How to actually eat in China
Long-form pieces on the parts of Chinese food culture that don't translate — what locals eat for breakfast, how to order with no English menu, and which shops are worth crossing the city for.
Food
Fifteen Minutes From The Bund, The Food Changes Completely
The Bund's own restaurants speak fluent English and take every card. Walk fifteen minutes inland and you're in a different Shanghai: older, cheaper, better. A walking loop with five stops and a total budget under ¥150.
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Food
Liang, Long, Zhi — How Shanghai Actually Sells Its Food
Nothing at an old-school Shanghai shop is sold by "a portion". Noodles come in liang, buns come in liang, dumplings come in long, pancakes come in zhang. The unit system nobody translates — decoded.
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Food
How To Order Noodles In Shanghai Like You Live Here
Hard noodles or soft. Soup on the side or in the bowl. Scallions held back or doubled. The words that change what arrives at your table — and the ones that just get you fed.
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Food
The 10 Tables Every First-Time Visitor Should Eat At In Shanghai
Not the ten fanciest, not the ten most famous — the ten places where the food is genuinely good, the price is genuinely small, and the experience is genuinely Shanghai. Ranked, mapped, and ordered in Chinese.
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Food
Eating At Yu Garden Without Getting Trapped
Yu Garden Bazaar is where the invention of the soup dumpling is genuinely worth seeing — and where the worst meal of your trip is genuinely possible to buy. Telling the two apart requires exactly one rule: look at who is eating.
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How-to
How to Order Food in China With No English
You don't need to speak Chinese. You need to copy, paste and point. The exact five moves that get food in front of you — plus the sentences that fix things when it goes wrong.
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Food
The Two Schools of Shanghai's Pan-Fried Bun
One bursts with scalding soup. One has almost none. Locals have been arguing about which is correct for a century — and most visitors only ever meet the wrong one.
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Food
Where Shanghai Eats Breakfast
Four breakfasts, four street windows you would walk straight past. What locals eat before nine, what it costs, and the Chinese words that get it in front of you.
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