China travel destinations

Dog meat, chicken's feet, fish-heads, snakes' gall-bladders, bear's paw - so many foreigners turn up their noses at fare a Chinese would be honoured to receive that they cannot be blamed for keeping these delicacies to themselves and isolating the 'guests' in a separate room in the restaurant. The full-scale banquet is the highlight of Chinese cuisine, but there are many simpler highlights to be experienced every day.

Peking Cuisine
Ducks could be forgiven for wishing this cuisine had never been invented, as they form a substantial part of its basic ingredients. Freshly roasted, crisp-skinned Peking Duck is famous the world over, and the many restaurants in the capital patronised by locals have to maintain high standards, because the Beijingese know what they like and stay away from what they do not. The skin and meat of the roasted duck are cut thinly and eaten in pancakes along with spring onions, cucumber, and sweet plum sauce. The meal ends with a soup made from the duck's carcass. As the north relies on wheat for its staple food, bread and noodles are more common than rice in Peking cuisine, and steamed dumplings are also popular.

Cantonese Cuisine
'If its back faces heaven, you can eat it', goes a traditional Cantonese saying (a more modern version has it that the Cantonese will eat everything with wings, except for aeroplanes, and everything with legs, except the table). Guangdong province, source of Cantonese cuisine, is an extremely fertile area, yielding several harvests annually, and with a long coastline that provides an abundance of seafood. These fresh ingredients are mostly steamed or stir-fried, ensuring that their flavour and texture are retained. As a result they need little support in the way of spices or sauces, although light sauces of garlic, ginger, and scallions (green onion) art-favoured. Rice is an important staple, coming from the subtropical hinterland. Snake is a local favourite, its taste being not dissimilar to that of chicken.

Sichuan Cuisine
Spice is the variety of life in Sichuan, and the fiery taste of the province's cuisine, laced with red-hot peppers, is renowned throughout China. Visitors unfamiliar with how 'hot' food can get had better go easy with Sichuan food. The pepper varieties in Sichuan give food a sharp, lemony taste, which is different from the standard chilli flavour.

Although hot and spicy is the basic approach, the cuisine offers much more, and chefs work with a medley of seven tastes - sweet, sour, salty, fragrant, bitter, nutty, and hot - to get the balanced effect they are seeking. Sichuan's subtlety is present in tea-smoked and camphor-smoked duck, while tangerine-peel chicken, pork with vegetables, and bamboo shoots in a sweet sauce are delicately flavoured dishes.

Hong Kong
Hong Kong is the citadel of Chinese cuisine. When Communism invaded the Chinese kitchen, people from all over the country fled to Hong Kong, bringing their culinary baggage with them and complementing the existing Cantonese style. 'Have you had your rice yet?' is a traditional Hong Kong greeting. The city is a vast cornucopia of fine food, mostly Chinese of course, but with international flavours: all the Asian cuisines, and many European and American, are well represented. Hong Kongers lead hectic lives. Eating out is one of the pleasures they relish, and they have more than 30,000 eateries from which to choose.

Macao
Macao is distinguished by its Portuguese tradition, which is influenced in turn by the country's legacy of Moorish rule and its imperial connections with India (Goa), Africa, and South America. When Macaonese cuisine is added to a range of Chinese styles as extensive as Hong Kong's (although with a smaller choice of restaurants), dining out joins gambling as Macao's main attraction.

Shanghai
Shanghai food, with its emphasis on seafood and subtle variations in taste, is one of the more notable local cuisines, despite being rather oily. Freshwater crabs, spiced baby eels, and freshwater shrimps cooked with Hangzhou tea, are all among the many items on the menu.

Other Styles
In Muslim restaurants and households, particularly in the far west, mutton takes the place of pork, and pilaf rice is used in place of plain boiled. Hunan likes its spices, but uses them in a more restrained way than Sichuan. Around Guilin, steamed bamboo rat is a great delicacy, as is stewpot in Yunnan, and stewed chicken with ginseng in Jialing. Few dishes enjoy the exotic reputation of the Mongolian hotpot, which helps the northerners survive their long and harsh winters, and is in fact a kind of soup in which vegetables and meat are first cooked in boiling water at the table, and then eaten; the bouillon gradually becomes more flavourful, and is drunk at the meal's end.

Beverages
Tea is the most popular drink in China, but other beverages, some far less benign, are indulged in. Wines and liqueurs made from fruits, flowers, or herbs can be tasteful and sometimes potent drinks. Rice wines, particularly those from Zhejiang, have a good reputation. Beware of fiery mao tai, the national tipple, used in the gan bei ('bottoms up') toast at banquets (traditionally, the empty glass should be held upside down over one's head to show that the toast has been honoured; in fact, emptying the glass is not mandatory).

Chinese Beer, especially the light and fragrant lager-style Tsingtao (which is still brewed according to a 1930s German recipe), is of a high standard and is extremely refreshing with spicy foods.