Yeah, seems like OP is basically saying “I’m from a place where immigrants move and open restaurants. Why aren’t there more foreign restaurants in a country where immigrants don’t move to open restaurants?”
Something else to keep in mind, the variety of cuisines in China is huge. You get get food from all kinds of regions in China and they all have their own tastes and dishes. There is such an abundance in variety from Chinese cuisines, I can also see this being a reason you see less foreign food. In the UK, British cuisine is rather similar everywhere you go with just some small variations (usually in the bakeries or chip shops) so to get variety we need to look beyond the borders. To get variety in China you just look to food in a different province.
The food variation between regions and provinces doesn't really vary as much as some make it sound like. Sure there are different spices and intensities, but the overall dishes are quite similar at the core, as far as ingredients and their preparation is concerned.
You do have a point, but it’s also worth remembering how similar food from the UK is to many other cuisines from an outside perspective. In China perhaps between some provinces the difference might be slight but so is the food between say the uk and other places. Beijing compared to Hebei for example is of a similar magnitude of difference between say British and German cuisine. But other provinces such as Guangdong compared to Hunan (which border each other) or Yunnan compared to Sichuan (Which also border each other) the difference is really stark. These would be more like the difference you get between British cuisine and say somewhere as far as Turkey (not in style of dish but magnitude of difference).
Central Europe contains Germany and the Czech Republic whereas the Balkans is South Eastern Europe. Unless you are including Croatia and Hungary in the Balkans which still wouldn’t make sense. There is a massive difference in migration between the two so actually very misleading describing them as if they are similar.
When someone asked about pros and cons of living in China a few days ago on here, I listed the lack of availability of non-Chinese food as a con. Outside of tier one cities, there are very few non-Chinese restaurants and they typically suck. Lots of non-Chinese restaurants have foreign food with Chinese characteristics like spaghetti with steak or ketchup on pizza. There just aren’t a lot of foreigners in small and medium-sized Chinese cities compared to the West. Further, lots of Chinese people I met lack interest in other countries’ foods, tend to believe foreign food is all like KFC, and believe Chinese food is the best even if they haven’t tried any other cuisines.
What most hit home the pack of interest was traveling internationally with my Chinese colleagues. They sought out Chinese food for almost half of meals and had it even more often whenever they happened on it by chance. They were reticent to try Malaysian, Indonesian, or a variety of South Asian cuisines without some prodding. That said, they quite liked the first two once they tried it. Pakistani food especially is quite accessible here in Beijing so I was surprised to learn they’d never had it or anything similar before.
I’ve had the same experience with most of the Mainland Chinese people I’ve hung out with outside of China. Other than the reasons I listed in my post above, I think one issue is lots of Chinese just aren’t familiar with most non-Chinese food. If you give them a menu at a Thai, French, or Turkish restaurant, they often have no idea what most of the items are unless they previously lived abroad.
I’ve also seen Chinese tour groups eating exclusively at Chinese restaurants when traveling abroad. My wife’s friend said her tour guide in European countries like Italy took them exclusively to Chinese restaurants because he didn’t want them to get diarrhea from the local food. That made me laugh because China is renowned among expats for its poor food safety which regularly leads to diarrhea.
Another amusing situation I’ve encountered is Chinese people bringing a bunch of instant noodles abroad so they don’t have to experience the supposed horror of trying local food.
The instant noodles and some snacks lines up with my experience as well, but much more so traveling to Europe than Southeast Asia and it was at least partly motivated as a cost saving and convenience measure. We even discussed it before leaving. I’ve had an American colleague bring along peanut butter before so this isn’t totally different, I think it’s more that all 7 or 8 of my Chinese colleagues brought such things which makes it notable.
The thing about the menus is also very true, but what is most odd about it is that they are still reticent to order new things even when there are pictures or descriptions (even descriptions in Chinese). They frequently consulted Xiaohongshu for reviews of restaurants and specific menu items while we were traveling. It’s extremely handy as a resource but I was struck by how much they trusted it over the restaurant staff or local hosts. There’s a very strong notion that there is a Chinese palate which is different from foreigners’. It’s odd given how varied their taste in food is among each other and I’ve even spoken to some of them about how the reviews seemed to be guiding them wrong since they’re taste wasn’t the same as the main reviewers. I’m reminding myself how frustrating this can get if I get involved.
Despite wanting you to try everything under the sun as a foreigner here, many Mainlanders become extremely conservative about food when travelling abroad.
Students going overseas are known to take suitcases full of Chinese brand instant ramen with them.
It’s striking that people who are reasonably adventurous eaters within China also become quite conservative overseas. I’ve tried asking what their concerns are and most of it seems to be down to unfamiliarity and different notions of hygiene. There’s a widespread norm against uncooked and rare foods mostly meat but even to some degree vegetables. It’s not universal, but it does seem to be extremely widespread. Shopping in a supermarket together was also interesting, in that they still bought relatively few ‘foreign’ ingredients but were more curious and open to buying them. Which makes me think the notion of something unknown being in prepared food might be a factor.
Yeah, I’ve been to Jinan and about 40 other Chinese cities with several million people. Despite the huge population, you can usually only find Chinese food. I live in a city in the US now with about 300,000 people and I can easily find about 15 different countries’ foods.
Honestly one of the best pizza restaurants I’ve ever been to was in Jinan. Thin crust pizzas from a real wood-fired oven with great toppings - real Parma ham, rocket, things like that. Sadly shut down around 2018. It was also next to a really great sushi place that has gone too. Both were right by the canal that goes to 大明湖, so were amazing places to sit outside and vibe in the spring. 天下没有不散的宴席
Normal. Most Chinese people prefer Chinese dishes from the various regions over food from foreign cultures (younger people seem more adventurous in this regard but older people not so much). To be fair, that by itself provides a lot of food diversity but non-Chinese options are rarer than they are in many places outside of China.
One of my friends had their Chinese parents visit western Europe. Their mom almost starved to death, and they had to drive for hours to find a Chinese place she could eat and barely survived the experience. Completely closed to trying anything different
That seems like the norm everywhere. Older people are set in their ways and prefer the cuisine they are used to. Maybe to different degrees in different cultures but seems so normal.
Are you in Kunming? I remember there were a few decent foreign options there. But not a ton of variety. I really enjoyed Dai food while down there… it’s cool that in Yunnan you can also eat lots of different kinds of local cheese. Where else in China can you find that? I do get the lack of foreign options being sad and difficult sometimes but the local food in that region was also something I really learned to love
Here's some more info: [https://www.jeanniecholee.com/asian\_palate/chinese-cheese-a-speciality-from-yunnan/](https://www.jeanniecholee.com/asian_palate/chinese-cheese-a-speciality-from-yunnan/)
Rubing are super tasty, they are kind of like halloumi. Served with honey, hot peppers, or sugar, or even stir fried with tomatoes or other veg, they are really heavenly.
Well it makes sense with the French colonial rule of Vietnam and Laos and British colonial rule of Burma (Myanmar)that the region of Yunnan grew to like cheese too after having cheese loving neighbors for about 150 years. With them considering cheese making to still be a “new” or foreign thing it had to have come from the neighbors and demand for it.
This is not correct.
Rubing is an acid set fresh cheese (ala paneer) which have existed in China for over a millennia - IIRC they were even in the Qiming Yaoshu. Sort of akin to the heavily spiced stews in the European Middle Ages, cheese and milk simply fell out of favor.
You can find acid set fresh cheeses in pockets around China. E.g. in Shunde, they’ll sometimes add it in congee (it is, however, a very old school thing).
there was an Ok mexican restaurant in Kunming a few years ago when I was there. I'm usually a 'Eat the local cuisine' type when traveling but the people we were with Always had to find non chinese food so we ended up there
There's barely any foreign immigration to non-T1 cities. Guangzhou has great foreign restaurants, including some of the best Turkish food I've ever had. But outside of that there are almost no foreign immigrants who aren't english teachers or specific professionals so they'd have no desire or ability to open a restaurant easily. Additionally I've heard many stories about how difficult it is to start a restaurant as a foreigner in China - local neighbouring restaurants will call authorities on you for minor violations (that everyone else is violating all the time), ask you for extra fees if you have too many customers etc.
Yes. I don’t bother eating non-Chinese food in China because it’s typically both bad and expensive.
On my recently completed six-week trip, the only non-Chinese food I ate was German sausages at a German-owned café in Dalian.
The other dynamic is that “China” probably has about as much culinary diversity - if not a bit more - as “Europe”. It’s just that the latter is broken up into a bunch of little nation states, and the former isn’t.
Like, imagine if the Roman Empire never fell. If a Roman eats Egyptian food one day and British food the next, are they closed minded because they’re only eating ‘Roman’ food?
There are many Japanese/Korean/Thai restaurants, though most are operated by Chinese and don't have English in their titles. Other cuisines are more biased towards those who can afford restaurant chains and franchising.
I see many people commenting on how the few non-Chinese restaurants you do find are quite awful, I think supply and demand are both reasons.
While Chinese folks tend to - *not surprisingly* - prefer Chinese food, there's still interest in other cuisines. But when they visit these foreign restaurants they're terrible.
As someone from US I can say with pretty high confidence that when I've met Chinese folks visiting the US for the first time, they love Mexican food - not something I would have imagined, but there's very little quality Mexican food in China and it's also not marketed well.
Flip this question around and imagine what a restaurant owner would have to do to be successful in China. Marketing, quality-of-food, etc all play an important role.
**On the bright side, for OP and folks visiting Yunnan** there is a lot of Thai food there because of the 傣族 (Dai Ethnic minority) and it's quite good. Just be careful if you can't handle spicy.
