novel Dream of Red Mansions. The author, Cao Xueqin, described a number of dishes in the book and now there are several restaurants which serve this style of dish. The most famous place is the Beijing Grand View Garden Hotel. This hotel is right next to the Beijing's Grand View Garden which is modeled after the garden described in the Dream of Red Mansions. Other restaurants featuring this novel type of food are the Jinglun Hotel and Laijinyuxuan Restaurant in Zhongshan Park.

There are hundreds of dishes that are medicated with such choice tonic materials as ginseng, deer musk, bear's paw, Chinese wolf berry and soft-shelled turtle, the cream of the chop of Chinese medicine. The "Yang Sheng Zhai" Restaurant of Xiyuan Hotel has the best reputation among such food. Although it has been changed to Sichuan Restaurant, it still offers medicinal foods.

Hotpot

There are basically two kinds of hotpot restaurants in Beijing: Mongolian style and Sichuan style. The staple of both types of hotpot is mutton (yang rou). The meat is usually sliced frozen so that it curls up into a tube shape. Then you place the meat into the hotpot, which is a copper pot containing a boiling soup base. After a few seconds the meat is cooked and you dip it into a sesame butter sauce. The verb describing the action of cooking the meat this way is called "shuan". Other shuan-ables include beef (fei niu), frozen tofu (dong dofu), Chinese cabbage (bai cai), bean sprouts (dou miao), and glass noodles (fen si). Spicy Sichuan hotpot has a soup base which can be described as either superspicy or mildly radioactive, but the pot is often divided into half spicy, half non-spicy soup pots. The soup base for Mongolian style is not spicy, and usually consists of some vegetables and seafood.

Famous Mongolian style hotpot restaurants are Neng Ren Ju at Baitasi, and Dong Lai Shun to the east of Tian'anmen Square. The most well-known Sichuan style hotpot restaurant is Jin Shan Cheng, of which there are many scattered throughout the city.

Recently there has been an explosion of buffet-style hotpot restaurants. Generally you pay a set price (often around 38 Yuan) for an all-you-can-eat meal. All-you-can-drink beer is included in the price too!
                                     
Traditional Snacks

Beijing has over 250 types of traditional snack foods. Many of them are made of glutinous rice, soy beans or fried materials. The king of all snack foods is called "dou zhi". This is a strange-tasting, greenish-grey, fermented bean porridge, and if you can manage to eat a whole bowl of it you will earn great respect from your Beijing friends. Supposedly it is an acquired taste, but who wants to acquire it? For a taste of snack foods from outside of Beijing, take a trip to Snack Street, just off of Wangfujing Street. Starting from about 5:00 p.m., the vendors line up in their stalls and start selling foods from all parts of the country. You can have an entire meal's worth of food walking from one end of the street to the other, trying this and that along the way.



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Cuisine From Other Regions

A huge chunk of Chinese culture is devoted to food and drink. There are hundreds of different dishes, and each region has its own distinctive flavor. The majority of Chinese restaurants in Beijing feature what is known as "family style dishes" (jia chang cai), which are basically the most common types of food that any self-respecting Chinese can make at home. These dishes are usually a combination of the spicy Sichuan style (chuan cai) and the more hearty Shandong style (lu cai). True Sichuan style restaurants have a special type of tea called Eight Treasures Tea. This tea is poured from a kettle with a yard-long spout, which the boy (it's usually a boy) wields skillfully. Aside from jia chang cai restaurants, there are also many places that are devoted to a certain type of food. Specialty restaurants include such classics as Donkey Flesh King, Dog Meat City and Fat Sister's Meat Pies.

Shanghai style (Shanghai cai) tends to be sort of sweet and features lots of seafood. Shanghai restaurants have been quite popular for some years now. Guangdong eaters have a reputation for eating "everything with four or more legs except for the table, and everything that has wings except for airplanes." All of the really funky dishes you hear about like live monkey brains and raw rat babies are Guangdong (Cantonese) style dishes (yue cai). However, there are lots of excellent, non-scary Guangdong dishes, and the seafood is especially tasty. Northeastern dishes (dongbei cai) are usually composed of large quantities of meat in thick, fairly salty sauces. Potatoes also feature heavily in dongbei cai. This is a great style of food to have in winter. Other famous schools of Chinese food include Huaiyang and Shanxi styles. There are also a number of regional minority cuisine.

