• Peking Duck

• Imperial Food

• Hotpot

• Traditional Local Snacks

• Foreign Cuisine

• Bars and Cafes

• Drinking

Beijing is famous for its Peking Duck, and so a Peking Duck dinner should be a fixed itinerary on any Beijing tour. With hundreds of restaurants offering this specialty, Quanjude Peking Duck Restaurant is the recognized leader for serving the best Peking Duck around town. With over 130 year of history, there are branch restaurants in Qianmen, Hepingmen and Wangfujing.

At Quanjude, ducks are marinated with a secret sauce recipe and then roasted directly over fruittree wood stoked flames. When roasted to perfection, the ducks are date-red in colour, lightly glazed with oil, and have crispy skin and tender meat. The chef then shaves the meat into thin slices with skin attached. The meat is served with Chinese onions and special sweet sauce wrapped by a very thin pancake.

Beijing has been the Capital of the Liao (907-1125), Jin (1115-1234), Yuan (1206-1368), Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) Dynasties. Under such circumstances, Imperial Food, or a special a style of Chinese food originating from the Imperial Palace was formed. In bygone days these dishes, exquisitely made with choice ingredients, were prepared in the imperial palace kitchen for the exclusive delight of the emperor. Today, Fangshan Restaurant in Beihai Park, Tingliguan Restaurant in the Summer Palace, and Dashanyuan Restaurant near Palace Museum, have made these once secret dishes available to the public.

Hotpot is very popular among Beijingers, especially during winter season. The concept is for you to cook your food at your table in a big pot full of soup that sits over a burner. A wide selection of thinly sliced fresh raw meats; vegetables, including tofu, Chinese cabbage, bean sprouts and the likes; seasonings and noodles are bought to you. You pick up the items and immerse it in boiling soup until it is cooked. Then you dip the meats and vegetables in a peanut, soy, sesame, and chili sauce mixture, and it is ready for eats.

There are basically two kinds of hotpot restaurants in Beijing: Mongolian and Sichuan style. Sichuan hotpot has a soup base, which can be described as either super spicy or mildly radioactive. But for those sensitive to spicy food, there is no need to worry cause often the pot is divided in half: one side spicy soup, the other half for nonspicy soup. The soup base for Mongolian style is not spicy, and usually consists of some vegetables and seafood.

Recently there has been an explosion of buffet-style hotpot restaurants. Generally you pay a set price (often around 38 yuan) for an "all you can eat" meal, including beer.

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There are a good variety of traditional local snacks and refreshments in Beijing. These include almond junket, milk curd, tiny corn buns, porridge with lotus seeds, cakes baked in a clay oven and stuffed with minced meat, fermented soy bean milk, sausages, odd-odor bean curd, sesame seed-speckled cakes, sweet sour plum juice and more.

The best snacks are found at night fairs, where traditional lanterns add a folkloric aura to scene. Beijing's open-air night snack markets are open all year round. For a taste of snack foods, go to Snack Street, near Wangfujing Street or Donghuamen near the Palace Hotel. From about 5:00pm, vendors lined up in their stalls start selling foods from all parts of the country. You can have an entire meal's worth of food walking from one end of the street to the other, sampling various delicacies along the way. These markets provide real life accounts of how the Chinese enjoy their evenings.

Apart from the thousands of restaurants serving Chinese dishes, Beijing's gourmet scene is also filled with restaurants serving Italian, French, American, Russian, Japanese, Thai, Indonesian, Korean and other foreign cuisine. Fast food outlets such as Mcdonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut and the likes are spotted throughout the city.

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Chaoyang Street and Sanlitun Bar Street, offer the most bars and cafes. These places are decorated with a western atmosphere, enabling foreigners to feel more at home. These are good places for those wishing to relax by sipping a cup of coffee or sampling some vintage brews.

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Drinking alcohol is a big part of Beijing entertainment, especially when dining with Chinese hosts. The Chinese likes to drink beer and BaiJiu (Chinese white wine) made from assorted grains. There are varying degrees of Bai Jiu. The Beijing favorite is called Er Guo Tou, which contains 56% alcohol, and costs about 5RMB per bottle. Wuliangye and Maotai, going for about 300-400 yuan per bottle is less alcohol intensive. If you are not a drinker, or don't feel up to the challenge, just say politely decline by saying you don't drink. It is generally acceptable to use Coke or tea as an alcohol substitute.