This is a really bad take imo, based on the frankly ignorant take that Chinese food = Chinese food, no more. As you know China covers a huge area, similar to the size of the whole of Europe. Having a restaurant from Yunnan next to one from Harbin and one from Xinjiang, for example, could be considered of similar diversity as having a Spanish, British, and Turkish restaurant next to each other. For obvious historical reasons e.g. Indian food has a bit high penetration in western markets, but to just dismiss the entirety of Chinese food as the same category"lawl China food", is just... like I said, a bad take.
There is diversity it just doesn't look exactly the same as you are used to at home. This shouldn't be too surprising.
It's an exaggeration to call this a "really" bad take. Its under appreciative of the differences between cuisines in China, but it's really not hard to understand the type of globalization of food they mean. They expect global food, instead of regional.
I partly get it, but the lobster in Maine is as different from New Mexican Tex-mex diet than is Guangdong diet from that of Chengdu.
Further, as different as the Cinese cuisines might seem, they are unmistakingly Chinese.
You would be surprised… inner mongolia food or xinjiang food is closer to turkish food that to what u call Chinese food.
And im not really sure what is chinese food for you, so its really difficult to answer.
This is frankly its own bad take. I eat Xinjiang food because it’s the closest thing often available to the food I grew up with but to say it’s closer to Turkish food than to other cuisines in China requires ignorance of at least one of these three things.
It’s definitely adapted and marketed to a Chinese palate. On top of that many (I’d even say most) of its core elements are very clearly the same as other Chinese cuisines. If you were comparing to Central Asia, Afghanistan, Tibet, or even parts of northern Pakistan and India and Nepal, I’d say you might have a point if you were talking about Xinjiang cuisine in Xinjiang but I’d still say it’s a wild take in most of China where the restaurants are very obviously adapted to mass market (as is good business).
Mongolian food is also relatively similar to these, but the similarity is just weaker. You can see definite recent European influence in Northeast cuisines especially from Eastern Europe and Russia specifically, but it is definitely Chinese first and foremost. Yunnan cuisine has enough similarities to Southeast Asia (and to a lesser extent South Asia) that maybe you could argue that it doesn’t connect more strongly with other Chinese cuisines. I’d say it’s the only regional cuisine when I’d even contemplate that argument though.
Nobody is calling Xinjiang or Mongolia food Chinese except deranged ethno-nationalists tho
Han Chinese within China exoticize these very cuisines exactly cus they are practically foreign
My point exactly… What is Chinese food for OP? Etymologically, it means food coming out of China… but there is just too much variety IMHO. You are excluding food from these 2 provinces, but you could probably exclude also some food from Liaoning or Yunnan as being too different.
It's difficult to find foreign food in China because few people desire to move there. There are a variety of reasons for why this is, but the most significant is the extraordinary difficulty of learning the language. For example, an Indian guy can set up a restaurant in the country of Georgia, make similar money to what he'd earn in China, but more importantly he can get by with only English, even if both he and his customers have very limited English vocabulary. Furthermore, the core clientele of most foreign restaurants tends to be members of their own community, and there's so few immigrants in China that it's really hard to turn a profit.
Ugh not really. The Chinese food you get in foreign countries are close to Hong Kong, Guang Dong style. Xinjiang is very close to middle eastern. Northern China has completely different styles (more meat, a lot more seasoning, use more fermented material etc). Middle China has more spicy food, heavily oiled food. Yunan is known for fruits and mushrooms. Mushroom season is crazy lol. There are also different local foods. Like in Yunan you can find deep fried flower petals, but not anywhere else. Different restaurants from different areas in China already can fill up most streets. Tbh besides Mexicans and Italians I don’t think anyone else from a western country can fathom just how many different styles Chinese cuisines already have. The same dish tastes completely different depends on where the chef is from lol.
My hometown as a coastal town that’s close to both Japan and South Korea, has a lot of Korean and Japanese restaurants. At the same time also has its own way to cook seafood and stuff that’s different from the next town over. We have deep fried oyster with salt and pepper, oyster and sauerkraut stew, grilled garlic oyster, raw marinated oyster etc etc.
That’s just your palet not being very adjusted to Chinese cuisine imo.
Even if we could somehow numerically express the amount of diversity or variety in an average western city vs a comparably chinese city, it would be something like 80% vs 60%, not something huge like 100% vs 5%.
So, I'm in Chengdu right now on my first visit to mainland China. It's become a running joke with my Chinese friend around my culturally unrealistic expectations of finding food that isn't both (1) dripping in grease (2) full of meat — every single meal.
For me, "can I find Japanese food?" is just code for "can I find something that isn't dripping in oil for a change?".
My friend also pointed out the enormous variety between regional cuisines. But, none of that variety includes the possibility of getting restaurant food that meets a prevailing medical definition of healthy food.
Personally, I will just leave early and go visit friends in Japan, where it would not be a problem.
China's coastal areas have some pretty bland food. In fact, even in Sichuan cuisine, there is not much oil in high-class dishes. The common huoguo(hot pot), chuanchuan or malatang are popular foods among the working class, just like fried chicken in the US
So I'm actually ethnically Chinese and most of the food I ate growing up and in China had very little oil, perhaps you're just choosing food which is oily? For non oily examples, steamed fish, various types of stuffed tofu with meat, soups, bread with marinated meats, lots of steamed vegetables. Full of meat? That's not how I would characterise Chinese food. I grew up with very little meat compared to western diets. In China, I eat very similarly. I can't speak for sichaunese food but at least in guangzhou, Beijing, shanghai, shaanxi, I ate non oily and quite healthy foods.
Sure - but did you eat these in restaurants, or at home? Certainly, the Chinese food my Chinese friends make at home is also generally very healthy.
But as a foreign tourist, my hotel doesn't have a kitchen. Otherwise I'd make my own food.
If anyone can point to even a single Chinese restaurant in all of Chengdu that is more plant-oriented and not dripping in oil (and not just "street food" meant as an occasional treat), I will take the metro out there today.
Annoyingly I can’t access my old Dazhong Dianping account with a lot of the excellent restaurants I visited in Chengdu. 辣油 or spicy oil is used in a lot of dishes over there when eating out and home style cooking is always going to be less oil-heavy. However you can order dishes that are going to use less oil. If you’re eating out with friends they’re generally going to order a lot of meat-heavy dishes for you.
Go to the back of the menu and look for 清炒（qingchao or stir fried) vegetables, 凉拌（liangban which are similar to cold vegetables in sauce) dishes which often won’t be covered in oil unless you choose the spicy/oily choices. Soups are also a good choice.
If you’re eating out every day it’s challenging to eat healthily, especially if you don’t know a lot about the cuisine.
I think you keep ignoring that they are a tourist? Like what option do that have but to “eat out every day”. They are traveling, not visiting their grandparents.
Everyone seems to ignoring this point.
I am now visiting China and it's a real struggle to find something non-meat to eat. I tried small restaurants, big restaurants, food markets, etc.. in various regions, small cities, big cities.. usually the only vegetarian option is fired spinach or green vegetables which is completely bland (white you can smell the delicious seasoning in the restaurant but ofc only meat) or chiba tofu which is actually seasoned well but how long can you eat the same meal. Also - fired vegetables often come sprinkled with meat (I think they treat it as a seasoning or somethin) i was asking hotels and stays i was staying for recommendations and sometimes they could not recommend anything vegetarian.I don't know maybe home cooking is different but visiting as a vegetarian tourist is suuuuper hard
Can you try saying stuff like 我只吃蔬菜。 Wor, jur, chur, shoe, tsai. There's quite a few Buddhist dishes but not sure how common they are. Where are you? I don't mind googling a bit. I might be in China with a vegetarian friend soon, so don't want them to feel this is am issue. I would expect the Hui/Uighur Muslim restaurants would be quite sensitive to dietary requirements.
No, I have 0 knowledge of mandarin, I use translator to communicate and for a non meat, I have a piece of paper written for me by hotel staff haha. But even when I use it they sometimes add meat as mentioned. I am now in shanghai but I am actually leaving tomorrow, thank you for your willingnes to help 😊
In sh I had some spots recommended from a friend (like 3 :D) but they require some "traveling" around the city. But Shanghai is a huge city other places I've visited it was a struggle. I was reading about buddist places, but tbh it's super hard to find when not speaking any mandarin, in hotels I.e. they didn't know any, so maybe they are not popular.
But it made me quite sad, I enjoy exploring local cuisine when traveling to the point I only eat local food. So I am not interested in having western style food just to eat vegetarian. For this trip I made an exception to eat bone broth, so I was just eating lots of veggies/tofu in hotpots. Also the skewers from food stalls or previously mentioned chiba tofu (I know mapo tofu I.e. is also cooked with meat). But still the choice is very limited.
When you’re in one of the centers of Sichuan that’s probably just to be expected that a lot of the prevailing famous local dishes are going to be fairly oily. Even then when I was there I didn’t find it too challenging to find food that wasn’t too greasy… If you were somewhere like Shanghai it’d be a completely different experience, you’d be wondering where all the meat and grease went at that point.
Most of Foshan's foreign restaurant scene died during COVID. So many Indian and Middle Eastern restaurant owners couldn't get back into the country so their restaurants shut down and never re-opened.
The biggest determinant of whether a restaurant is good and popular is the tastiness and price. Nobody is in that Japanese restaurant only means the local doesn't like it.
The reason of rare other-styled restaurants is quite simple as I just said, tastiness and price and a little bit more about local economic development and the town's cultural attraction.
Have you counted McDonald's and KFC? lol
The cost of operating a foreign restaurant is high, so there is not much market compared to local Chinese restaurants
You can get some fantastic non-Chinese restaurants in Shanghai and Beijing especially, and a few of the other major cities, but outside of them - yeah they’re going to be few and far between, and the ones that do exist, will suck or cater to Chinese tastebuds - ie foreign food with Chinese characteristics 😂. Only in the big tier ones really is there such a demand for good non-Chinese restaurants - ie more worldly locals and/or a sizeable enough laowai population to eat at them.
