The Beijing food is famous for its delicious taste and various sorts. It is hard for people to have a taste of all kinds of Beijing food in a short time. Besides the most famous food such as Beijing Roast Duck, there are so many other delicious foods in Beijing.

 

To experience the pleasure of Chinese food completely, it is not enough to choose something comfortingly familiar, such as sweet-and-sour pork, hoping that will taste the same as in the neighborhood restaurant back home. It may well do so, but this misses the point of a Chinese meal, with its yin-yang balance of flavors, textures and ingredients. The foods from Beijing are satisfying indeed, with sharpened, direct flavors that Westerners undoubtedly will find pleasing.

 

With cold winters, a short growing season, and a relatively arid climate, northern China developed a cuisine based on wheat, millet, and soybeans. Northern cooks developed wheat pancakes, like those that accompany their famous Peking duck, and thin wheat skins for meat-filled pot-sticker dumplings. Modern Beijing chefs are proud of their hand-pulled noodles (lai mein) said to have originated in the north during the Han dynasty some 2000 years ago, shortly after the technique of flour milling reached China, via India, along the new Silk Road between what is now Afghanistan and Xian. Trade along this route, which took silk robes to the Roman emperors and much later brought Marco Polo from Venice, enriched the Northern provinces with herbs, fruits, vegetables, and spices.

 

Beijing's restaurants have at last caught up with its gastronomic history. In this commercial capital of China, the cooking of the northern region with all its inherent elegance is there for the eating. For visitor and resident alike, such cooking has become more accessible and more pleasurable with the recent openings of several luxury hotels that are committed to excellent and authentic cooking served in elegant settings.

 

Tea is the most popular drink in Beijing as well as China in large. Lu Yu, a Tang dynasty Master of Tea, wrote that drinking tea aids the digestion, especially "when sipped in the company of sweet and beautiful maidens in a pavilion by a water-lily pond or near a lacquered bridge. Most tea drinkers will not be so fortunate, but as long as the tea is good they may be willing to make allowances. In the Chinese tea ceremony, the miniature cups and teapot are doused with scaldingly hot water; tea is then placed in the pot and boiling water added. After an appropriate interval, the tea is poured and drunk at once. There are many varieties of Chinese tea, and though jasmine tea is usually served as a matter of course in restaurants, you could ask for black, fragrant green, linden or magnolia tea instead.

 

All Chinese restaurants provide diners with chopsticks and a spoon. Very few restaurants furnish forks and of course knives are not needed for Chinese food. Chopsticks can be awkward at first. Perseverance is needed to get the technique right, but a Chinese meal is best enjoyed with them, and the two sticks can be surprisingly agile in practiced hands. The bottom stick is the "anvil", held firmly between the first joint of the ring finger and the lower thumb, while resting in the crook of forefinger and thumb. The top stick is held like a pen between the tip of the thumb and forefinger and pivots against the lower sticks.

 

Beijing is the best place to experience the Chinese culture, come and enjoy it.