Actually Ravenman, as I have aged (65 now), I have become more…well, if not accepting, at least more ready to try things. So if you have any thoughts for someone who has (1) no experience with Chinese food and (2) limited tastes in that plain beef and chicken are ok but much else is up in the air, I’m willing to listen.
And yes, I know that I miss much great stuff and flavors due to my block, and I’ll gladly admit that the fault is mine, not anyone else’s. I learned to eat Shawarmas in Abu Dhabi, maybe I’ll pickup something new on this trip.
Beijing, Xi’an, Shanghai and Hong Kong should have a variety of western restaurant chains, and a supermarket should have some western-style items, too. The river cruise might have fewer options.
One thing to note is that breakfast foods in China might be somewhat different from what you’re used to – rice porridge (congee), steamed buns, pickled vegetables, etc. Hard-boiled eggs are relatively common, though.
I’m not Ravenman, but I lived in China for five years, and my then-65-year-old father came to visit me during his three month tour of China. He’s kind of picky and normally closed-minded about food, but he ended up loving nearly everything he ate. I was a little bit envious of him, because I lived there and in three months he ate more and saw more than I did my entire time.
First, as a backup, if you’re in big cities, you’ll find Pizza Hit, KFC, McDonalds, Starbucks, etc. You won’t die of hunger.
Second, unless you have allergies, don’t ask what’s in something. Really disgusting things (like dog) are delicacies, and you won’t be given any without someone bragging about it. And that’s regional, to boot.
As a last resort, there are noodles and dumplings (jiaozi) everywhere. These will be very, very familiar to you.
Chinese food in China compared to America is kind of like Mexican food in Mexico compared to Taco Bell (I’ve also lived nearly five years in Mexico). Embrace your open-mindedness, but be assured that there is always a Western-friendly backup available.
If you want to expand your horizons with a low level of risk, I recommend you try a few Hot Pot meals. Sort of like fondue, where they give you a crock pot of very hot broth, and a bunch of small plates of many raw foods (meats, veggies, noodles, etc.) that you dip yourself and eat when they are cooked to your liking. The entire table shares the pot and the small plates, but you get to control what goes into your mouth, and it is very delicious. And very sociable.
Once, somewhere near Guangzhou, I ate the better part of a plate of deep fried bird heads before someone clued me in. At that point, I polished off the plate. Turns out bird heads are pretty damned tasty when fried.
Most of my meals from my many trips to China were fairly pedestrian, especially if I was eating at the factory with the workers. Rice, some vegetables, a little meat. Pretty nice except for the spitting out of the bones everywhere.
The meals where my hosts were trying to impress were more notable, both good and bad. I had the most amazing Peking Duck at some several hundred year old place in Beijing. I had my own personal slicer! I had super delicious Szechuan somewhere I know I can’t find on a map. And I had a wonderful, slightly confusing teppanyaki meal (complete with French-style snails) at what was supposed to be a western-style resort inbetween Shenzhen and Guangzhou. I had incomparable dim sum at a place in Kowloon that my host told me never ever to try to go by myself. Still don’t know why.
But I had some frightening meals too. In most cases, I noticed my hosts eating only token amounts of the stuff I thought was super out of bounds. I think some of that stuff was just for show. But I tried everything no matter what.
The only stuff I found intolerable: Chinese wine and baijiu. And yet I still drunk a ton of both rather than be a poor guest. I leaned to keep an extra, half-full water glass at my place at the table. I got really good at dumping my Baijiu in there when no one was paying attention.
Worst two meals I had in China? One was at a Pizza Hut, and the other was when two of my female hosts thought I might me homesick and took me to a ‘western’ restaurant. I think it was supposed to be Italian food. It was prepared as if the chef only had pictures of food to work from with no indication what the ingredients, flavors or textures should be. Truly horrific. Almost as bad as the Mexican food I once ordered in New Zealand. I ‘repaid’ them for the courtesy by taking them to a food court Chinese restaurant when they came to the US the next year.