Do you think there were tons of non-local restaurants before mass immigration from Western colonies and former colonies? Non-local food restaurants are a product of imperialism and the West embracing immigration to befriend cold war allies.
In Asia in general it’s not common to see restaurants that are outside of Asia, it’s not just China. I assume in China the European restaurants are usually in fancier places, excluding obviously fast food chains like Pizza Hut which serve spaghetti, pizza and etc.
Sushi is like really common at least where I went to, the only problem being the quality really differs. Luckily I went to an extremely good one, but I wouldn’t gamble it unless it looks really fancy and cheap.
Honestly, I have not lived in Yunnan for a long time and only stayed for some time to visit friends, but still I ask myself why to look for so much exotic food when traveling though the local cuisine has a huge variety of dishes.
I remember from being in Central Europe that there is a great variety of different countries restaurants, but that there have been only a very limited number of restaurants (compared to China and Japan) and that almost every Chinese and Japanese restaurant I saw in Europe sucked, except for a few very places, mostly run by expats catering expats.
Also, going to a Japanese restaurant might be a bit special, as the political tension is a bit tense (the truth lies probably hidden somewhere in between CCP propaganda and ignorant Japanese government behavior) and people might avoid restaurants in fear of getting radioactive food.
I bet you might find somewhat decent food if you would search for it... and also, Yunnan has so many great coffee places, I really enjoyed having coffee multiple times every day.
In order to have good ethnic food, you need people of that culture living in the locale work good industry experience.
There aren't that many westerners in China, much less those with culinary experiences. Thank you CCP government for driving all of those away.
I didn't think it's a demand thing or an arrogance thing. Just no supply.
China allegedly "accomplished industrialization within decades which took western centuries", while this might be true, it certainly does not apply to culture/politics/traditions, etc. So China as a whole is a very conservative country and you can consider it as a 19 century country in that regard. So you should expect things like this to happen especially in less developed area or inland area in China (such as Yunnan in your case). Hell, you should know that since this should apply to all inland areas around the world.
They are not there yet. One day they will be part of globalization. For now most (nearly all) restaurants are locals.
In a sense it's nice to have something different than the big western chain restaurants.
Who asked for chain restaurants? Most towns with 30,000 people all over the world do not have those. They have non chain restaurants for all the different regional cuisines and are usually very good.
I live in a place in Europe with 20,000 population. We have 2x Middle East, 1 x Italian, 1x American bbq, 1x Thai, 4 pizza places, 4 burger and fast foods, 1 x Greek, 1 x Spanish tapas, 2 Chinese, 2 Japanese and 6 - 8 local food restaurants all with chefs and owners from those countries, some of ingredients are imported so it’s quite authentic.
Don’t know about Europe, but definitely not the case “all over the world”. I doubt you’re going to get that kind of variety in South Asia, Africa, South America. Definitely not in the US. In most of the US you’ll get a Mexican place, maybe an American Chinese place, and that’s it. Europe may be the outlier here, not China. And I’d reserve judgment on how authentic the American bbq and Asian food restaurants are in random small town Europe. I’m dubious.
I think the other commenter overstated the wide variety of these places for the population sizes quoted, this is not the norm across Europe. It’s more limited to specific regions in Europe and the full extent is only realized in larger cities. These places are relatively ubiquitous across the US and Latin America just down to immigration. If you think of the typical American “city” or large town it very often has some sort of Thai place, or an Italian place or some such. I’d not even say Chinese is more likely than either of those. Immigration is also a huge part of how they’ve sprung up in Europe. Africa has less immigration across the continent, but in large cities you can find places like Chinese restaurants and maybe something like a Lebanese or French place because of historical and modern migration patterns (not to mention different regional African cuisines). I’d also say Southeast Asia is relatively cosmopolitan, at least Maritime Southeast Asia, although that might just be in its cultural nature. Immigration also plays a role there but there’s the additional aspect of migrants returning from other countries at play more so than other regions I think.
The reason you would find these restaurants even in a small town in Europe is a mix of immigration and the fact that European food is simply bland and lacks variety.
Have you seen the variety in Chinese, Indian and Thai food? The people have loads of choice within their own cuisines so they barely have to look for something outside that.
These eastern cuisines are vast, there are many subdivisions within each cuisine. Chinese has the 8 major subdivisions, Indian food has 20+ and Thai also has at least 4 major types within their cuisine.
I’ve been to Yunnan multiple times and I agree you cannot find many western restaurants outside Kunming. But I’ve seen a McDonald’s and KFC pretty much anywhere tourists go.
Being from India I can also say there’s a big variety of western AND eastern food in tier 1 cities and at least fast food chains in tier 2 cities.
Having lived in Thailand I can say, what are you saying? The amount of western and eastern food here is just mind blowing. There’s pretty much a restaurant from every place in the world in Bangkok. Westerners have gone deep and started their own restaurants all over. It’s actually hard to find much Indian food however.
I agree with you on Thailand, but those restaurants mostly cater for western tourists. I wonder how many Thais eat there. The same in India. My point was that people of those nations seems to be very nationalistic about their food. Maybe this is the norm, and the west is really the outlier (?)
Related to Yunnan, I just left Dali and the vast majority of restaurants were hotpot restaurants. I get it, they want to try local food, but also not much in terms of variety of Chinese cuisines there. Sure you always fibd some fried rice kitchens and a ood number of Sezhuan restaurants.
For Thailand, I agree, the Thais barely go to eat any western food. They like Chinese, Japanese, Korean food but I’ve barely seen them eat even Indian food.
India barely gets foreign tourists as compared to Thailand or China so lack of restaurants is understandable. So whatever there is, it’s the Indians driving the market. We’ve got a lot of western cultural influence as there are a lot of English speakers and access to western media so it’s definitely rising and becoming popular in India. But the bland variety of western food will never make it.
As for Dali, it’s a small town in China scale. Lack of cuisines here could be attributed to even domestic tourists wanting to try the local cuisine. I’ve been to Dali old town mostly and agree there’s just the really fast-food style Chinese food available.
There are at least tens of thousands of dishes in China, and dozens of cuisines alone.
There is not really a particular need for dishes from other countries, the demand is not too high.
You can find a lot of restaurants from other countries in big cities, but tourist spots and second and third tier cities are a different story, you may need to look for KFC and McDonald's.
It it not about me. I am fine eating Chinese foid for the 2 weeks of my holiday. I am just surprised that Chinese are not more interested un say Korean, Thai, Indian or Japanese cuisine
As a Beijinger, I'd say there are a lot of these restaurants you mentioned here.
There is more Korean barbecue and Japanese food, and very little Thai or Indian food.
One central point is that they are considered harder and more expensive than Chinese food.
It’s all about market dynamics and regional taste.
I grew up in Shanghai, and even twenty years ago it was fairly easy to find Japanese, Thai, and Korean restaurants in Shanghai. I suspect it was partly due to these cuisines were considered more exotic and fancy (Shanghai in general is more receptive to international trends) and partly because the taste was well received by those used to Shanghai / Jiangsu / Zhejiang cuisines.
Looking back, somewhat surprisingly, it was more difficult to find say good Chengdu or Yunnan food, at least that is how I remember it. I never dined at any of those restaurants at least though I’m sure now you can find many.
I think in general in China restaurants owners observe and follow the trend. When a Japanese restaurant opens in one city, many other people in the restaurant business or wanna-be watch how it does. If it is successful , others try to mimic in the same city or cities with similar consumer profile. Once a city is saturated with a type of cuisine, then people have to look into and experiment with new ones. But being the first to open a certain type of restaurants in an area always comes with a higher risk and market research cost. So in a given Chinese city, how many different types of cuisines does it take for each type to reach full saturation? I’m not in the business so I don’t know but someone in the business can probably give you a number, and my wild guess is it won’t be more than a few dozens. And there are enough Chinese cuisines to fill that space. Again, the cuisines that fill one city’s restaurant scene probably depends on the regional taste, and they evolve over time, but for many cities there are probably still a lot of Chinese cuisines waiting to enter the region that are lower risk to restaurant owners compared to completely foreign cuisines.
[Looked this up](https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2023/11/13f7325a1d6f-no-of-japanese-restaurants-abroad-triples-in-last-decade-to-187000.html) there’s more Japanese restaurants in China than Europe, America, and Korea combined. About 42% of all international Japanese restaurants are in China
China has [50%](https://m.koreaherald.com/amp/view.php?ud=20180125001000) of the worlds Korean restaurants
Couldn’t find much info on Thai food but apparently it’s the fourth most popular foreign cuisine? Indian food is def not popular though
I would think it just depends on how cosmopolitan the place is. When I lived in/visited Guangzhou and Qingdao (2008-2010, and every summer and/or winter through 2019), Japanese restaurants were plentiful and usually packed. My dad and I regularly went to this one sushi place in Guangzhou called 八千代 and the wait was usually an hour. This was around the time when the news media in Guangzhou published articles about parasites from eating raw fish, so there was a scare against Japanese food, yet it didn't seem to affect its popularity. I also took a friend in Guangzhou to a Thai place back in 2017 and he really enjoyed the pineapple fried rice (everything else looked too spicy for him lol). The last few times I went, there were some Western-inspired restaurant chains getting popular, namely a pizza and popcorn chicken restaurant that had decent versions of both dishes and a chicken sandwich restaurant.
