Chinese Food Culture: Eight Cuisines, One Table

What are the regional cuisines of China?

Eight are conventionally counted: Cantonese (Yue) from Guangdong, Sichuan (Chuan), Jiangsu (Su), Zhejiang (Zhe), Fujian (Min), Hunan (Xiang), Anhui (Hui) and Shandong (Lu). Each has its own logic about heat, sweetness and what counts as the main ingredient.

Cantonese cooking is the mildest and closest to what most Westerners have eaten abroad: steaming and quick wok work, seafood, and dim sum served from trolleys from about 07:00 until 14:00. A dim sum breakfast costs RMB 40–80 per person.

Sichuan food is the opposite: chilli plus Sichuan pepper, which produces the numbing ma la sensation rather than simple heat. Hunan is hotter still and drier, with sour and smoked notes; Jiangsu and Zhejiang lean sweet and delicate; Shandong is savoury, heavy on seafood and vinegar.

How a Chinese meal is built

Chinese meals are shared, and the structure is fixed: cold dishes first, then hot dishes, then soup, then the carbohydrate — rice, noodles or steamed buns — served last as a filler rather than a base.

Order one dish per person plus one soup for a group of four, and add a vegetable dish if nobody else does. A host ordering for guests will over-order; this is generosity, not waste, and leaving a little food on the plate is normal.

There is no dessert course in a traditional meal. Fresh fruit arrives at the end, sweet dishes like red-bean paste or eight-treasure rice pudding are regional, and Western-style cakes belong to a separate bakery tradition.

At the table: the rules that actually matter

Four rules carry all the weight. Never stand chopsticks upright in a bowl of rice — it echoes the incense burned for the dead. Do not tap the bowl with them, do not point, and do not use your own chopsticks to serve someone else when a serving spoon is on the table.

Let the host order and let the host pay. Fighting over the bill is expected from the guest and refused by the host; the way to reciprocate is to host the next meal. Splitting the bill in a restaurant is uncommon outside younger city circles.

Hold the bowl close to your mouth when eating rice rather than shovelling from the table, and try a little of everything. Commenting that a dish is unusual is fine; refusing to eat any of it is read as rejecting the host's effort.

Street food and night markets

Street food is where regional cooking is most honest and cheapest: RMB 15–30 for a bowl of noodles, RMB 3–10 for skewers, RMB 5–15 for a jianbing crepe cooked on a griddle in front of you.

Choose the stall with a queue. High turnover means ingredients are fresh and the oil is changed; a stall with nobody at it at 19:00 is telling you something. Food cooked to order in front of you is safer than dishes sitting uncovered.

Night markets run from about 18:00 to 23:00 and are a genuinely good evening plan — Xi'an's Muslim Quarter, Beijing's Wangfujing Snack Street and Chengdu's Jinli are the three most walkable. Bring cash: small stalls often take QR payments only from Chinese accounts.

What to order on a first trip

Start with five dishes that define the range: Cantonese dim sum or steamed fish, Sichuan mapo tofu, Hunan braised pork, Peking duck in Beijing, and a bowl of hand-pulled lamian noodles in Xi'an or Lanzhou.

Regional specialities worth planning a city around: Chengdu for Sichuan hotpot and street snacks, Guangzhou for dim sum, Xi'an for Muslim Quarter lamb and biangbiang noodles, Hangzhou for West Lake vinegar fish.

Vegetarians manage better than expected because Buddhist cooking is an established tradition, but ask about meat stock — the word is su (素) for vegetarian. Say wo chi su (我吃素) and check that lard and chicken powder are not in the dish.

Our food-focused itineraries route cities around markets and cooking schools rather than restaurants alone. See what is included at /destinations/chengdu/ before you plan the food side of the trip.

Last updated: 2026-10-02 · Reviewed by JoyoTour