Chinese Cuisine: What You Have Not Eaten

01What You Already Think It Is

What do most people get wrong about Chinese cuisine before they arrive?

Most readers arrive at this subject with a picture already in place, assembled from takeaway menus, a few restaurant meals and whatever the last documentary showed. The picture is not wrong. It is a small and unrepresentative sample presented as the whole.

Three things it usually contains. That Chinese food is one cuisine with regional accents. That it is mostly stir-fried. That the sweet, thickened, deep-fried dishes on an overseas menu represent what people eat at home.

All three are artefacts of how the food travelled. The dishes that reached other countries came with particular groups of emigrants from particular counties, were adapted to the ingredients and the tastes available where they landed, and then stabilised into a menu that has been reproduced for decades. It is a real cuisine with a real history. It is a branch, not the trunk.

What sits behind it is a country the size of a continent, where the staple grain changes as you travel, where a single province can use a dozen cooking methods the next one does not, and where the eight best-known regional schools are a filing system that specialists themselves argue about.

This page assumes you have eaten Chinese food and want to know what you have not eaten.

02The Eight Schools

What are the eight schools of Chinese cuisine?

Chinese cooking is conventionally sorted into eight regional schools. You will see the list on menus, in books and on the walls of restaurants, so it is worth knowing what it is and what it is for.

Shandong 山东. The northern school, and the one with the longest institutional history through the imperial kitchens. Clear broths and thick broths as separate arts. Wheat country.

Sichuan 四川. The best travelled abroad. Layered heat rather than plain heat, built from chilli, Sichuan pepper, fermented broad-bean paste and pickles, with the numbing element that has no equivalent in other cuisines.

Guangdong 广东. The coastal school, and the one most concerned with freshness and with doing as little as possible to it. Also the source of most early emigration, which is why so much of what the world calls Chinese food is Cantonese 广东 in origin.

Jiangsu 江苏. Lower Yangtze, knife work, control, sweetness used as seasoning rather than as a finish. Historically the cuisine of the salt merchants and the canal cities.

Zhejiang. The neighbour, sharing the river delta, leaning to freshwater fish, wine and lees.

Fujian 福建. Coastal and mountainous at once. Soups, wine-based sauces, and the widest use of seafood dried and rehydrated.

Hunan 湖南. Heat again, but drier and sharper than Sichuan, with smoke and cured meat 腊味 behind it rather than numbing spice.

Anhui. Mountain ingredients, wild vegetables, braising and stewing over long times.

What the list is good for and what it is not. It is a decent map of the historically wealthy food regions and a reasonable guide to what a restaurant flying one of these banners will serve. It is a poor guide to what people eat, because it leaves out the northwest, the northeast, the southwest ethnic cuisines, and most of what any given household cooks on a weekday.

03Why the Regions Differ

Why does Chinese food differ so much from province to province?

The differences are not about taste. They are about what the land gave people and what it cost to get it.

Grain sets the base. Wheat in the northern plains, rice through the centre and south, and between them a slope rather than a border. Along the coast the change is orderly: the far north eats overwhelmingly wheat, and by the time you reach the far south rice has won outright. Rice noodles are a rice product, which is why they belong to the south and not the north.

Protein follows the same logic on a different axis. Grassland and pasture in the northwest and Inner Mongolia 内蒙古 gave mutton and beef. The coast gave seafood. And there is a second route to mutton that surprises people: several provinces of the central plains raise large numbers of sheep on crop residue rather than on pasture, which is why lamb is ordinary food in Henan 河南 and Shaanxi 陕西 as well as in Xinjiang 新疆.

Where there is sea but little farmland, the answer changes again. Fujian 福建 and Zhejiang kept wheat, but as pastry and dumpling skins rather than as the staple. The flour did not disappear. It stopped being the meal and became the snack.