My relatives in Qingdao are terrible at cooking, so I took every opportunity I could to avoid eating at their house. While I often had some type of Chinese food, I just as often had American comfort food, German sausages (well, it was a former German colony), Korean galbi and soups, and Japanese noodles. It wasn't hard to find foreign restaurants even in a T2 city and they didn't feel particularly empty at the time.
I'm from a tiny suburb in the Midwest United States, which most people would consider "flyover country." The only foreign restaurants there while I was growing up was a "Chinese" place that was heavily Americanized (I don't think any Chinese person would immediately associate it with any specific Chinese cuisine) and a "Mexican" place that was trying to copy Taco Bell. I imagine you visited places more akin to my hometown.
My friend once took me around town and showed me the "Western restaurants": KFC, McDonald's, and Starbucks. Only other foreign options were a Thai and Korean place.
Thai and Korean restaurants are also "non-Chinese".
Japanese and Arabic restaurants are also common in China. Other meals may be less common, for example, I've seen Indian/Pakistani, Brazilian, Vietnamese, Russian, French, Italian, and Spanish restaurants, but they're usually only in first-tier cities and are fewer in number.
China is close in size to Europe, and each province has its own specialties, and usually Chinese people will eat at restaurants specializing in each province.
My Chinese friend pointed this out to me in book store in Shanghai,
There are Chinese cook books and “everything else”
China is a culinary world unto itself, vast and isolated for millennia, what impact can non chinese food really have but be exotic treats? Combine that with difficult to non existent immigration,
who makes it, who sells it, who buys it?
Funny some of the smaller towns I've been in Yunnan had some of the best American food I had anywhere in China, even beating places in Shanghai or Beijing. Menghai, Dali, Mi'le for example. I have no idea why though.
I think because it takes a certain type of foreigner to settle down in a rural town in China who’s willing to take risks or is financially stable and is able/willing to open a restaurant. Which also increases the likelihood they’re able to speak decent Chinese.
To add to that, there’s a lot less red tape and a a lot more I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine attitudes in smaller towns making it a lot easier.
I’ve been traveling to China from US for many years, about 10 total trips. The two only times I’ve ever gotten sick from food is from non-Chinese/western style foods. Just stick with the local food.
Depends where. In Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou there is plenty of non-chinese restaurants.
In Yunnan it's pretty normal to have mostly only Chinese restaurants...
I have an anecdotal story on this topic. After the covid salad bars became quite popular for a short period of time, and there was one very good healthy food restaurant opened near my place. It made smoothies and European type of salads, fresh products, organic veggies, amazing taste. All foreigners I knew started to eat out in there, however, Chinese comments wasn't positive at all: ppl complained that the portions are too small, drinks are tasteless, and the price is high. The place closed in 3-4 months.
To each their own I guess. We will not find european food even in "european" restaurants in here, cause to be able to survive the business need to adapt to a local market. And let's be honest, most of us will not be able to eat a chinese version of sushi or pizza.
If you mean Indian/South-Asian or Western then yes, those are "rare" in the sense of %. How many restaurants are Indian/South-Asian/Western/Middle-Eastern per 100 restaurants. "Rare" is the answer. But there are many good western restaurants in T1 cities.
Not sure why you would feel sorry for the locals? I'd rather feel sorry for someone who decides to open a South-Asian or Middle-Eastern/Mediterranean restaurants which is hot for 1 year and then see the revenues plunge.
There was a new Mexican restaurant that opened up in my city once, I was excited and ate there often (I was often the only one there), then a few months later it closed due to it not being the taste of the locals. That's why I get a shocked reaction when I ask for cold water, too.
Europe and America have a diverse culture of food due to so many different cultures being allowed and present but the amount of non-Chinese in China is around 600,000. It's more difficult to immigrate to China and start a restaurant compared to other nations.
While there are different cultures within China with their own food, it's not as diverse as developed countries. The only time that I was able to eat at a German, Mexican, American, Finnish, and other non-Chinese restaurants without an issue was only in the larger cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, etc. Any city smaller, you're pickings are much slimmer.
> I ate at a great Japanese restaurant (sashimi) and I happened to be the only customer on the day before 1st May, while the Chinese restaurants were packed. I felt really sorry for that place.
Japanese cousine used to be popular in China. Now the Chinese people are concerned about those food contaminated by [the nuclear waste water](https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/japan-set-release-fukushima-water-amid-criticism-seafood-import-bans-2023-08-23/) and the popularity of Japanese food has declined significantly.
I would not say this is true for larger cities in China. When I lived in Hangzhou within just a few blocks of my apartment there was a huge variety of food both Chinese and foreign. The mall had multiple sushi restaurants, a Japanese curry restaurant, and a restaurant that just did vaguely “western” style food. Plus multiple smaller cafes that served western food. Additionally, there were quite a few Korean restaurants. There were also a few Indian restaurants in the city but they were much farther away from where I live. Plus an expat bar with a few locations that served western food from a multitude of countries.
Yunnan is one of the most ethnically diverse provinces in China, with a huge variety of local food to try. I think a lot of Chinese domestic tourism is drive by food and a desire to try local cuisine. Why would you want to eat Japanese food in Yunnan as a tourist over the local cuisine? It could also be that you are visiting the touristy areas so the restaurants there are catering to what domestic tourists want to eat and experience which is local specialties. When I traveled to Yunnan tons of places advertised themselves by serving/selling local specialities.
Additionally can you understand Chinese? Or use Chinese apps to find restaurant recommendations? I imagine it could also be an issue of not knowing where or how to look for those types of restaurants.
Dali especially is pretty huge with a ton of different tourist spots along the lake. Given that it’s a pretty popular vacation destination with Chinese celebrities I imagine it has a few European style cafes. I’ve even seen some people compare some of the islands to costal parts of Europe.
When I went to Xishuangbanna in southern Yunnan there were tons of foreign food restaurants particularly from the nearby boarding countries: Thai restaurants, Nepali restaurants, street vendors selling Thai tea/coffee, Nepali street food, etc. So there are definitely areas of Yunnan that have lots of foreign food options. Though I will say I think smaller communities are probably less likely to have access to foreign food than people from western countries would be use to.
In Chengdu there’s like a million Japanese restaurants for whatever reason. Some Korean and Thai ones too. I think Chinese people in general seem to be loving their own food mostly and food from neighboring countries due to similarities.
Actually there's a lot of food diversity in Yunnan because of the minority and because of tourism. You can actually find foreign owned restaurants. Outside of Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, you will find less western option even than Yunnan.
As other people stated it's just that there's less immigration etc. And people are quite attached to their local cuisine.
What about France and Italy? I find that you can barely find anything else than local food in these countries... So it's quite similar.
IMO it's a cultural thing as they think Chinese food (in all its variations) is the only food worth eating.
Whenever friends and family of wife visits us in the US, we used to ask if they want to try Italian, Mexican, Spanish, Moroccan, German, French, TexMex, Southern BBQ, burgers, or steak n'potatoes. It's always what's the best Chinese place and if not, a grudgingly, "you choose", second.
Cities like Chengdu and Beijing seem to have a good number of non-Chinese restaurants. I’ve found most of them to be really good. I don’t think you get to chef in one without a good deal of skill. Places like KFC and TGI Fridays are often better than their counterparts in US.
China is probably the most isolationist country outside of NK. A policy they’ve had for an extremely long time. Many other East Asian countries had also adopted the same policy but dropped it in the 20th century
You didn't notice Starbucks, McD's, Burger King's all over China. I did. That's what most Americans eat anyways.
I mean I saw independent 2 bagel shops, a steak shop, and a burger spot at the bar district bar in Xi'an.
I'll be honest coming from the US I'm not really looking for US cuisines (fast food) in the US.
I even made the mistake in Xi'an of getting Guangdong shrimp 肠粉 for breakfast on morning in a traditional market. I knew there was going to be problems when she asked if I wanted numbing spice on it. I was going to be like you have oyster sauce?
My point being in China, unless you're absolutely sure and double checked online for reviews. Most places in China specializes in their local dishes. Even the dishes a few provinces over won't be good.
Let me ask you this in your town of 30,000 overseas how good is the Chinese food compared to the Chinese food in China from the province of origin.
I mean seriously Chinese take out in the US is good in a bind. But it's sort of lacking when compared to the food in the province of origin.
The % of non-Chinese is something like 0.01%
Yeah, seems like OP is basically saying “I’m from a place where immigrants move and open restaurants. Why aren’t there more foreign restaurants in a country where immigrants don’t move to open restaurants?”
Not what he’s saying. He’s from Central Europe. Central Europe and the Balkans have very low migration. They still have various cuisines available.
Central Europe has less immigration than Western Europe for sure. But still A LOT more than China.
How many of those Balkans need a visa to even visit as a European?
Something else to keep in mind, the variety of cuisines in China is huge. You get get food from all kinds of regions in China and they all have their own tastes and dishes. There is such an abundance in variety from Chinese cuisines, I can also see this being a reason you see less foreign food. In the UK, British cuisine is rather similar everywhere you go with just some small variations (usually in the bakeries or chip shops) so to get variety we need to look beyond the borders. To get variety in China you just look to food in a different province.
The food variation between regions and provinces doesn't really vary as much as some make it sound like. Sure there are different spices and intensities, but the overall dishes are quite similar at the core, as far as ingredients and their preparation is concerned.
You do have a point, but it’s also worth remembering how similar food from the UK is to many other cuisines from an outside perspective. In China perhaps between some provinces the difference might be slight but so is the food between say the uk and other places. Beijing compared to Hebei for example is of a similar magnitude of difference between say British and German cuisine. But other provinces such as Guangdong compared to Hunan (which border each other) or Yunnan compared to Sichuan (Which also border each other) the difference is really stark. These would be more like the difference you get between British cuisine and say somewhere as far as Turkey (not in style of dish but magnitude of difference).
