Lodging & Dining

A man in a stained white cap pulls a rope of dough into sixteen strands in under twenty seconds, drops them into a cauldron, fishes them out ninety seconds later…

The bowl arrives and it is enormous, and it appears to contain nothing but soup. No steam rises off it, which is the first trap. Around it the waiter sets…

Any useful Chinese dumpling guide has to start by admitting that “dumpling” is a translation problem. In English it’s one word. In China it covers at least a dozen distinct…

Most visitors arrive with a one-item Chengdu food guide in their head: hotpot. That is a shame, because hotpot is the loudest dish in the city, not the best one….

This China night market guide is for travelers who discover, usually around 8pm on their second evening, that the country’s real food culture does not live in restaurants. It lives…

Tea in China is not a drink so much as a landscape, a calendar and a social code. Follow it and you end up in terraced hills above West Lake…

A China hostels guide has to open with a warning most travel blogs skip: not every hostel in China is licensed to take foreign guests. The country requires any hotel…

A China tea house guide has to cover two completely different worlds, because both are alive at once. There’s the slow, formal gongfu cha ceremony — tiny pots, repeated short…

A China cooking class is the rare travel experience that keeps paying you back after the trip: you fly home with recipes and muscle memory, not just photos. Across the…

A proper Xiaolongbao Shanghai guide has to start with a small confession: the soup dumpling most tourists hunt in Shanghai is not really from Shanghai at all. It was perfected…