Chilli is the clearest case of economics becoming culture. For most of the past several centuries ordinary households across China had limited means, and chilli grew easily in the Sichuan 四川 and Chongqing 重庆 region. It began as a seasoning that covered off-flavours in cheap ingredients and added layers to plain ones, spread outward to the neighbouring provinces, and over generations stopped being a solution and became the taste itself. A habit that started as economy is now identity.

Climate decides how food was kept, and that decision shows up on the menu. Cold and dry in the northeast produced smoking and stewing. Warm and humid in the lower Yangtze produced curing in wine lees and in spirits. The southern coast, where the catch arrives alive, produced the technique of doing almost nothing.

04What the Kitchen Does to Heat

How many cooking methods does Chinese cooking actually use?

Chinese kitchens distinguish a large number of separate things you can do with fire, and they name dishes after them. In a compilation of 4,706 dish names from popular Chinese food maps, twenty-nine distinct cooking verbs appear, and roughly one dish in five is named for the method rather than for the main ingredient.

English collapses a large part of that range into one word. Stir-fry covers at least eight Chinese verbs, which differ in the heat of the pan, in whether oil goes in first, in how long the food stays, and in what the result feels like to eat. One scorches at the highest heat the stove will give, so the food carries a scent from the pan itself. One slides the ingredients through warm oil and finishes with a thickened sauce. One works with no oil at all, driving moisture out until the pieces turn chewy.

The reason the wok exists is that fuel was expensive. Cut small, cook fast, over a thin-walled pan on a high flame. Stack a steamer so one fire cooks three dishes. A cuisine organised around not wasting wood ends up organised around speed, and speed is what a wok is for.

Some methods are national and some are local, and the difference carries information. In the collected dish names, steaming shows no regional concentration at all. Stewing and smoking run several times more common in the three northeastern provinces than nationally. Curing in wine lees and in spirits clusters in the lower Yangtze. Roasting over open fire clusters in the dry northwest. Blanching, which means in and out of boiling water and a sauce on the side, runs several times more common on the southern coast than anywhere else.

The preserving methods are the ones that changed meaning. Smoking, salting, wine-lees curing, air-drying and drunken preparations all began as ways of keeping food through a season. Cold chains removed the reason and the techniques stayed, because by then people preferred the taste. Eating a cured dish in Zhejiang or a smoked one in Jilin 吉林 is eating a solved problem.

And fermenting is a separate thing again. Bean pastes, fermented tofu, pickled greens, soured bamboo, black beans. These are not preserved versions of fresh ingredients. They are ingredients in their own right, and much of what tastes deep in Chinese savoury cooking comes from them.

05How a Meal Is Put Together

How is a Chinese meal ordered and eaten?

The unit is the table, not the plate. Dishes arrive to be shared, they arrive when they are ready rather than in courses, and the rice or the noodles come at the end in many regions rather than at the start. A visitor who orders one dish per person has ordered a meal for twice the number of people at the table.

Balance is the organising idea and it is structural rather than nutritional. A table is built to cover a range: something braised and something fresh, something with sauce and something plain, one soup, one vegetable, a starch. Ordering five variations of the same thing is the mistake most often made by people ordering from an unfamiliar menu.

Soup has a position and it varies by region. In the south it often opens the meal or sits alongside it throughout. In parts of the north it closes.

Tea is present and is not a course. It arrives before anything else, gets refilled without being asked for, and continues after the food.

In parts of the south, breakfast is the elaborate meal of the day. In Guangdong 广东 it is named after the tea rather than after the food, and it runs to dozens of small dishes brought round on carts or ordered from a checklist. The equivalent in Hainan 海南 carries a different name again. Suzhou 苏州 treats its breakfast with the same seriousness by a different route, through noodles and their toppings.

There is a reason and it is the heat. In the far south the usable part of the day is the morning, so that is where the social life went. Meeting friends over a two-hour breakfast is ordinary, and the evening meal can be the smaller one. A visitor who sleeps through breakfast in Guangzhou 广州 has missed the main event.

The round table with the turning centre is a real convention and it has rules that are worth knowing: the dish faces the guest of honour when it lands, the turning goes one way, and it stops while someone is serving.

