Chinese Cuisine

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Food in Beijing is delightful. Firstly the street food is cheap and tasty-mostly spicy stirfries of meat, peppers and aubergine. If you can get over the rubbish under your table this is a must. Also avoid the cheapest meat dishes on the menu as you will only end up with very cheap meat or complete fat.

Beijing Duck is the trademark dish-succulent meat, served with pancakes, plum sauce and some veg like cabbage or cucumber. They use the entire duck so you get one plate of meat with the crackling, shredded meat and then they use the rest for a soup. Yum...we went to Lao She Tea house for it and it was very delicious, as the chinese say

There is loads of fruit on sale-melon is everywhere. Also noodles and dumplings are ubiquitous.

But Beijing has cuisines from all regions. Went to a sichuanese restaurant where the dishes were incredibly spicy. Ordered blackened chicken (unintentionally), the bones and all are black and they are very scrawny. Our guide was even gulping down rice after a mouthful containing a little red chili.

Apparently you are not s'posed to buy any drinks on the street as they bottle them themselves.

A bottle of 630ml Tsingtao beer costs 20 yuan (20 cent)!! And the great thing about all the restaurants is that you can byo

The absolute best food that we had was in Sichuan province, in Chengdu.

The sichuan hotpot is fab-you can get a partition hotpot at your table of spicy and savoury broth. Then you order whatever ingredients you want and cook them at the table. We had carp, rabbit kidneys, lotus root, potato and bamboo shoots. Couldn't recommend highly enough...

We also went to Wenshu Yuan, a zen temple and they have excellent veg food really cheap.

In Yunnan province tried some of the local specialities like fans of cheese, fish from Er Hai lake cooked in a spicy & sour soup with papaya and they do all sorts of preserved fruits but the eryun preserved plums are the best

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