What to eat in China: regional dishes, places and food costs

One dish for each city on the classic route

Beijing, Xi’an, Chengdu and Shanghai each have a dish that belongs to the city, and eating it is the easiest way to feel the change from one stop to the next.

Our first trip guide puts the four cities in order, and the trip cost guide prices the whole route.

Beijing: roast duck, hutong noodles and mutton hotpot

Peking duck is the one dish most visitors plan a dinner around. The duck is roasted until the skin is crisp, carved into thin slices and brought with a steamer of thin pancakes, a dark soybean sauce and strips of cucumber and spring onion, and you fill each pancake yourself. Order the duck first and choose the rest of the meal around it.

Two houses define the dish. Quanjude, founded in 1864, is known for hung-oven roasting, a technique on China’s national list of intangible cultural heritage. Bianyifang, set up in 1416, roasts in a closed stove so the duck is never exposed to the flame; the method, known as “green roast duck”, sits on the same list. Quanjude is at 30 Qianmen Street (全聚德, 前门大街30号) and Bianyifang in Xianyukou food street on the east side of Qianmen Street (便宜坊, 鲜鱼口). Qianmen is at the southern end of Tiananmen Square, so a duck dinner fits an evening after the sights in our Beijing guide.

For a first duck dinner, Quanjude or Liqun Roast Duck is the easy choice. Liqun, at No. 11 Beixiangfeng Hutong near Qianmen Street, is a hole-in-the-wall house reached through a narrow passage hung with photographs. For historical comparison, Visit Beijing’s 2018 guide listed average spending of CNY 133 a person at Bianyifang, CNY 160 at Liqun, CNY 192 at Quanjude and CNY 300 at Da Dong, at Nanxincang International Plaza, 22A Dongsishitiao. These are older average bills, not current duck-menu prices; use the restaurant’s menu to price a duck and side dishes for two.

Two other Beijing dishes fill the rest of your days. Zhajiangmian, hand-made noodles tossed with fried soybean paste and minced pork and served with shredded cucumber, bean sprouts and other vegetables, makes the lunch on a hutong walk: guests queue for it at No. 69 Fangzhuanchang Hutong Noodles, at No. 1 Fangzhuanchang Hutong near Nanluoguxiang. From late autumn through winter, plan a dinner of instant-boiled mutton (shuan yangrou): thin slices of mutton dipped in a copper hotpot of plain water with spring onion and ginger, then in sesame paste. Dong Lai Shun, at 198 Wangfujing Street, cooks it in copper pots over charcoal.

Xi’an: bread soup, the Muslim Quarter and belt noodles

Xi’an cooks with wheat, and its best-known meal is paomo: pita-style bread soaked in a soup of beef and lamb. Lao Sun Jia, at the southern end of Huimin Street, is the paomo house to look for. You crumble the bread yourself, the kitchen adds it to the hot soup, and the bowl is eaten with chilli sauce, fresh coriander and sweet garlic. Most Shaanxi restaurants charge around CNY 30 for a bowl of mutton paomo (yangrou paomo), a price given in December 2025.

The Muslim Quarter, also called Huimin Street, lies by the Drum Tower and is the place to eat on a Xi’an evening. Some 300 snack shops and restaurants, most of them run by Hui families, line its 600 metres, selling roujiamo, peanut pastries and paomo. Roujiamo is the quick meal: chopped meat stuffed into a baked bun, and here the meat is beef. Beiyuanmen Street, which locals call Fangshang, adds cured beef and mutton and guantang baozi, the soup buns that count among the city’s famous Muslim snacks; Jiasan is the best-known name for them.

Biangbiang noodles are the other signature dish: wide, hand-pulled belts of dough served by the bowl with vegetables, sauce and chilli. Youpo mian, the oil-splashed version, has hot oil poured over the chilli and garlic on top. Yongxingfang, a food street in Xincheng district that keeps the layout of an old lane, is known for youpo noodles and other Shaanxi dishes, among them potato and glutinous rice cakes, Zichang pancakes and gourd-shaped chicken.

