Lodging & Dining

Finding safe, certified meals abroad can be a source of anxiety for Muslim travelers, but China is genuinely friendly territory. This halal food in China guide explains how to spot…

China’s northeast, known locally as Dongbei, is a vast region of snowy plains, dense forests, and long, brutal winters. The food that comes out of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning provinces…

A cube of pork belly the size of a matchbox arrives in a small porcelain bowl, tied with a straw bow, so dark it looks lacquered. You press it with…

The first thing most visitors notice about food in southern Anhui is the smell. Walk down Tunxi Old Street in the evening and somewhere between the tea shops and the…

There is a saying in Fuzhou that a meal without soup is not a meal. It is not a figure of speech. Sit down in an ordinary restaurant in coastal…

Watch a chef in Yangzhou make wensi tofu and you will understand the cuisine before you taste anything. He lays a block of silken tofu on a wet board and,…

When the Qing court needed cooks, it hired them from Shandong. When Beijing restaurants standardised their menus in the nineteenth century, they were largely copying Shandong ones. Most travellers arrive…

At 6:40am on a Wuhan side street, a woman is holding a paper bowl of hot sesame noodles in one hand and steering a scooter with the other, eating as…

It starts around nine at night. A cart rolls out onto the pavement, someone tips a bag of charcoal into a long steel trough, and within twenty minutes the whole…

On a single lane off Yongkang Road in Shanghai I once counted eleven cafés in four hundred metres — a Japanese-style kissaten with a siphon bar, two competition-grade filter shops,…