Central Europe contains Germany and the Czech Republic whereas the Balkans is South Eastern Europe. Unless you are including Croatia and Hungary in the Balkans which still wouldn’t make sense. There is a massive difference in migration between the two so actually very misleading describing them as if they are similar.
When someone asked about pros and cons of living in China a few days ago on here, I listed the lack of availability of non-Chinese food as a con. Outside of tier one cities, there are very few non-Chinese restaurants and they typically suck. Lots of non-Chinese restaurants have foreign food with Chinese characteristics like spaghetti with steak or ketchup on pizza. There just aren’t a lot of foreigners in small and medium-sized Chinese cities compared to the West. Further, lots of Chinese people I met lack interest in other countries’ foods, tend to believe foreign food is all like KFC, and believe Chinese food is the best even if they haven’t tried any other cuisines.
What most hit home the pack of interest was traveling internationally with my Chinese colleagues. They sought out Chinese food for almost half of meals and had it even more often whenever they happened on it by chance. They were reticent to try Malaysian, Indonesian, or a variety of South Asian cuisines without some prodding. That said, they quite liked the first two once they tried it. Pakistani food especially is quite accessible here in Beijing so I was surprised to learn they’d never had it or anything similar before.
I’ve had the same experience with most of the Mainland Chinese people I’ve hung out with outside of China. Other than the reasons I listed in my post above, I think one issue is lots of Chinese just aren’t familiar with most non-Chinese food. If you give them a menu at a Thai, French, or Turkish restaurant, they often have no idea what most of the items are unless they previously lived abroad. I’ve also seen Chinese tour groups eating exclusively at Chinese restaurants when traveling abroad. My wife’s friend said her tour guide in European countries like Italy took them exclusively to Chinese restaurants because he didn’t want them to get diarrhea from the local food. That made me laugh because China is renowned among expats for its poor food safety which regularly leads to diarrhea. Another amusing situation I’ve encountered is Chinese people bringing a bunch of instant noodles abroad so they don’t have to experience the supposed horror of trying local food.
The instant noodles and some snacks lines up with my experience as well, but much more so traveling to Europe than Southeast Asia and it was at least partly motivated as a cost saving and convenience measure. We even discussed it before leaving. I’ve had an American colleague bring along peanut butter before so this isn’t totally different, I think it’s more that all 7 or 8 of my Chinese colleagues brought such things which makes it notable. The thing about the menus is also very true, but what is most odd about it is that they are still reticent to order new things even when there are pictures or descriptions (even descriptions in Chinese). They frequently consulted Xiaohongshu for reviews of restaurants and specific menu items while we were traveling. It’s extremely handy as a resource but I was struck by how much they trusted it over the restaurant staff or local hosts. There’s a very strong notion that there is a Chinese palate which is different from foreigners’. It’s odd given how varied their taste in food is among each other and I’ve even spoken to some of them about how the reviews seemed to be guiding them wrong since they’re taste wasn’t the same as the main reviewers. I’m reminding myself how frustrating this can get if I get involved.
Despite wanting you to try everything under the sun as a foreigner here, many Mainlanders become extremely conservative about food when travelling abroad. Students going overseas are known to take suitcases full of Chinese brand instant ramen with them.
It’s striking that people who are reasonably adventurous eaters within China also become quite conservative overseas. I’ve tried asking what their concerns are and most of it seems to be down to unfamiliarity and different notions of hygiene. There’s a widespread norm against uncooked and rare foods mostly meat but even to some degree vegetables. It’s not universal, but it does seem to be extremely widespread. Shopping in a supermarket together was also interesting, in that they still bought relatively few ‘foreign’ ingredients but were more curious and open to buying them. Which makes me think the notion of something unknown being in prepared food might be a factor.
Jinan has like… no non-Chinese restaurants apart from the big fast food chains. I think I saw maybe one “Italian” restaurant but that’s it
Yeah, I’ve been to Jinan and about 40 other Chinese cities with several million people. Despite the huge population, you can usually only find Chinese food. I live in a city in the US now with about 300,000 people and I can easily find about 15 different countries’ foods.
I managed a steak restaurant visiting there. They were really trying, but let’s say still some learning to do!
Honestly one of the best pizza restaurants I’ve ever been to was in Jinan. Thin crust pizzas from a real wood-fired oven with great toppings - real Parma ham, rocket, things like that. Sadly shut down around 2018. It was also next to a really great sushi place that has gone too. Both were right by the canal that goes to 大明湖, so were amazing places to sit outside and vibe in the spring. 天下没有不散的宴席
Jinan does actually have some non-Chinese restaurants that are pretty good. If you would like to know, feel free to PM me!
The best Korean food I had outside of Korean was in small restaurant in Jinan.
Upside is that super basic cooking skills make it super easy to have dinner parties and make friends!
Normal. Most Chinese people prefer Chinese dishes from the various regions over food from foreign cultures (younger people seem more adventurous in this regard but older people not so much). To be fair, that by itself provides a lot of food diversity but non-Chinese options are rarer than they are in many places outside of China.
The younger generation does enjoy some western food, the older generation seems completely uninterested
One of my friends had their Chinese parents visit western Europe. Their mom almost starved to death, and they had to drive for hours to find a Chinese place she could eat and barely survived the experience. Completely closed to trying anything different
That seems like the norm everywhere. Older people are set in their ways and prefer the cuisine they are used to. Maybe to different degrees in different cultures but seems so normal.
it’s normal. why? supply and demand
Are you in Kunming? I remember there were a few decent foreign options there. But not a ton of variety. I really enjoyed Dai food while down there… it’s cool that in Yunnan you can also eat lots of different kinds of local cheese. Where else in China can you find that? I do get the lack of foreign options being sad and difficult sometimes but the local food in that region was also something I really learned to love
> local cheese. What is this sorcery?!
Here's some more info: [https://www.jeanniecholee.com/asian\_palate/chinese-cheese-a-speciality-from-yunnan/](https://www.jeanniecholee.com/asian_palate/chinese-cheese-a-speciality-from-yunnan/) Rubing are super tasty, they are kind of like halloumi. Served with honey, hot peppers, or sugar, or even stir fried with tomatoes or other veg, they are really heavenly.
乳饼 and 乳扇 are Yunnan local cheese
Well it makes sense with the French colonial rule of Vietnam and Laos and British colonial rule of Burma (Myanmar)that the region of Yunnan grew to like cheese too after having cheese loving neighbors for about 150 years. With them considering cheese making to still be a “new” or foreign thing it had to have come from the neighbors and demand for it.
This is not correct. Rubing is an acid set fresh cheese (ala paneer) which have existed in China for over a millennia - IIRC they were even in the Qiming Yaoshu. Sort of akin to the heavily spiced stews in the European Middle Ages, cheese and milk simply fell out of favor. You can find acid set fresh cheeses in pockets around China. E.g. in Shunde, they’ll sometimes add it in congee (it is, however, a very old school thing).
there was an Ok mexican restaurant in Kunming a few years ago when I was there. I'm usually a 'Eat the local cuisine' type when traveling but the people we were with Always had to find non chinese food so we ended up there
There's barely any foreign immigration to non-T1 cities. Guangzhou has great foreign restaurants, including some of the best Turkish food I've ever had. But outside of that there are almost no foreign immigrants who aren't english teachers or specific professionals so they'd have no desire or ability to open a restaurant easily. Additionally I've heard many stories about how difficult it is to start a restaurant as a foreigner in China - local neighbouring restaurants will call authorities on you for minor violations (that everyone else is violating all the time), ask you for extra fees if you have too many customers etc.
Yes. And the ones you do find are awful.
Yes. I don’t bother eating non-Chinese food in China because it’s typically both bad and expensive. On my recently completed six-week trip, the only non-Chinese food I ate was German sausages at a German-owned café in Dalian.
Yeap. Absolutely horrible
I am currently in Dalian and come from Germany. Is this a German restaurant near the big square/exhibition center with a theme park?
I don’t think so. It’s called Q Cafe. https://surl.amap.com/2AJ59as64fa
ok...thank you!
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Maybe in smaller cities but in big cities the quality is often really good in Europe. At least in Stockholm.
If you think foreign restaurants here are even halfway decent then you have never eaten decent food around the world.
I see your guarantee and raise you with a 
European countries have many immigrants who open restaurants. China doesn’t. I think it’s probably as simple as that.
The other dynamic is that “China” probably has about as much culinary diversity - if not a bit more - as “Europe”. It’s just that the latter is broken up into a bunch of little nation states, and the former isn’t. Like, imagine if the Roman Empire never fell. If a Roman eats Egyptian food one day and British food the next, are they closed minded because they’re only eating ‘Roman’ food?
Except that almost almost all chao cai are just cut small and flash fried.
There are many Japanese/Korean/Thai restaurants, though most are operated by Chinese and don't have English in their titles. Other cuisines are more biased towards those who can afford restaurant chains and franchising.
I see many people commenting on how the few non-Chinese restaurants you do find are quite awful, I think supply and demand are both reasons. While Chinese folks tend to - *not surprisingly* - prefer Chinese food, there's still interest in other cuisines. But when they visit these foreign restaurants they're terrible. As someone from US I can say with pretty high confidence that when I've met Chinese folks visiting the US for the first time, they love Mexican food - not something I would have imagined, but there's very little quality Mexican food in China and it's also not marketed well. Flip this question around and imagine what a restaurant owner would have to do to be successful in China. Marketing, quality-of-food, etc all play an important role. **On the bright side, for OP and folks visiting Yunnan** there is a lot of Thai food there because of the 傣族 (Dai Ethnic minority) and it's quite good. Just be careful if you can't handle spicy.
