James Thompson

In China people are very proud of their food and it is a very important part of their culture. Most special occasions are celebrated with some kind of special food or dish for that occasion. For birthdays it is longevity noodles, for Dragon Boat festival it is rice dumplings, for Mid-Autumn festival it is mooncake and so on. It is common around meal times to substitute how are you? with have you eaten yet? and even wedding ceremonies tend to take place at restaurants. When I am asked about what I generally eat back in the UK for lunch, Chinese people generally look at me with a mix of confusion and pity when I tell them I would normally eat a simple sandwich.

Chinese cuisine is very rich and varied and while you can find Chinese food that is similar to back in the UK, it is normally a little different and those dishes also only make up a small part of Chinese cuisine. Every place is famous for some kind of dish, even the smallest places, Wuxi is known for its sweet and sour ribs. China is ultimately a big country and its cuisines are, from province to province, as varied if not more varied than Europe. The big cuisines tend to be Hunan, North Eastern, Sichuan, Jiangsu, Shandong, Cantonese, but there are also many more. The two I am going to give a brief introduction to, which are my favourite, are North Eastern and Sichuan.

North Eastern food is great, North Eastern restaurants will normally have many of the national dishes more familiar to foreigners such as sweet and sour pork, kung pao chicken etc. But generally North Eastern food is known for being salty and filling. One of the main reasons I love North Eastern food so much is that they have lots of potato dishes, as well as aubergine, tofu and many more. It generally does not look as nice on the eye as other cuisines, but it tastes great. Here are some photos.

The second cuisine is Sichuan, and this is one of the most popular cuisines in China and is very different from anything I have tried before. This cuisine is known for being spicy, however, the spice in unlike anything I have tasted before and is best described as numbing. Sichuan food comes in many forms, the most popular being hot pot, dry pot and ma la soup.

Ultimately after living in China for almost three years I do not really miss the food back home, and if I do it is generally easy to get if that is really what you want. One of the great things here is that Chinese people know how to make vegetables taste good, and it is the one place in the world I could probably be a vegetarian.