My advice to the less adventurous eater: when you come across something you like, gorge on it. Be like a bear preparing for winter. Then a couple of meals you can’t stomach will be no factor.
Breakfast is usually western. In your hotel there is probably an egg station where they cook the eggs in front of you
Do you like eggs? You can get hard boiled eggs anywhere. Also the “tea” eggs, which are hard boiled in a very mild tea/soy sauce type solution and I think very tasty. My back up. All restaurants have eggs. If nothing else you can get a fried egg and rice and be full.
The Yangzi river cruise will be tough. The food isn’t very good even on the high end vessels, and you’re in very spicy country.
American fast food…while there is local flavors, you can also get the standard stuff.
Can you tell us what you like to eat now? That may make it easier to figure out what you can get, or have adapted.
I just spent a week in Hong Kong. The hotel I was at catered to Chinese, not Western, tourists so had the kind of breakfast hogarth mentioned, which I found awesome, but they had toast and hard boiled eggs so you should do fine.
Hong Kong has tons of malls with extensive food courts of all types of cuisines. There are also very good bakeries with a wider variety of foods than you can find in the US. Also Starbucks and McDonalds, of course.
You might want to try dim sum, which lets you pick and choose. Oddly, while housing in Hong Kong is very expensive, the food is relatively inexpensive, far cheaper than San Francisco.
BTW I think you might stay away from wet markets. You might see things there which would turn you from eating for a week. I liked it but I’m the opposite of picky.
Did not see a rabbit head, damn it!
I got taken to a real Szechuan place last night by a Chinese colleague, one of those tiny hole in the wall places off the usual restaurant track, where the decor is a half a dozen card tables and some lawn chairs, and the food is what the angels get when they’re good. Salt and pepper squid with chili and Szechuan peppers until your tongue goes numb and your entire head sweats is the way to go.
When we were in Taiwan, my picky eater children basically lived off dumplings. They’re very, very non-threatening and not at all spicy. Also, Dan Bing (?sp?) which is basically pancakes, though I don’t know if that’s a mainland thing
My impression of Chinese cuisine is that in most of the country, spicy food is not the norm (Szechuan and Mongolian notwithstanding…)
The dominant flavors are Chinese Five Spice and what the Japanese call “Deliciousness”, but crab, seafood or vegetables are likely to be drowned in garlic and ginger. You can get peanut butter, but butter is not part of the palate, and any bread is too much influenced by the French.
Hot chili dishes will be available, but it’s regional. My in-laws eat mostly quite plain food – the fresh chili is added as a garnish.at the table. But for some reason the only vegetable they can eat without garlic and ginger is (raw) cucumber
The soups are mostly pretty harmless, Particularly the wonton soup and the beef noodle soup. Just Five Spice*, a meat stock soup, plain noodles – the only sharp flavor comes from the garnish, and the boiled water is pretty safe.
Chicken Rice is pretty much just chicken and five spice and rice, but I get pretty sick of chicken after as while. Peking Duck, as noted above is Duck (and five spice), and plain pancakes, and plum sauce. Chicken is a high-risk food for food poisoning, and perhaps duck is as well, but I’ve never heard so.
Street food in Shanghi was quite edible, if it hasn’t been almost totally banned, as it has in Singapore and Hong Kong. Because it’s just put together, you can sometimes get fried food that doesn’t have pepper or five spice or ginger or garlic.
*You can’t even taste the spices in five spice, they’re all so mild… Like the “deliciousnes” (MSG), it just sort of adds a background flavor to everything
If all else fails, ask for ‘chicken rice’. It’s widely available, the sauces are on the side, it’s NOT spicy in any way. Even a picky eater could get by on a meal of this. It’s exactly as advertised, steamed chicken and rice cooked in chicken broth. Bonus: it’s yummy and delicious!
If it’s an organized tour for US and Canadians, I don’t think you’ll have to worry, there’s likely always going to be something you can eat.