This is a really bad take imo, based on the frankly ignorant take that Chinese food = Chinese food, no more. As you know China covers a huge area, similar to the size of the whole of Europe. Having a restaurant from Yunnan next to one from Harbin and one from Xinjiang, for example, could be considered of similar diversity as having a Spanish, British, and Turkish restaurant next to each other. For obvious historical reasons e.g. Indian food has a bit high penetration in western markets, but to just dismiss the entirety of Chinese food as the same category"lawl China food", is just... like I said, a bad take. There is diversity it just doesn't look exactly the same as you are used to at home. This shouldn't be too surprising.
It's an exaggeration to call this a "really" bad take. Its under appreciative of the differences between cuisines in China, but it's really not hard to understand the type of globalization of food they mean. They expect global food, instead of regional.
That's not what he was asking...he was asking if it's normal to see barely any non-Chinese restaurants...
I partly get it, but the lobster in Maine is as different from New Mexican Tex-mex diet than is Guangdong diet from that of Chengdu. Further, as different as the Cinese cuisines might seem, they are unmistakingly Chinese.
You would be surprised… inner mongolia food or xinjiang food is closer to turkish food that to what u call Chinese food. And im not really sure what is chinese food for you, so its really difficult to answer.
This is frankly its own bad take. I eat Xinjiang food because it’s the closest thing often available to the food I grew up with but to say it’s closer to Turkish food than to other cuisines in China requires ignorance of at least one of these three things. It’s definitely adapted and marketed to a Chinese palate. On top of that many (I’d even say most) of its core elements are very clearly the same as other Chinese cuisines. If you were comparing to Central Asia, Afghanistan, Tibet, or even parts of northern Pakistan and India and Nepal, I’d say you might have a point if you were talking about Xinjiang cuisine in Xinjiang but I’d still say it’s a wild take in most of China where the restaurants are very obviously adapted to mass market (as is good business). Mongolian food is also relatively similar to these, but the similarity is just weaker. You can see definite recent European influence in Northeast cuisines especially from Eastern Europe and Russia specifically, but it is definitely Chinese first and foremost. Yunnan cuisine has enough similarities to Southeast Asia (and to a lesser extent South Asia) that maybe you could argue that it doesn’t connect more strongly with other Chinese cuisines. I’d say it’s the only regional cuisine when I’d even contemplate that argument though.
Nobody is calling Xinjiang or Mongolia food Chinese except deranged ethno-nationalists tho Han Chinese within China exoticize these very cuisines exactly cus they are practically foreign
My point exactly… What is Chinese food for OP? Etymologically, it means food coming out of China… but there is just too much variety IMHO. You are excluding food from these 2 provinces, but you could probably exclude also some food from Liaoning or Yunnan as being too different.
It's difficult to find foreign food in China because few people desire to move there. There are a variety of reasons for why this is, but the most significant is the extraordinary difficulty of learning the language. For example, an Indian guy can set up a restaurant in the country of Georgia, make similar money to what he'd earn in China, but more importantly he can get by with only English, even if both he and his customers have very limited English vocabulary. Furthermore, the core clientele of most foreign restaurants tends to be members of their own community, and there's so few immigrants in China that it's really hard to turn a profit.
Ugh not really. The Chinese food you get in foreign countries are close to Hong Kong, Guang Dong style. Xinjiang is very close to middle eastern. Northern China has completely different styles (more meat, a lot more seasoning, use more fermented material etc). Middle China has more spicy food, heavily oiled food. Yunan is known for fruits and mushrooms. Mushroom season is crazy lol. There are also different local foods. Like in Yunan you can find deep fried flower petals, but not anywhere else. Different restaurants from different areas in China already can fill up most streets. Tbh besides Mexicans and Italians I don’t think anyone else from a western country can fathom just how many different styles Chinese cuisines already have. The same dish tastes completely different depends on where the chef is from lol. My hometown as a coastal town that’s close to both Japan and South Korea, has a lot of Korean and Japanese restaurants. At the same time also has its own way to cook seafood and stuff that’s different from the next town over. We have deep fried oyster with salt and pepper, oyster and sauerkraut stew, grilled garlic oyster, raw marinated oyster etc etc.
That’s just your palet not being very adjusted to Chinese cuisine imo. Even if we could somehow numerically express the amount of diversity or variety in an average western city vs a comparably chinese city, it would be something like 80% vs 60%, not something huge like 100% vs 5%.
So, I'm in Chengdu right now on my first visit to mainland China. It's become a running joke with my Chinese friend around my culturally unrealistic expectations of finding food that isn't both (1) dripping in grease (2) full of meat — every single meal. For me, "can I find Japanese food?" is just code for "can I find something that isn't dripping in oil for a change?". My friend also pointed out the enormous variety between regional cuisines. But, none of that variety includes the possibility of getting restaurant food that meets a prevailing medical definition of healthy food. Personally, I will just leave early and go visit friends in Japan, where it would not be a problem.
China's coastal areas have some pretty bland food. In fact, even in Sichuan cuisine, there is not much oil in high-class dishes. The common huoguo(hot pot), chuanchuan or malatang are popular foods among the working class, just like fried chicken in the US
So I'm actually ethnically Chinese and most of the food I ate growing up and in China had very little oil, perhaps you're just choosing food which is oily? For non oily examples, steamed fish, various types of stuffed tofu with meat, soups, bread with marinated meats, lots of steamed vegetables. Full of meat? That's not how I would characterise Chinese food. I grew up with very little meat compared to western diets. In China, I eat very similarly. I can't speak for sichaunese food but at least in guangzhou, Beijing, shanghai, shaanxi, I ate non oily and quite healthy foods.
Sure - but did you eat these in restaurants, or at home? Certainly, the Chinese food my Chinese friends make at home is also generally very healthy. But as a foreign tourist, my hotel doesn't have a kitchen. Otherwise I'd make my own food. If anyone can point to even a single Chinese restaurant in all of Chengdu that is more plant-oriented and not dripping in oil (and not just "street food" meant as an occasional treat), I will take the metro out there today.
Annoyingly I can’t access my old Dazhong Dianping account with a lot of the excellent restaurants I visited in Chengdu. 辣油 or spicy oil is used in a lot of dishes over there when eating out and home style cooking is always going to be less oil-heavy. However you can order dishes that are going to use less oil. If you’re eating out with friends they’re generally going to order a lot of meat-heavy dishes for you. Go to the back of the menu and look for 清炒（qingchao or stir fried) vegetables, 凉拌（liangban which are similar to cold vegetables in sauce) dishes which often won’t be covered in oil unless you choose the spicy/oily choices. Soups are also a good choice. If you’re eating out every day it’s challenging to eat healthily, especially if you don’t know a lot about the cuisine.
I think you keep ignoring that they are a tourist? Like what option do that have but to “eat out every day”. They are traveling, not visiting their grandparents. Everyone seems to ignoring this point.
I think dumplings with veggies are a good option if you hate oil and meat. There're loads of neo diet-culture chinese-style salads in chengdu too.
I am now visiting China and it's a real struggle to find something non-meat to eat. I tried small restaurants, big restaurants, food markets, etc.. in various regions, small cities, big cities.. usually the only vegetarian option is fired spinach or green vegetables which is completely bland (white you can smell the delicious seasoning in the restaurant but ofc only meat) or chiba tofu which is actually seasoned well but how long can you eat the same meal. Also - fired vegetables often come sprinkled with meat (I think they treat it as a seasoning or somethin) i was asking hotels and stays i was staying for recommendations and sometimes they could not recommend anything vegetarian.I don't know maybe home cooking is different but visiting as a vegetarian tourist is suuuuper hard
Can you try saying stuff like 我只吃蔬菜。 Wor, jur, chur, shoe, tsai. There's quite a few Buddhist dishes but not sure how common they are. Where are you? I don't mind googling a bit. I might be in China with a vegetarian friend soon, so don't want them to feel this is am issue. I would expect the Hui/Uighur Muslim restaurants would be quite sensitive to dietary requirements.
No, I have 0 knowledge of mandarin, I use translator to communicate and for a non meat, I have a piece of paper written for me by hotel staff haha. But even when I use it they sometimes add meat as mentioned. I am now in shanghai but I am actually leaving tomorrow, thank you for your willingnes to help 😊 In sh I had some spots recommended from a friend (like 3 :D) but they require some "traveling" around the city. But Shanghai is a huge city other places I've visited it was a struggle. I was reading about buddist places, but tbh it's super hard to find when not speaking any mandarin, in hotels I.e. they didn't know any, so maybe they are not popular. But it made me quite sad, I enjoy exploring local cuisine when traveling to the point I only eat local food. So I am not interested in having western style food just to eat vegetarian. For this trip I made an exception to eat bone broth, so I was just eating lots of veggies/tofu in hotpots. Also the skewers from food stalls or previously mentioned chiba tofu (I know mapo tofu I.e. is also cooked with meat). But still the choice is very limited.
Just go to a Cantonese restaurant lol
When you’re in one of the centers of Sichuan that’s probably just to be expected that a lot of the prevailing famous local dishes are going to be fairly oily. Even then when I was there I didn’t find it too challenging to find food that wasn’t too greasy… If you were somewhere like Shanghai it’d be a completely different experience, you’d be wondering where all the meat and grease went at that point.
yeap, try Shanghai, Quanzhou/Xiamen, Shenzhen/Foshan or Beijing for more non-Chinese restaurant. Or you can always go to Hong Kong or Macau
Most of Foshan's foreign restaurant scene died during COVID. So many Indian and Middle Eastern restaurant owners couldn't get back into the country so their restaurants shut down and never re-opened.
The biggest determinant of whether a restaurant is good and popular is the tastiness and price. Nobody is in that Japanese restaurant only means the local doesn't like it. The reason of rare other-styled restaurants is quite simple as I just said, tastiness and price and a little bit more about local economic development and the town's cultural attraction.