Restaurants are loud and that is not a failure of the restaurant. A good Chinese dining room is busy, bright and noisy, and quietness is a sign of something other than quality.

Meal times run earlier than in Europe. Lunch from around eleven thirty, dinner from around five thirty to six. A restaurant that is empty at eight in the evening may be past its hour rather than past its best.

06Dishes Worth Knowing

Which Chinese dishes should you make a point of eating?

Not a best-of list. These are the dishes that teach you something if you eat them attentively.

Kung Pao chicken 宫保鸡丁. Diced chicken, peanuts, dried chilli and Sichuan 四川 pepper, cooked fast in a hot pan. This is the dish to order if what you liked at home was the sweet, battered chilli chicken sold abroad as General Tso's. That dish is a real thing with its own history, created in the diaspora and sweetened for the market it was sold into. It is not on menus here. Kung Pao is the one that is, and it is drier, sharper and less sweet.

A red-braised pork. Sugar caramelised first, then soy, then a long low braise. It exists in versions across the country and the differences between them are a short course in regional seasoning.

A cold dressed dish. Sliced or shredded, dressed at the table with vinegar, oil and aromatics. Cold dishes are a category in their own right and are usually the first thing a Chinese table orders.

Something blanched with a sauce on the side. The southern coast's argument that technique can mean restraint.

A steamed whole fish. The test of a kitchen. Timing to the minute, then hot oil over the aromatics at the table.

Peking duck 北京烤鸭. The one Chinese dish with a global reputation that survives contact with the original. Skin, pancake, scallion, sauce, and a carving performed in front of you.

A stew that has been going since morning. The northeast and the mountains. One pot, long heat, and the thing the stove was already lit for.

Something cured or smoked. Wine lees in the lower Yangtze, smoke in the northeast, salt and air in the mountains. You are tasting a preservation method that no longer needs to preserve.

A soup that is the point rather than the accompaniment. In Guangdong 广东 the slow-simmered soup is the reason for the meal.

A fermented ingredient used as an ingredient. Fermented tofu, bean paste, soured bamboo shoots. This is where the savoury depth comes from and it is invisible on a menu in translation.

07Where to Eat, by Region

Which Chinese cities and regions are worth eating in?

Some Chinese cities are worth staying in for the food alone. Not visiting. Staying, for long enough that you stop ordering the famous thing.

Sichuan 四川 and Chongqing 重庆, for heat with structure. Numbing spice, hotpot, street snacks and a sweet-dish tradition that surprises people who expect only chilli. The two are different from each other and both are different from what the word Sichuanese suggests abroad.

Shaanxi 陕西 and Shanxi 山西, for wheat. The two provinces that turned flour into a system. Shanxi alone uses a dozen different ways of shaping dough, each with its own tool, and the noodle dishes there are named after the action rather than the topping. Anyone who thinks Chinese food means rice should spend a week here.

Beijing, for the duck, and for a northern capital cuisine built on court kitchens and on the food of the streets around them.

Guangdong 广东, for breakfast, for pastry and for seafood. The morning tea 早茶 meal is a two-hour institution rather than a snack. The dessert and pastry tradition here has no equivalent elsewhere in China.

Inner Mongolia 内蒙古, Xinjiang 新疆 and Qinghai 青海, for mutton and beef. Grassland and pasture country, cooked over fire and in one pot, with a bread tradition alongside it.

Shandong 山东, for the street barbecue. Skewers over charcoal at small outdoor places, in volume, late into the night. This is the shaokao 烧烤 sense of the word and not the restaurant sense, a distinction the ordering section sets out.

Yunnan 云南, for the mushrooms. The wild fungus season has no parallel in China, and the ethnic cuisines of the province have more in common with Southeast Asia than with the eight schools.

Hunan 湖南, for a different heat from Sichuan's: drier, sharper, built on cured meat 腊味 and smoke rather than on numbing spice.