I hope you didn’t take any of my comments as criticism – everyone has their comfort zones, and I thought the comfort zone that includes a long trip to China but excludes PF Changs was curious!
Others have mentioned what I had been thinking – eggs, jiaozi dumplings, pretty plentiful fast food (though I question whether on a tour if you’ll have a lot of detour time), and markets where you can get all kinds of familiar junk food, from ramen to chocolate chip cookies.
A couple things that haven’t been mentioned: some noodle soups can be pretty plain in terms of ingredients, but very tasty. You’ve just got to try a few standard dishes, just once, and the odds are that you will love them: sweet and sour pork, kungpao chicken (can be spicy so ask first, but you can easily pick around the peppers), iron-plate beef (it’s sizzling slices of beef that’s often kind of sweet), and crispy skin tofu. Don’t let the fact that it is tofu turn you off: it is prepared in a way that would make five year olds attack it like a pile of grilled cheese sandwiches. ETA: oh and Peking duck is the best thing that I’ve ever eaten, so do yourself a favor and try it.
Like others have said, there’s a lot of variation in dishes from region to region, and even restaurant to restaurant. But look at your chopsticks as being your best friend here: chopsticks are basically extensions of your fingers, so if you get used to using them, it is the best utensil in the world for eating around stuff that you don’t want: you just pick up the stuff that you do want.
Have a fantastic trip, be safe, and I’m very jealous.
When I went to China a few years back, the other American was an extremely picky eater. The only place he had trouble was when we were in a small town in the mountains around Hangzhou. Everywhere else, there were plenty of “western” options. Beijing and Shanghai, in particular should be no problem.
For the cruise, and if they take you to one of those family-style banquet meals they seem to love to take visitors to, just make a discreet mention to one of your hosts before the meal. They’ll find something for you, even if it’s just noodle soup. You’ll also want to ask ahead of time for western utensils, if needed. Although you’ll make a good impression if you try to manage with chopsticks, even if ineptly.
And I agree with Pork Rind: avoid the Chinese wine and baijiu, and pretty much any strong distilled spirits. Our hosts in Hangzhou kept wanting to toast the guests every two minutes, with some godawful lotus root distilled alcohol. Our Chinease colleague got blitzed in no time flat, and had an awful hangover the next days.
Beer is everywhere in China. You’ll have easy access to the local lager, no question. I suppose you could ask for specific brands, like if you went to a bar, but odds are you will just end up drinking what the table has ordered for dinner, lunch, and sometimes breakfast.
Fussy eating is just such a foreign concept to those of us who like to explore new tastes. Personally to me it would be like I decided I didn’t like one of my senses so I decided to purposely limit it, like I purposely decided I was only want to see the world in monochrome because colors where too much, or I never wanted to hear music because speech was just fine. I can understand not like a flavor but never trying certain flavors would be like only ever having straight up missionary style sex because I was afraid to go outside my comfort zone ever.
This is not a dig at the OP, I just really never understood fussy eating.I have a fussy eater in my family and I’ve just never understood the psychology behind it.
the things I like I really really like, the things I don’t I really really don’t. For instance, I don’t like beer and I don’t like sausages, we discussed going to Germany but I don’t know what I would eat. (sausages all taste like hot dogs to me and the one time I tried to eat one as an adult, I gagged so much I threw it away.)
Light lager beer is cheap and available everywhere. It may not be cold though. You can get Bud pretty much everywhere as well. These days, imported German beers are also pretty prevalent.
Chicken is probably your best bet. 白切鸡 (plain, chilled, sliced chicken), 鸡汤 (Chicken soup that is really a very light broth, and you eat the stewed chicken). Chinese also cook chicken a whole bunch of different ways, but these two are plain with a soy sauce style dip on the side. If you like noodles, they can also do you a bowl of noodles with the chicken broth.
Again, if you like eggs, you can get those everywhere.
Beef will be more difficult as it is usually not plain but stir fried with a lot of other stuff and seasonings.