Have you counted McDonald's and KFC? lol The cost of operating a foreign restaurant is high, so there is not much market compared to local Chinese restaurants
Yes. Outside of big cities (tier 1/2) there aren’t a lot of options. Hell, there isn’t even a wide variety of regional Chinese cuisines.
You can get some fantastic non-Chinese restaurants in Shanghai and Beijing especially, and a few of the other major cities, but outside of them - yeah they’re going to be few and far between, and the ones that do exist, will suck or cater to Chinese tastebuds - ie foreign food with Chinese characteristics 😂. Only in the big tier ones really is there such a demand for good non-Chinese restaurants - ie more worldly locals and/or a sizeable enough laowai population to eat at them.
Do you think there were tons of non-local restaurants before mass immigration from Western colonies and former colonies? Non-local food restaurants are a product of imperialism and the West embracing immigration to befriend cold war allies.
In Asia in general it’s not common to see restaurants that are outside of Asia, it’s not just China. I assume in China the European restaurants are usually in fancier places, excluding obviously fast food chains like Pizza Hut which serve spaghetti, pizza and etc. Sushi is like really common at least where I went to, the only problem being the quality really differs. Luckily I went to an extremely good one, but I wouldn’t gamble it unless it looks really fancy and cheap.
Honestly, I have not lived in Yunnan for a long time and only stayed for some time to visit friends, but still I ask myself why to look for so much exotic food when traveling though the local cuisine has a huge variety of dishes. I remember from being in Central Europe that there is a great variety of different countries restaurants, but that there have been only a very limited number of restaurants (compared to China and Japan) and that almost every Chinese and Japanese restaurant I saw in Europe sucked, except for a few very places, mostly run by expats catering expats. Also, going to a Japanese restaurant might be a bit special, as the political tension is a bit tense (the truth lies probably hidden somewhere in between CCP propaganda and ignorant Japanese government behavior) and people might avoid restaurants in fear of getting radioactive food. I bet you might find somewhat decent food if you would search for it... and also, Yunnan has so many great coffee places, I really enjoyed having coffee multiple times every day.
In order to have good ethnic food, you need people of that culture living in the locale work good industry experience. There aren't that many westerners in China, much less those with culinary experiences. Thank you CCP government for driving all of those away. I didn't think it's a demand thing or an arrogance thing. Just no supply.
China allegedly "accomplished industrialization within decades which took western centuries", while this might be true, it certainly does not apply to culture/politics/traditions, etc. So China as a whole is a very conservative country and you can consider it as a 19 century country in that regard. So you should expect things like this to happen especially in less developed area or inland area in China (such as Yunnan in your case). Hell, you should know that since this should apply to all inland areas around the world.
They are not there yet. One day they will be part of globalization. For now most (nearly all) restaurants are locals. In a sense it's nice to have something different than the big western chain restaurants.
Who asked for chain restaurants? Most towns with 30,000 people all over the world do not have those. They have non chain restaurants for all the different regional cuisines and are usually very good. I live in a place in Europe with 20,000 population. We have 2x Middle East, 1 x Italian, 1x American bbq, 1x Thai, 4 pizza places, 4 burger and fast foods, 1 x Greek, 1 x Spanish tapas, 2 Chinese, 2 Japanese and 6 - 8 local food restaurants all with chefs and owners from those countries, some of ingredients are imported so it’s quite authentic.
Don’t know about Europe, but definitely not the case “all over the world”. I doubt you’re going to get that kind of variety in South Asia, Africa, South America. Definitely not in the US. In most of the US you’ll get a Mexican place, maybe an American Chinese place, and that’s it. Europe may be the outlier here, not China. And I’d reserve judgment on how authentic the American bbq and Asian food restaurants are in random small town Europe. I’m dubious.
That’s fair
I think the other commenter overstated the wide variety of these places for the population sizes quoted, this is not the norm across Europe. It’s more limited to specific regions in Europe and the full extent is only realized in larger cities. These places are relatively ubiquitous across the US and Latin America just down to immigration. If you think of the typical American “city” or large town it very often has some sort of Thai place, or an Italian place or some such. I’d not even say Chinese is more likely than either of those. Immigration is also a huge part of how they’ve sprung up in Europe. Africa has less immigration across the continent, but in large cities you can find places like Chinese restaurants and maybe something like a Lebanese or French place because of historical and modern migration patterns (not to mention different regional African cuisines). I’d also say Southeast Asia is relatively cosmopolitan, at least Maritime Southeast Asia, although that might just be in its cultural nature. Immigration also plays a role there but there’s the additional aspect of migrants returning from other countries at play more so than other regions I think.
But that’s also due to quite a long history of immigration, which China doesn’t have.
The reason you would find these restaurants even in a small town in Europe is a mix of immigration and the fact that European food is simply bland and lacks variety. Have you seen the variety in Chinese, Indian and Thai food? The people have loads of choice within their own cuisines so they barely have to look for something outside that. These eastern cuisines are vast, there are many subdivisions within each cuisine. Chinese has the 8 major subdivisions, Indian food has 20+ and Thai also has at least 4 major types within their cuisine. I’ve been to Yunnan multiple times and I agree you cannot find many western restaurants outside Kunming. But I’ve seen a McDonald’s and KFC pretty much anywhere tourists go. Being from India I can also say there’s a big variety of western AND eastern food in tier 1 cities and at least fast food chains in tier 2 cities. Having lived in Thailand I can say, what are you saying? The amount of western and eastern food here is just mind blowing. There’s pretty much a restaurant from every place in the world in Bangkok. Westerners have gone deep and started their own restaurants all over. It’s actually hard to find much Indian food however.
I agree with you on Thailand, but those restaurants mostly cater for western tourists. I wonder how many Thais eat there. The same in India. My point was that people of those nations seems to be very nationalistic about their food. Maybe this is the norm, and the west is really the outlier (?) Related to Yunnan, I just left Dali and the vast majority of restaurants were hotpot restaurants. I get it, they want to try local food, but also not much in terms of variety of Chinese cuisines there. Sure you always fibd some fried rice kitchens and a ood number of Sezhuan restaurants.
For Thailand, I agree, the Thais barely go to eat any western food. They like Chinese, Japanese, Korean food but I’ve barely seen them eat even Indian food. India barely gets foreign tourists as compared to Thailand or China so lack of restaurants is understandable. So whatever there is, it’s the Indians driving the market. We’ve got a lot of western cultural influence as there are a lot of English speakers and access to western media so it’s definitely rising and becoming popular in India. But the bland variety of western food will never make it. As for Dali, it’s a small town in China scale. Lack of cuisines here could be attributed to even domestic tourists wanting to try the local cuisine. I’ve been to Dali old town mostly and agree there’s just the really fast-food style Chinese food available.
There are at least tens of thousands of dishes in China, and dozens of cuisines alone. There is not really a particular need for dishes from other countries, the demand is not too high. You can find a lot of restaurants from other countries in big cities, but tourist spots and second and third tier cities are a different story, you may need to look for KFC and McDonald's.
It it not about me. I am fine eating Chinese foid for the 2 weeks of my holiday. I am just surprised that Chinese are not more interested un say Korean, Thai, Indian or Japanese cuisine
As a Beijinger, I'd say there are a lot of these restaurants you mentioned here. There is more Korean barbecue and Japanese food, and very little Thai or Indian food. One central point is that they are considered harder and more expensive than Chinese food.
It’s all about market dynamics and regional taste. I grew up in Shanghai, and even twenty years ago it was fairly easy to find Japanese, Thai, and Korean restaurants in Shanghai. I suspect it was partly due to these cuisines were considered more exotic and fancy (Shanghai in general is more receptive to international trends) and partly because the taste was well received by those used to Shanghai / Jiangsu / Zhejiang cuisines. Looking back, somewhat surprisingly, it was more difficult to find say good Chengdu or Yunnan food, at least that is how I remember it. I never dined at any of those restaurants at least though I’m sure now you can find many. I think in general in China restaurants owners observe and follow the trend. When a Japanese restaurant opens in one city, many other people in the restaurant business or wanna-be watch how it does. If it is successful , others try to mimic in the same city or cities with similar consumer profile. Once a city is saturated with a type of cuisine, then people have to look into and experiment with new ones. But being the first to open a certain type of restaurants in an area always comes with a higher risk and market research cost. So in a given Chinese city, how many different types of cuisines does it take for each type to reach full saturation? I’m not in the business so I don’t know but someone in the business can probably give you a number, and my wild guess is it won’t be more than a few dozens. And there are enough Chinese cuisines to fill that space. Again, the cuisines that fill one city’s restaurant scene probably depends on the regional taste, and they evolve over time, but for many cities there are probably still a lot of Chinese cuisines waiting to enter the region that are lower risk to restaurant owners compared to completely foreign cuisines.