For a sit-down meal, look to the main streets of the Bell and Drum Tower shopping district. Defachang, on West Street (Xi Dajie), serves dumpling feasts, with dumplings in many shapes and colours. On East Avenue (Dong Dajie), Baiyunzhang is a Muslim dumpling restaurant known for dumplings in sour soup, and Xi’an Restaurant, at No 298, has the broadest menu: gourd-shaped fried chicken, a milky white fish soup and a cold dish of sliced pork skin, chicken skin and jellyfish skin are among its popular dishes. Our Xi’an guide sets out the sights these meals fit between.

Chengdu: mapo tofu, hotpot, and the difference between heat and numbness

Mapo tofu is Chengdu’s calling card. It dates from 1862, from a small restaurant beside Wanfu Bridge at the city’s north gate, whose customers were porters who brought their own cooking oil; they praised the tofu as numbing, hot and scalding at once. The classic version uses soft gypsum-set tofu, minced beef stir-fried until crisp, a meat stock and garlic shoots, in a thickened sauce finished with red oil and Sichuan pepper powder.

The heat and the numbness come from different ingredients. The heat is chilli, from Pixian chilli bean paste and erjingtiao chillies; the numbness is Sichuan pepper, here the Hanyuan variety, ground and sprinkled over the dish at the end.

Chen Mapo Tofu, a China time-honoured brand, runs three restaurants of its own in Chengdu, and franchised shops in China and abroad carry the name too. Share the dish with plain rice, which takes the edge off the chilli. For a quick lunch, look for long chao shou, Chengdu’s name for wontons: minced pork in thin wrappers, served in a bowl of broth, with red chilli oil if you want the heat. Long Chao Shou (龙抄手), a time-honoured snack restaurant founded in 1941, runs three restaurants of its own in the city, and the snack restaurants on and around Chunxi Road, the shopping street in Jinjiang District on Metro Line 2, serve them beside lai tang yuan, the city’s rice dumplings.

Fuqi feipian, “husband-and-wife lung slices”, is the cold dish to share: beef, ox heart, tongue, tripe and head skin, braised, sliced thin and dressed with red chilli oil and ground Sichuan pepper. A married couple, Guo Chaohua and Zhang Tianzheng, created it in Chengdu in the early 1930s, and Fuqi Feipian’s main restaurant is on Zongfu Road, beside Chunxi Road.

Hotpot is the other Chengdu meal to plan an evening around. A pot of broth boils in the middle of the table, plates of raw ingredients arrive, and everyone cooks their own: thinly sliced meat, leafy vegetables, mushrooms, tofu, wontons and seafood are typical, each dipped in a sauce before eating. Order the yuanyang pot for a first time: it is divided into a spicy broth and a plain one, so each diner can choose the heat. The restaurants on and around Chunxi Road are the easiest place to find a hotpot house in the centre. Our Chengdu guide covers the rest of the city.

Shanghai: soup dumplings, pan-fried buns and a bowl of noodles

Soup dumplings come first in Shanghai; the prices below were checked on 26 October 2026. Xiaolongbao in the Nanxiang style date from 1871, when a pastry-shop owner in Nanxiang, now part of Shanghai’s Jiading district, made the bun smaller and thinner and added meat jelly to the filling; the jelly melts into soup when the dumplings are steamed. The filling is usually minced pork, and the soup inside is scalding: bite a small hole first. For the original style, eat at Nanxiang Steam Bun Restaurant (南翔馒头店), founded in 1900, inside the Yuyuan Garden Malls at 87 Yuyuan Road. It opens at 07:30, so a dumpling breakfast fits before a morning at Yu Garden, and the average bill is about CNY 93 a person. For crab-roe dumplings, made with fresh crab each day and at their best in autumn, go to Lai Lai Xiao Long at 506 Tianjin Road, where the average bill is about CNY 58 a person; it closes between 14:00 and 15:00.