Suzhou 苏州 and the canal towns, for a breakfast taken as seriously as Guangdong's by a completely different route, and for sweetness used as seasoning.

And then the part that no list can cover. China has thousands of counties. A county town or a single village can have one dish that people travel for, and the number of named regional foods runs to the tens of thousands. No page enumerates this. What a page can do is tell you how to find the local one when you are standing in it, which is the next section.

One practical consolation. Any large Chinese city has restaurants from every region, so a missed province is recoverable. The reverse is not true: the county-level dish exists only where it is.

And one place inverts the whole logic. Yiwu 义乌 is a county-level city in Zhejiang whose wholesale market 批发市场 draws traders from more than two hundred countries, and the traders stayed long enough to be fed properly. The result is a concentration of foreign restaurants that has no equivalent in Chinese cities many times its size: Turkish, Iraqi, Iranian, Yemeni, Syrian, Afghan, Egyptian, with one street given over to it and a district of halal kitchens around the market. The best Middle Eastern food in China is in a small city in the middle of Zhejiang, for the same reason the market is there, which is that somebody had to sell buttons to the world.

08How to Find It, How to Order

How do you find good food in China and order it?

• The single most effective technique is to ask a person. Chinese diners take this question seriously, answer it at length, and are usually right. The phrasing matters less than the fact that you asked.
• Learn four sentence patterns and you can eat anywhere in the country.

– Where is there a good X? The blank takes a cuisine or a dish type. – A good X shop. Attach it to breakfast, to noodles, to steamed buns 包子, to barbecue. – How much is it? Prices are usually posted, but ask anyway. – Less spicy, please. Say it when ordering, not after.

• These four cover most situations, and the names of the cuisines are worth learning in Chinese, because a taxi driver or a hotel receptionist will recognise the characters immediately and may not recognise the English. Sichuan cuisine 川菜 and Hunan cuisine 湘菜 are the two most useful to know.
• Barbecue is two different words in Chinese and asking for the wrong one sends you somewhere else.

Shaokao 烧烤 is the street business. Skewers of fresh meat over open charcoal, at a stall or a small shop, opening in the evening and often running until the small hours. This is what people mean when they talk about barbecue as a night out.

Kaorou 烤肉 usually means a Korean-style grill restaurant: a proper dining room, a hot plate set into the table, fresh meat cooked in front of you and eaten as you go. Formal, indoors, and a completely different evening.

Both come out as barbecue in English. Say or show the one you want.

• For the street version, use the crowd rule. They work late, they cluster on the same streets, and the busiest one is reliably the right one. This is a case where the queue is better information than any review.
• For seafood, look for a buffet. Seafood buffets are common in coastal cities and are inexpensive by the standards of most countries. This is the cheapest way to eat a lot of seafood in China and it is not a compromise on quality.
• For breakfast, ask rather than walk in. Steamed buns from a street window are machine-made in most places now and are not necessarily good. The good breakfast shops and the good bun shops are known locally and are not signposted. Ask, and use the sentence pattern above.
• Order fewer dishes than you think, and adjust for latitude. A rough guide is the number of people plus one, not one each. Northern restaurants serve larger plates than southern ones, so the same rule that leaves you comfortable in Guangzhou 广州 will leave food on the table in Harbin 哈尔滨. Order one fewer in the north and add if you need to.
• Order across categories rather than within one. Something braised, something fresh, one vegetable, one soup, a starch. A table of five fried dishes is a common and avoidable mistake.
• Cold dishes come first and are ordered separately. They arrive while the kitchen works.
• Say your heat level at the point of ordering. In the southwest the chilli is built into the dish rather than added at the end. Asking for less is normal and is not an insult.
• Ask about the broth if you do not eat meat. A dish with no visible meat can still be built on a pork or chicken stock. Temple kitchens run full vegetarian menus and are the reliable option.
• Expect a photographic menu in most mid-range places, which solves the language problem better than a phrasebook. Ordering happens on a phone in a growing number of restaurants, through a code on the table; ask the staff if you cannot use it.
• Tea arrives without being ordered and is usually free. Tapping two fingers on the table is a way of saying thank you while someone is pouring.
• Some things on Chinese menus will not suit every visitor. Offal is ordinary food here rather than a novelty, and blood is an ingredient. This site flags the items many international visitors would rather avoid, so you can decide in advance rather than at the table.
• Tipping is not practised in mainland Chinese restaurants.