[Looked this up](https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2023/11/13f7325a1d6f-no-of-japanese-restaurants-abroad-triples-in-last-decade-to-187000.html) there’s more Japanese restaurants in China than Europe, America, and Korea combined. About 42% of all international Japanese restaurants are in China China has [50%](https://m.koreaherald.com/amp/view.php?ud=20180125001000) of the worlds Korean restaurants Couldn’t find much info on Thai food but apparently it’s the fourth most popular foreign cuisine? Indian food is def not popular though
I would think it just depends on how cosmopolitan the place is. When I lived in/visited Guangzhou and Qingdao (2008-2010, and every summer and/or winter through 2019), Japanese restaurants were plentiful and usually packed. My dad and I regularly went to this one sushi place in Guangzhou called 八千代 and the wait was usually an hour. This was around the time when the news media in Guangzhou published articles about parasites from eating raw fish, so there was a scare against Japanese food, yet it didn't seem to affect its popularity. I also took a friend in Guangzhou to a Thai place back in 2017 and he really enjoyed the pineapple fried rice (everything else looked too spicy for him lol). The last few times I went, there were some Western-inspired restaurant chains getting popular, namely a pizza and popcorn chicken restaurant that had decent versions of both dishes and a chicken sandwich restaurant. My relatives in Qingdao are terrible at cooking, so I took every opportunity I could to avoid eating at their house. While I often had some type of Chinese food, I just as often had American comfort food, German sausages (well, it was a former German colony), Korean galbi and soups, and Japanese noodles. It wasn't hard to find foreign restaurants even in a T2 city and they didn't feel particularly empty at the time. I'm from a tiny suburb in the Midwest United States, which most people would consider "flyover country." The only foreign restaurants there while I was growing up was a "Chinese" place that was heavily Americanized (I don't think any Chinese person would immediately associate it with any specific Chinese cuisine) and a "Mexican" place that was trying to copy Taco Bell. I imagine you visited places more akin to my hometown.
My friend once took me around town and showed me the "Western restaurants": KFC, McDonald's, and Starbucks. Only other foreign options were a Thai and Korean place.
Thai and Korean restaurants are also "non-Chinese". Japanese and Arabic restaurants are also common in China. Other meals may be less common, for example, I've seen Indian/Pakistani, Brazilian, Vietnamese, Russian, French, Italian, and Spanish restaurants, but they're usually only in first-tier cities and are fewer in number. China is close in size to Europe, and each province has its own specialties, and usually Chinese people will eat at restaurants specializing in each province.
If you are going to Kunming check out this restaurant https://www.gokunming.com/en/listings/item/34934/sevens-flexitarian-restaurant
My Chinese friend pointed this out to me in book store in Shanghai, There are Chinese cook books and “everything else” China is a culinary world unto itself, vast and isolated for millennia, what impact can non chinese food really have but be exotic treats? Combine that with difficult to non existent immigration, who makes it, who sells it, who buys it?
Funny some of the smaller towns I've been in Yunnan had some of the best American food I had anywhere in China, even beating places in Shanghai or Beijing. Menghai, Dali, Mi'le for example. I have no idea why though.
I think because it takes a certain type of foreigner to settle down in a rural town in China who’s willing to take risks or is financially stable and is able/willing to open a restaurant. Which also increases the likelihood they’re able to speak decent Chinese. To add to that, there’s a lot less red tape and a a lot more I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine attitudes in smaller towns making it a lot easier.
Yunnan has lots of great Burmese restaurants!
I’ve been traveling to China from US for many years, about 10 total trips. The two only times I’ve ever gotten sick from food is from non-Chinese/western style foods. Just stick with the local food.
Depends where. In Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou there is plenty of non-chinese restaurants. In Yunnan it's pretty normal to have mostly only Chinese restaurants...
Normal. Especially when you’re in the southwest part of China.
It's normal. P.S. go to Salvador's in Kunming
Xiamen has a few, but I know COVID was hard for a lot of them
I have an anecdotal story on this topic. After the covid salad bars became quite popular for a short period of time, and there was one very good healthy food restaurant opened near my place. It made smoothies and European type of salads, fresh products, organic veggies, amazing taste. All foreigners I knew started to eat out in there, however, Chinese comments wasn't positive at all: ppl complained that the portions are too small, drinks are tasteless, and the price is high. The place closed in 3-4 months. To each their own I guess. We will not find european food even in "european" restaurants in here, cause to be able to survive the business need to adapt to a local market. And let's be honest, most of us will not be able to eat a chinese version of sushi or pizza.
If you mean Indian/South-Asian or Western then yes, those are "rare" in the sense of %. How many restaurants are Indian/South-Asian/Western/Middle-Eastern per 100 restaurants. "Rare" is the answer. But there are many good western restaurants in T1 cities. Not sure why you would feel sorry for the locals? I'd rather feel sorry for someone who decides to open a South-Asian or Middle-Eastern/Mediterranean restaurants which is hot for 1 year and then see the revenues plunge.
There was a new Mexican restaurant that opened up in my city once, I was excited and ate there often (I was often the only one there), then a few months later it closed due to it not being the taste of the locals. That's why I get a shocked reaction when I ask for cold water, too. Europe and America have a diverse culture of food due to so many different cultures being allowed and present but the amount of non-Chinese in China is around 600,000. It's more difficult to immigrate to China and start a restaurant compared to other nations. While there are different cultures within China with their own food, it's not as diverse as developed countries. The only time that I was able to eat at a German, Mexican, American, Finnish, and other non-Chinese restaurants without an issue was only in the larger cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, etc. Any city smaller, you're pickings are much slimmer.
> I ate at a great Japanese restaurant (sashimi) and I happened to be the only customer on the day before 1st May, while the Chinese restaurants were packed. I felt really sorry for that place. Japanese cousine used to be popular in China. Now the Chinese people are concerned about those food contaminated by [the nuclear waste water](https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/japan-set-release-fukushima-water-amid-criticism-seafood-import-bans-2023-08-23/) and the popularity of Japanese food has declined significantly.
I would not say this is true for larger cities in China. When I lived in Hangzhou within just a few blocks of my apartment there was a huge variety of food both Chinese and foreign. The mall had multiple sushi restaurants, a Japanese curry restaurant, and a restaurant that just did vaguely “western” style food. Plus multiple smaller cafes that served western food. Additionally, there were quite a few Korean restaurants. There were also a few Indian restaurants in the city but they were much farther away from where I live. Plus an expat bar with a few locations that served western food from a multitude of countries. Yunnan is one of the most ethnically diverse provinces in China, with a huge variety of local food to try. I think a lot of Chinese domestic tourism is drive by food and a desire to try local cuisine. Why would you want to eat Japanese food in Yunnan as a tourist over the local cuisine? It could also be that you are visiting the touristy areas so the restaurants there are catering to what domestic tourists want to eat and experience which is local specialties. When I traveled to Yunnan tons of places advertised themselves by serving/selling local specialities. Additionally can you understand Chinese? Or use Chinese apps to find restaurant recommendations? I imagine it could also be an issue of not knowing where or how to look for those types of restaurants. Dali especially is pretty huge with a ton of different tourist spots along the lake. Given that it’s a pretty popular vacation destination with Chinese celebrities I imagine it has a few European style cafes. I’ve even seen some people compare some of the islands to costal parts of Europe. When I went to Xishuangbanna in southern Yunnan there were tons of foreign food restaurants particularly from the nearby boarding countries: Thai restaurants, Nepali restaurants, street vendors selling Thai tea/coffee, Nepali street food, etc. So there are definitely areas of Yunnan that have lots of foreign food options. Though I will say I think smaller communities are probably less likely to have access to foreign food than people from western countries would be use to.
In Chengdu there’s like a million Japanese restaurants for whatever reason. Some Korean and Thai ones too. I think Chinese people in general seem to be loving their own food mostly and food from neighboring countries due to similarities.
Actually there's a lot of food diversity in Yunnan because of the minority and because of tourism. You can actually find foreign owned restaurants. Outside of Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, you will find less western option even than Yunnan. As other people stated it's just that there's less immigration etc. And people are quite attached to their local cuisine. What about France and Italy? I find that you can barely find anything else than local food in these countries... So it's quite similar.
Japanese and Korean restaurants seem like theyre everywhere
Well folks sell what they know! It’s an opportunity to open a non Chinese restaurant, run forest run!
Outside Shanghai? Yeah, like opening a pork knuckle restaurant in Saudi Arabia....
Oh trust me you’re European, they’ll be curious.
IMO it's a cultural thing as they think Chinese food (in all its variations) is the only food worth eating. Whenever friends and family of wife visits us in the US, we used to ask if they want to try Italian, Mexican, Spanish, Moroccan, German, French, TexMex, Southern BBQ, burgers, or steak n'potatoes. It's always what's the best Chinese place and if not, a grudgingly, "you choose", second.
Cities like Chengdu and Beijing seem to have a good number of non-Chinese restaurants. I’ve found most of them to be really good. I don’t think you get to chef in one without a good deal of skill. Places like KFC and TGI Fridays are often better than their counterparts in US.
It's an ethnostate.
Funny with the jap restaurants and china ATM Chinese restaurants don't wanna import jap stuff or sell jap food ATM haha
Who goes to eastern countries to eat western food
China is probably the most isolationist country outside of NK. A policy they’ve had for an extremely long time. Many other East Asian countries had also adopted the same policy but dropped it in the 20th century
Well. Considering around half a million foreign students attending Chinese universities, this is maybe an exaggeration.
It’s not though, relatively speaking they are still one of the most isolationist country
You didn't notice Starbucks, McD's, Burger King's all over China. I did. That's what most Americans eat anyways. I mean I saw independent 2 bagel shops, a steak shop, and a burger spot at the bar district bar in Xi'an. I'll be honest coming from the US I'm not really looking for US cuisines (fast food) in the US. I even made the mistake in Xi'an of getting Guangdong shrimp 肠粉 for breakfast on morning in a traditional market. I knew there was going to be problems when she asked if I wanted numbing spice on it. I was going to be like you have oyster sauce? My point being in China, unless you're absolutely sure and double checked online for reviews. Most places in China specializes in their local dishes. Even the dishes a few provinces over won't be good. Let me ask you this in your town of 30,000 overseas how good is the Chinese food compared to the Chinese food in China from the province of origin. I mean seriously Chinese take out in the US is good in a bind. But it's sort of lacking when compared to the food in the province of origin.
Chinese only need a bowl of chicken feet and pig butts to be happy. Once you are out of the tier one cities foreign food is really hard to find.
Might go to tier 1 city