When visiting Haikou, the provincial capital of Hainan Island, you will find seafood almost in every fine restaurant. Famous local specialties such as Wenchang Chicken, Jiaji Duck and Dongshan Mutton are also served as a must. It is said that Hainan mutton is prepared in a special way, hence it bears several unique attributes that are not often associated with mutton, soft, pure fragrant, making it much more appetizing to many people. These tasty dishes are highly recommended for visitors!

Seafood restaurants in Haikou fall into two categories. One is the up-market variety where the décor and service is as much of the dining experience as the quality of the food. Such places are the Jinghao Restaurant on Binhai Avenue and Nanzhuang Restaurant on Haixiu Avenue. These extra touches come at a price, so eating in these venues is relative expensive. The alternative is the one on the roadside where you will see the seafood alive, breathing and kicking in the tank! This kind of restaurant is much more reasonably priced, especially if it is merely the hunger you with to satisfy. Popular venues in this category include those on Haixiu Middle Road and on Xinbu Island.

Xining is the capital of Qinghai Province, playing an important role as the center of the provincial politics, economy, culture, education, science, transport and communications. Built in 222AD, this old west city bears typical characteristics of coexistence of multi-ethnic and multi-religious cultures. Xining is not only a Chinese Excellent Tourism City due to the beautiful city scene and the cool temperature in summer, it is also a unique place for snacks which are also fascinating, and attract numerous visitors from within as well as from abroad. Some of the famous ones are introduced as follows.

Liangfen (bean jelly) is made from pea powder and cut into short strips. Liangfen is served with vinegar, chili and mashed garlic, mustard and salt to enhance the taste of the dish.

Niangpi is a popular snack made of flour and baking soda. It can be found anywhere in Xining for four-Yuan. The most famous version of this snack is called Mazhong Niangpi and can be found in the Mojia Street.

Zasui Tang is a soup cooked with lamb and oxen entrails. Locals often eat this snack for breakfast. The hot soup helps warm people during the winter.

Muslim Yoghurt is a must while in Xining – this breakfast is a kind of yoghurt made by local Muslim families and is served in small bowls for one Yuan.

With more than 100 years history, Fo Tiao Qiang is a traditional Min Cuisine recipe. It is said to have been created by the wife of a Fuzhou official, who in 1876 was entertaining an important member of the Fujian Government in his home. His wife, who was an excellent cook placed chicken, duck, pork and seafood together into an empty wine jar to simmer following a recipe which was known at the time as “Full of Blessing and Longevity”. When the dish was served, the visitor praised the aroma and the delicious flavor and was so impressed that when he returned home he asked the cook – Zheng Chunfa to learn how the wife of his host had prepared the food. Subsequently, Zhen Chunfa adapted the recipe making it more fulsome, and on the strength of his creation, he opened a restaurant named Juchunyuan where he served it to the delight of his customers.

One day several talented writers entered the restaurant and were served with Zheng Chunfa’s special version of “Full of Blessing and Longevity”. When he opened the jar in which it had been cooked, the diners were so taken with the gorgeous smell that one of them wrote a poem about it. In the poem he said that the smell was so wonderful that even a Buddha would stop pattering and jump over the wall to have a taste. Hence the name “Buddha Jumps over the Wall”. Simmered stuff in a Shaoxing wine jar using more than twenty ingredients including fish, sea cucumber, chicken, pork and mutton, dried scallop, sea-ear, needle of bamboo shoot and pigeon egg, this traditional dish is widely renowned overseas and is considered the top dish among those of the Min Cuisine.

Fuzimiao Street (Gongyuan Street)

Most travelers find local delicacies in Nanjing irresistible. Gongyuan Street on the northern bank of the famous Qin Huai River (usually called Fuzimiao Street by locals) is the most bustling tour site in the city. It is one of China’s Four Famed Streets – the others being Wangfujing in Beijing, Xuanmiaoguan Street in Suzhou and Nanjing Road in Shanghai. You can sample various snacks, from the reputed Salted Soup Duck to Chinese dumplings in dozens of restaurants, stalls and shops on the street. The most famous snacks include spicy Gan Si, eggs boiled in tea, fried pancakes, duck blood soups, beef soup, dumplings and others. Famous restaurants include Wanqing Tower, Kuiguangge, Lao Zhengxing, Liu Feng Ju and so on.

