When coming to China, food is one of most important parts to experience. Whether you stay in an international hotel, a cheap backpacker’s place or are living in a Chinese apartment building, the moment will come where you are hungry and looking for a place to eat and then you should know what possibilities you have.
When coming to China, food is one of most important parts to experience. Whether you stay in an international hotel, a cheap backpacker’s place or are living in a Chinese apartment building, the moment will come where you are hungry and looking for a place to eat and then you should know what possibilities you have.
In China’s capital
Beijing there are many ways to satisfy ones craving for whatever kind of food. You can enjoy dishes from all over the world, no matter what you want; you can definitely find it in Beijing. Once you decide to have
Chinese food though, it becomes very interesting.
The cheapest way to eat in China is by buying food which is being cooked on the sidewalk right before you in a huge basin with some indefinable broth in it. You can choose between green vegetables, tofu, meat, fish and various other exotic animals like scorpions, starfishes and silkworms all neatly arranged on a skewer. If you generally like fast-food and are not fussy about not knowing what is exactly in the broth, which hardly ever gets changed during the day, then you will probably enjoy this kind of meal.
The second cheapest version of Chinese food can be found in food stalls, the so called “Xiaochi”, which cover all of China and offer very basic food. Here you can enjoy your meal while sitting either on a plastic stool or an actual chair next to a very greasy table.
In China the food of the food stalls is generally very good, but the choice is slightly limited as the ingredients of the dishes stay the same except for being mixed with either flat rice noodles, rice vermicelli, glass noodles, fried noodles, noodles in soup, steamed rice or fried rice.
Of course the menus in China are written in Chinese characters and in order to find out what kind of food one is ordering, one either has to simply order a meal, find out what it is and for future use remember what the characters looked like or find out what the meals are called beforehand. If you are lucky, you will end up in a restaurant which offers a good display of pictures which will give you a slight idea of what you could be ordering.