Learn Mandarin in Beijing: Eating out

There is an air of conviviality around the Chinese dining table. A certain number of dishes are ordered which are placed at the centre of the table and which each guest picks at with their chopsticks. At banquets the Chinese calculate one dish per guest, in a restaurant 7 count two dishes for one person dining alone and three dishes for two people. In Beijing, however many restaurants follow the western principal of one dish per person. In big restaurants, learn-mandarin foreign students can request establishment have knives and forks. Elsewhere on the other hand it’s impossible to avoid chopsticks.


The Chinese eat relatively early compared with Western: breakfast is before 8am, lunch 11am to 1pm and dinner around 6:30pm.

The menu
Choice is one quality you expect of a restaurant in China. The menu therefore is long, classified by the types of dishes. The majority of restaurants in town and at tourist sites now offer menus translated into English and/or accompanied by photos of the main dishes. In the countryside, ordering is done more often in the kitchen where learn-mandarin(www.glchinese.com) foreign students are shown directly the vegetables and meat in the fridge. When there is neither a translation nor photos, the best thing to do is to have a look at the other tables: the customers will know how to make themselves understood.

Price
The Chinese love going out to eat. Restaurants are therefore plentiful and in the main cheap. Reckon on 80 yuan per head to satisfy your appetite in a traditional restaurant. Gourmet restaurants offering food influenced by international tastes will have much the same prices as those in West (200-300 yuan/person).
Warning: If you order fish, the price depends on the weight.

Eat at restaurant
With the exception of numerous foreign and fusion restaurants patronized by Westerners, the restaurants in Beijing serve Chinese food which often marries local gourmet food with well-known international dishes. Certain local chains, particularly those run by Chinese are specialized, for example in Mongolian hotpot or dim-sum, Cantonese style dumplings with a thousand varieties. Learn-mandarin-in-Beijing students can also find a growing number of bars and switched-on cafés which mix classic Chinese food with international dishes found anywhere: pizzas, hamburgers, spaghetti, etc. In the small, busy and numerous popular restaurants, you can prepare your soup by choosing the ingredients yourself and savor in all simplicity pancakes, doughnuts, stuffed breads, dumplings, fried noodles, kebabs, etc.

Chinese food
Warning: With the exception of Shanghai regional specialties, which are rather sweet and sour, some Chinese food is spicy, maybe too spicy in Hunan and Sichuan.

Learn-mandarin-in-Beijing foreign students who cannot stand this type of food should use the phrase bu ld de (不辣的), which means "not spicy".

A typical Chinese meal starts with cold dishes known as "small dishes", continues with hot food, called "main dishes", and ends with a soup which can then on rare occasions go on to a dessert.

Specialities
Learn-mandarin-in-Beijing foreign students can find below some of the most currently used ingredients in cooking and some of the well-known specialties:

Fried beef in ginger (ganbian niu rou, 干煸牛肉): northern Chinese specialty.
Beijing Roast Duck (Beijing kaoya, 北京烤鸭): that is to say coated in melted sugar, then roasted and served hot or cold.
Chinese cabbage (bai cai, 白菜): usually stir-fried, it is one of the most used vegetables in Chinese cooking.
New Year Rice Cake (nian gao, 年糕): made from glutinous rice flour, sugar, lard and water.
Preserved eggs (songhuadan,松花蛋): duck eggs preserved for 3 months in a mixture of straw, clay and quicklime, so called because of the dark and veined surface. Very popular, they symbolize longevity and boldness.
Noodles (miantiao, 面条): Chinese noodles have been around for 2,000 years and are prepared with various ingredients: wheat (mian面), the most used, but also rice ( mifen米粉; in this case they are called rice noodles), or even bean, lentil, etc. Learn-mandarin-in-Beijing foreign students can have the famous beef noodle, made on the spot, but also noodles fried in a wok with meat.
Steamed Stuffed Buns (baozi, 包子): enjoyed at any time of the day by the Chinese, these buns, which come in various forms according to the region and the makers, are steamed and stuffed or not with a filling made from meat and/or vegetables.
Sweet-Sour Crucian (tangcu jiyu, 糖醋鲫鱼): freshwater fish with firm and tasty meat, fried then covered in a sweet red sauce.
Kung Pao Chicken (gongbao jiding, 宫保鸡丁): a particularly highly seasoned specialty, originally from Sichuan.
Sharks Fin Soup (yuchitang, 鱼翅汤): a great Cantonese specialty.
Stuffed Dumplings (jiaozi, 饺子): half-moon shaped dumplings, consisting of a pastry made from flour and filled with minced meat (pork, beef, lamb) and vegetables fragranced with garlic, onion, or ginger. And as the Chinese saying goes: "Nothing is more comfortable than having a lie-down; nothing is more delicious than stuffed dumpling!"
Tofu (doufu, 豆腐 ): a product made from soy beans soaked then reduced to a purée which is then boiled, filtered and turned to gel. Very rich in vegetable proteins and easily digested, it is often served in cubes or in strips.

Drinks
Tea is the most common and most consumed drink in China. In a restaurant, you are served it as soon as you arrive, but it is not a drink to have with the meal: the Chinese prefer a beer or alcohol with their food.
The largest consumer of beer since 2004, China makes almost all the brands on sale itself. Apart from the well—known Tsihgtao and Yanjing, products of the town of the same name Qingdao and Beijing, each region makes its own beer.
Traditional Chinese alcohols are determined by the colour with which they are associated: yellow wines are rice wines having the same alcohol content as our grape wine. The flavors are delicate (for example, Shaoxing yellow wine) and should ideally be served warm: white alcohols are much stronger. They are made from corn, rice or more rarely from sorghum (like the famous Meiguilu, fragranced with fresh rose petals). Traditional grape wine is equally made in China and resembles western fortified wines. As for grape wines made according to western processes, they are becoming more and more popular with the Chinese, even if the quality is somewhat not so satisfactory. Good wine is very expensive in China.
Soft drinks, colas and other non—alcoholic drinks are sold everywhere. Learn-mandarin-in Beijing students should be aware that fruit juices are usually sweeter and have only a little fruit flavor. Don’t be taken aback if you are served hot water during a meal: consumption of cold water is not common in China and it is a way of showing the water has been boiled and that it is safe to drink.