Uygur Food

The Uygurs are a Muslim minority from Xinjiang Autonomous Region in the Northwest. There are Uygurs all over the city selling lamb shish kebob, but there are two places where they are fairly concentrated together, one is tempted to call them ghettos. These two locations, Weigongcun and Ganjiakou, abound with Uygur restaurants. If you are walking by around dinner time, prepare yourself to get accosted by "grabbers", sort of like "greeters" at other restaurants, except these guys tugs on your sleeve and try to drag you into their place. Nothing hostile, just very persistent. The best thing at these restaurants is the roast fried spicy mutton (chao kao rou), square noodles in tomato sauce (chao pian'r), and the round nang bing, a type of bread which is scrumptious when piping hot, and hard as a rock when cool. There is also a smaller, fatter type of round bread which can satisfy a bagel-craving. The roadside shishkabob can be delicious, too, but is not always the paramount of sanitary foodstuffs.
饮料 Drinks
啤酒 (pi jiu) Beer
可乐 (ke le) Coca-Cola
花茶 (hua cha) Jasmine Tea
红茶 (hong cha) Black Tea
绿茶 (lü cha) Green Tea
八宝茶 (ba bao cha) "Eight Treasures" Tea
凉菜 Cold Dishes
拌腐竹 (ban fu zhu) Seasoned beancurd sheet rolls
炝芹菜 (qiang qin cai) Spiced celery
凉拌土豆丝 (liang ban tu dou si) Seasoned shredded potato topped with parsley
香菜小辣椒 (xiang cai xiao la jiao) Parsley with green chillies
蔬菜类 Vegetable Dishes
清炒豆苗 (qing chao dou miao) Stir-fried pea sprouts
尖椒土豆丝 (jian jiao tu dou si) Stir-fried potato shreds with green chillies
鱼香茄子煲 (yu xiang qie zi bao) Eggplant stewed in yuxiang sauce and served in casserole
虎皮尖椒 (hu pi jian jiao) Deep-fried chilli peppers
洋葱煎蛋 (yang cong jian dan) Onion omelet
蚝油生菜 (hao you sheng cai) Stir-fried romaine lettuce in oyster sauce
松仁玉米 (song ren yu mi) Stir-fried corn with pine nuts
酸菜粉丝 (suan cai fen si) Pickled Chinese cabbage with noodles made from green pea
青椒土豆片 (qing jiao tu dou pian) Fried sliced potato with green chillies in soy sauce
猪肉类 Pork Dishes
木樨肉 (mu xi rou) Stir-fried sliced pork with egg and "tree ear"
回锅肉 (hui guo rou) Twice cooked pork
干煸扁豆 (gan bian bian dou) Minced pork fried with French beans
三鲜锅巴 (san xian guo ba) Rice crisps with seafood
肉末粉丝 (rou mo fen si) Stir-fried minced pork with noodles made from green pea
鱼香肉丝 (yu xiang rou si) Hot and sweet slices of pork
牛羊肉类 Beef & Mutton
水煮羊肉 (shui zhu yang rou) Quick-boiled beef slices flavored with pepper oil
洋葱牛肉丝 (yang cong niu rou si) Shredded beef fried with onions in soy sauce
干煸牛肉丝 (gan bian niu rou si) Deep-fried shredded beef with pepper
葱爆羊肉 (cong bao yang rou) Quick-fried mutton with scallion
蚝油牛肉 (hao you niu rou) Sautéed beef slices with bamboo shoots in oyster sauce
鸡肉类 Chicken
宫爆鸡丁 (gong bao ji ding) Stir-fried diced chicken with peanuts and served with red chilli sauce
西柠煎软鸡 (xi ning jian ruan ji) Soft-fried chicken in lemon sauce
汤类 Soup
酸辣汤 (suan la tang) Hot and sour soup
粟米羹 (su mi geng) Corn and egg sou