Food Menu

 The menu in a Chinese restaurant can be daunting with many restaurants only showing a long list of words and characters. It pays to learn some of the key words, like beef, pork, rice, noodles and so on. Although I have explained some below, you can easily find online images and sites that go into much more detail. One key tip is to find out what the local speciality is and also learn those characters and words, as they'll pop up often.

Anyway, common meat dishes found throughout most of China that you might want to try, include ‘tang-su lee-ji’ (sweet and sour pork), ‘bao-chao yang-rou’ (lamb in pepper/onion), ‘ru -shang rou-sir’ (pork slices served in tasty fungus), ‘tu-dough-shao new-rou’ (potato and beef), ‘gong-bao jee-ding’ (chicken pieces in nuts) in the north. These tend to be hits with visitors to China. Larger restaurants may have some or all of these or variations of.

But, arguably, the king of all meat dishes is the famous Beijing roast duck which is accompanied with vegetables and pancake wraps (build your own duck wrap using the meat and vegetables and dunk into a dark soybean sauce): ‘Beijing kao ya’. You might also want to try Sichuan Hotpot ('Sichuan huoguo'), where you throw veggies, meats and whatever else there is available into a large bubbling bowl often spicy, sometimes with a 'half spicy and half non-spicy' bowl option. Don't forget to get a side bowl of sauces and herbs to go along with the hotpot.

For seafood dishes, try ‘yow-men da-shia’ (fried shrimps in which you should eat everything but the head) or the ‘hong-shao lee-you’ (fried carp in sauce).

Additional plates are ‘shi-hong shur-chao jee-dan’ (a lovely and simple mixed egg and tomato plate), ‘jia-chang doufu’ (tofu with vegetables) and another dish the Chinese are famous for, dumplings: ‘jiao-za’ (vegetable and meat filled dumplings) ‘hun-dun’ (meat only dumplings) and ‘bao-za’ (varying flavours but much bigger dumplings). The first two types are boiled whereas the ‘bao-za’ is steamed.

Check out our Food and Eating Habits pages for more info!