Hunan Lu Dinning & Shopping Street

Located in the northwestern part of the city in Gulou District (Drum Tower District), this one kilometer long street is one of the most prosperous shopping streets in Nanjing with the famous Shiziqiao Food Street in the middle. This pedestrian street is filled with dozens of restaurants providing both Chinese and western-style food. The street is divided into three parts. The first part has restaurants serving typical local cuisine, among which Shiwangfu Restaurant is the best. The second part is called Chinese Food Street where various cuisines from different parts of China are found and the last, but not least, is the area which has food from Japan, Korea, India, Thailand and the west.

This street is a warm, lively place for local people who spend evenings there with friends. An annual flavored food festival is held to attract tourists.

Hanfu Street

Hanfu Street, opposite Nanjing Presidential Hall, is the latest food street to be developed and has restaurants run by people from other cities in China. They cover all kinds of food from throughout the country including spicy Sichuan cuisine, ethnic Guizhou food, folk dishes of Northeast China and Shanghai Cuisine.

Huguosi snack is a representative of the Beijing local snacks, well-known by its rich variety?prominent features, and profound historical and cultural flavors.

Huguosi, originally one of Beijing’s most bustling neighborhoods, got its name from the Huguo Temple, an old-line temple built in this area in the Yuan Dynasty (AD 1264-1295). During the past days, temple fair held each month was an important religious festival for both Buddhist and Taoist. People burned incense, worshiped god, strolled or did commodity trading in these days. The temple fair in Huguosi became a famous rendezvous for snack vendors; Huguosi snacks along with the temple fairs thus flourished for hundreds of years until the late Qing Dynasty when social turbulence came into being.

In 1956, Chinese government gathered a dozen of famous vendors to organize them into a state-owned Huguosi Snack Store. The location of the store was formerly the site of a famous temple fair in the western part of the city. Huguosi snacks retrieved a real sense of inheritance, protection, and development.

Nowadays, the store, as one of few old brand-name state-owned businesses, still continues its tradition by treating people with various delicious snacks. Therein, nian gao (glutinous rice cake), dou bao (steamed buns with smashed red bean stuffing), xi zi bing (a cake with the Chinese character for ‘happiness’ on it) and mian yu’er (a cake shaped like a fish) are some of the most popular foods at the store during big holiday shopping.

It is interesting that most of these foods carry auspicious meanings. For example, nian gao literally means: "better this year than last year". The fish cake is considered auspicious because fish in Chinese (yu) means surplus. The Chinese hope they are prosperous and rich in each New Year.

Other foods available include many kinds of traditional Beijing snacks. Some of the most famous treats are lv da gun (rolling donkey), a soft yellow rice and soybean cake; ai wo wo, a white glutinous rice cake with a variety of stuffing; wan dou huang, a smooth tasting yellow pea cake; and jiao quan, a deep-fried crispy flour ring and so on.

The guest of honor natural receives the choicest morsels, and is expected to lead the way when necessary. With a fish course, the fish head would be left for the guest of honor – and it is the most nutritious part (the eyes and lips are the valued delicacies offered to the senior lady present). The platter holding the fish will always be laid on the table in such a way that the fish head points towards the guest of honor (at family meals, the head faces the head of the family). If visitors find that they are the guest of honor and are unwilling to accept the duties involved, they should always delegate the honor to the person on their left, or politely turn the platter so that the fish head faces the host.

At the end of the meal, when the guest of honor feels that everyone appears to have had their fill of post-prandial brandy or ceremonial final cups of tea, he should rise. In theory, no other diner can rise until the guest of honor has, and such a social nicety has often resulted in a meal being very lengthy! Nowadays, however, the host will usually give an appropriate, discreet hint to the guest of honor.

In a restaurant, the signs that a meal is ending are more obvious. A bowl of fruit will be presented, fresh towels will be provided for wiping mouths and hands, and the final pot of tea – a ceremonial farewell greeting – will not be refilled.

It is known that color, aroma, and flavor are the three musts for Chinese food. However, these are never the only principles to be followed in Chinese cooking; the nutrition is the first concern.

A theory of the “harmonization of foods” can be traced back to the Shang dynasty’s (16th to 11th century B.C.) scholar Yi Yin. He related the five flavors of sweet, sour, bitter, piquant, and salty to the nutritional needs of the five major organ systems of the body, i.e. the heart, liver, spleen, lungs, and kidneys, and he stressed their role in maintaining good physical health. In fact, many of the plants used in Chinese cooking such as scallions, fresh ginger root, garlic, dried lily buds, and tree fungus have properties of preventing and alleviating various illnesses. The Chinese have a traditional belief that food and medicine share the same origin and that food has a medicinal value. This view can be considered the forerunner of nutritional science in China. According to this theory, a correct proportion of meat to vegetable ingredients should be maintained. One-third of meat-based dishes should be made of vegetable ingredients, and one-third of vegetable dished should consist of meat vice verse. In preparing soups, the quantity of water used should total seven-tenths the volume of the serving bowl. Basically, the correct ingredient proportions must be adhered to in the preparation of each dish or soup to ensure optimal nutritional value.