Shengjian, the pan-fried buns, are a different dish: where xiaolongbao are steamed, shengjian are fried in a pan until the base is crisp. They are ordered by the liang, which means four buns. The soup-filled style, hunshui, uses a semi-leavened dough and pork mixed with aspic that melts in the pan; the style called qingshui uses fully leavened dough and no added aspic, relying on the meat’s own juices. Order qingshui buns at Da Hu Chun (大壶春), 136 Middle Sichuan Road, at CNY 11 for four; Lao Zheng He, at 11 South Sichuan Road, makes a slightly juicier qingshui bun at the same price, and Dong Tai Xiang, at 188 North Chongqing Road, sells semi-leavened buns at CNY 13 for four.

Scallion-oil noodles, tossed in fragrant scallion oil and soy sauce, are Shanghai’s signature bowl. Huxi Laolongtang Noodle Shop (沪西老弄堂面馆), in Room 101 at 685 Dingxi Road, piles on dried shrimp for CNY 7 a serving; Cang Lang Ting (沧浪亭), at 8 Sinan Road, serves a more refined bowl, also with dried shrimp, for CNY 25.

For a sit-down dinner, Lyceum (兰心餐厅), at 130 Jinxian Road, cooks home-style dishes, including the spring soup yanduxian of pork, salted pork and bamboo shoots, for an average bill of about CNY 92 a person. Dinner there runs only from 19:00 to 21:00 and it takes no reservations, so expect a queue. Lao Zheng Xing (老正兴), at 556 Fuzhou Road, is the more formal choice at about CNY 153 a person. Our Shanghai guide shows where these streets sit.

Cantonese tea and dim sum, if you add Guangzhou

Dim sum is the Cantonese way of eating: small dishes, shared across the table over pots of tea, with shrimp dumplings (har gow) among the first to order. Guangzhou is not on the classic four-city route, but it is a gateway for some trips, and the tea houses there are worth a morning.

Tao Tao Ju (陶陶居), founded in 1880, is one of Guangzhou’s well-known tea houses, and its original address is 20 Dishifu Road in Liwan District (广州市荔湾区第十甫路20号). Since 2015 its owner, Guangzhou Restaurant Group, has opened new-style Tao Tao Ju tea houses in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Xiamen. Check the branch’s menu for tea, rice and service charges before ordering.

Ordering, paying and eating with a diet

Duck, mapo tofu, fuqi feipian, both kinds of hotpot and dim sum are dishes for the table, ordered to share; noodles, paomo, roujiamo and shengjian are ordered per person. Pay with Alipay or Weixin Pay (also called WeChat Pay). Carry some renminbi. Since 1 February 2026 face-to-face businesses must generally accept cash. Unattended services must offer a way to meet cash-payment needs in special circumstances; wholly online transactions can specify their payment methods. Our payments guide covers setting up both apps.

Dishes that look plain can contain animal products: the scallion-oil noodles come with dried shrimp at Huxi Laolongtang and Cang Lang Ting, mapo tofu is made with minced beef and meat stock, and xiaolongbao and shengjian are filled with pork. If you follow a halal, vegetarian or allergy diet, write what you cannot eat in Chinese on your phone and show it when you order; sauces and stocks are shared between dishes, so no dish can be promised free of a trace.

What food costs a day

These are food-day estimates based on the Shanghai price comparisons checked on 26 October 2026, not national tariffs. Each day covers breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinking water and snacks for one adult, with no alcohol and no hotel breakfast counted. In Shanghai terms, a budget day runs on the CNY 7 to 25 noodle bowls and the CNY 11 buns, a mid-range day mixes those with sit-down meals priced between the CNY 25 noodle bowl and Lyceum’s CNY 92 average, and a comfort day puts most dinners near Lao Zheng Xing’s CNY 153 average. Allow about CNY 30 for a simple lunch; prices for a specific noodle or wonton order depend on the menu. For duck and hotpot evenings, replace that day’s dinner estimate with the actual order and add any difference; the 2018 duck comparisons above are not current quotations.

Over the ten days of our trip cost guide, food comes to about CNY 2,000 for two on a budget, CNY 3,600 mid-range and CNY 7,000 in comfort; that guide sets it beside rooms, trains and flights.