09PreeChina Experiences

What does PreeChina arrange around food?

Going to a restaurant in China is not hard. Getting into the interesting ones is.

Every category below has a specific barrier, and the barrier is the reason this block exists.

Restaurants that are hard to find on purpose. Courtyards behind an unmarked door, dining rooms inside residential buildings, places with one sign in Chinese and no listing in any language you read. The barrier is discovery and then reservation, which happens by phone, in Chinese, often days ahead, sometimes with a deposit. We find them and we book them.

Dinner in a garden, with a performance. A classical Chinese garden is a designed sequence of views, and eating inside one while a performance runs is a form of evening the gardens were originally built for. The barrier is access: the gardens that allow it are limited, the arrangements are private, and the performers are booked separately from the meal.

Restaurants inside scenic areas 景区 and city parks. Some of the best-sited dining rooms in China are inside a ticketed park or a scenic reserve, which means gate hours and meal hours have to be reconciled. The barrier is timing and entry, and both are solvable in advance.

Tables with a view of the city from height. Chinese cities have skylines most visitors see only from a viewing platform. The barrier is which building, which floor, which side and which hour, and none of that is visible when you book from outside the country.

Tables with a view of the landscape. Lake, river, mountain, terrace, tea hillside. The barrier is distance and season, and the answer is to build the meal into a day rather than treat it as a destination.

And the places local people rate highest. This is the category visitors miss most completely, because the ranking runs on Chinese platforms, in Chinese, with a scoring culture that does not translate. A restaurant with a national reputation among Chinese diners can be invisible to every English-language source. We read that layer and we book from it.

A stay built around one city's food. Several Chinese cities reward a week rather than a meal. We build those as itineraries rather than as reservations, which means working out what to eat on the fourth day, not the first.

What we do not publish. We do not put the names of these places on this page. Openings, closings, chefs, prices and reservation policies all change; the categories do not. Ask PreeChina Customize for the current version.

One thing we tell you in advance. If a place is famous for something you would rather not eat, you will hear that before you sit down.

10What It Is Not

What is Chinese cuisine not?

• Not one cuisine. The staple grain changes as you travel, the cooking methods cluster differently by region, and two provinces can share every ingredient and produce food you would not connect.
• Not mostly stir-fried. Stir-frying is one family among many, and steaming is more evenly spread across the country than any other method.
• Not represented by the overseas menu. The dishes that travelled came with particular emigrant groups from particular counties and were adapted where they landed. That is a real cuisine with its own history. It is a branch. The sweet battered chilli chicken is the clearest case: it was created in the diaspora, and the dish that occupies its place on menus here is drier and sharper.
• Not the eight schools. The list is a map of the historically wealthy food regions. It leaves out the northwest, the northeast, the southwest ethnic cuisines, and most of what any household cooks on a Tuesday.
• Not enumerable. The number of named regional foods runs into the tens of thousands, and a single county can hold one that people travel for. Any list, including the one on this page, is a sample.
• Not uniformly spicy, and not uniformly mild. The base register of most Chinese cooking is salt and savoury depth, with heat clustering in a belt through the centre and southwest. Heat arrived from the Americas and spread for reasons that had to do with cost before they had anything to do with taste.
• Not a health system. Ideas about balance and about warming and cooling exist in Chinese food culture and this site does not present them as medical claims. The balance that governs how a table is ordered is structural: range across textures and methods, not a nutritional prescription.
• Not something you need a guide to eat. You can walk into almost any restaurant in China and eat well. What is hard is the layer above that, and that is the only part of this subject where we claim to add anything.