The Chinese have a number of traditional rules and customs associated with eating. For example, food must be eaten while seated. Also a set order of who may be seated first among men, women, old, and young exists. Furthermore, one must eat main courses with chopsticks and soup with a spoon.

The Chinese Philosopher Lao Tzu once said: “Governing a great nation is much like cooking a small fish.” He meant that governing a country required just the right “seasonings” and adjustments for successful results. This metaphor clearly illustrates the significance that diet occupies in Chinese culture.

Though there are approximately 32 famous styles of cuisine, Chinese food can be roughly divided into the Northern and Southern styles of cooking. In general, Northern dishes are oily without being cloying and the flavors of vinegar and garlic tend to be more pronounced. Pasta also plays an important role in Northern cooking; noodles, ravioli-like dumplings, steamed stuffed buns, fried meat dumplings, and steamed bread are the favored flour-based treats. The cooking styles of Beijing, Tianjin, and Shandong are probably the best known styles of Northern Chinese cuisine. On the other hand, Southern cooking is in particular renowned by its elaborate and dainty flavor. Representative of the Southern cooking styles are: Sichuan and Hunan cuisine which are famous for their liberal use of chili peppers; the Jiangsu and Suzhou styles which emphasize freshness and tenderness; and Cantonese food which tends to be somewhat sweet and full of variety. Rice and rice products such as rice noodles, rice cakes, and rice congee are the usual accompaniments to Southern style cooking.

In Chinese cooking, color, aroma, and flavor share equal importance satisfying the gustatory, olfactory, and visual senses, comprehensively. An entree will combine three to five colors, selected from ingredients that are light green, dark green, red, yellow, white, black, or caramel-colored. Usually, a meat and vegetable dish is prepared from one main ingredient and two to three secondary ingredients of contrasting colors. It is then cooked with the appropriate method, seasonings, and sauces so as to be aesthetically attractive. The primary methods of preparation include stir-frying, stewing, steaming, deep-frying, flash-frying, and pan-frying. A dish with a fragrant aroma will whet the appetite. Among many others, some ingredients that contribute to a mouth-watering aroma are scallions, fresh ginger root, garlic, chili peppers, wine, star anise, stick cinnamon, pepper, sesame oil, and dried black Chinese mushrooms. Of utmost importance in cooking any dish is preserving the fresh, natural flavor of the ingredients while removing undesirable odors. Soy sauce, sugar, vinegar, and other seasonings add richness to a dish without covering up the natural flavor of the ingredients. A well-prepared dish will be rich to those who like strong flavors, not over-spiced to those who like a blander taste, sweet to those who like a sweet flavor, and hot to those who like a piquancy. A dish that is all of these things to all of these people is a truly successful one.

"Chao shou" is a unique way Sichuan people refer to wontons, which literally means making wontons in the shape of folded hands.

In the 1940s, Zhang Guangwu, owner of the "Fragrant Teahouse", founded a wonton restaurant named "Long Chao Shou." The dumplings offered by the restaurant were praised for their thin wrappers, tender meat filling and delicious soup.

Ingredients: pork 1.25kg, wheat flour 1.5, pepper powder 4g, soy sauce 35g, 7eggs, ginger juice 25 kg, sesame oil 25g, salt 35g.

Directions: 1. Prepare the soup. Cook hen, pork tripe, ham and leg bone with high heat in fresh water. 2. Put in a bowl minced tendon-free pork, salt, water, egg, soy sauce, ginger juice, sesame oil, and pepper powder. Stir well. 3. Make dough with wheat flour, 1.5 egg and water. Make thin sheet and cut into 7cm-square skins. Put the meat on the skin and make them into the shape of folded hands. 4. Put Chao shou in boiling water, cook with moderate heat for several minutes. Serve in prepared soup with salt, pepper powder, and monosodium glutamate.

When the Minor Heat, one of the 24 Chinese solar terms comes, the temperature would rise to its highest point of the year. During this period, it seems that the Cantonese could not live without melons, such as white gourd, towel gourd and cucumbers.

White gourd has a great variety, Taishan’s white gourd with black peel, Holland’s mini white gourd and Duyuan’s white gourd.

It is just the right time to eat white gourd in summer. With numerous ingredients to choose from, it is splendid to have white gourd soups in this season. From Holland’s mini gourd bowl to the soup in huge white gourd, everyone could find the one that suits you best.