Peking Roast Duck

Peking Duck has the reputation of being the most delicious food Beijing has to offer. While some find it a bit too greasy, others get hooked after just one bite. In any case, a Peking Duck dinner is usually a fixed item on any Beijing tour itinerary. Eating Peking Duck is a definite must for new visitors to Beijing; the other is climbing the Great Wall.

The place that offers the best Peking Duck is the Quan Ju De Restaurant, which has outlets in Qianmen, Hepingmen and Wangfujing. It was established 130 years ago and, counting from the time when its founder Yang Renquan began his duck business, it is 160 years old.

At Quan Ju De, ducks are immersed in ingredients that are unique to the restaurant and roasted directly over flames stoked by wood of fruit trees. The best roasted duck is date-red in color, shining with oil, with crispy skin and tender meat.

The chef then slices the meat into thin slices, each with a piece of skin. The meat is served with very thin pancakes, Chinese onion and a special sauce. The way to eat Peking Duck is to coat the thin pancake with sauce, add a few pieces of meat and onion and roll it all up. Chopsticks are optional: it is much easier just to grab the package with your hands.

Another famous restaurant serving up Peking duck is the Bian Yi Fang (Cheap Restaurant), which opened in 1855 -- nine years before Quan Ju De. At Bian Yi Fang, roasting is done in an enclosed container heated with crop stalks as the fuel.

There are now hundreds of restaurants serving Peking Duck all over the city. Most of them offer duck for 38 yuan a piece -- cheaper than the specialty restaurants.

 Imperial Court Cuisine

Imperial Court Cuisine is a style of Chinese food that originated at the Imperial Palace. It is based on the foods served to the emperor and his court. Now, the cuisine has become a major school of Chinese cooking and there are several places where one can sample its unique flavor. Fang Shan in Beihai Park and Ting Li Guan at the Summer Palace are the best ones. Some 150 years ago one could never have dreamed of enjoying such delicacies -- which, however, come at a price.

 Imperial Official's Cuisine and Medicinal Foods

Tan Family Meal

Tan Family Meal

This first type of cuisine is unique to Beijing. In the past, Beijing officials were very picky about what type of food they ate. The most famous official cuisine is the Tan Family Meal, which is offered at the Beijing Hotel. As the preferred food of the Qing Dynasty official Tan Zongling, it was later introduced to restaurants. Another type is described in the classic novel "Dream of the Red Mansion." The author, Cao Xueqin, described a number of dishes in the book, and now there are several restaurants that serve them. The most famous place is the Beijing Grand View Garden Hotel. This hotel is located next to Beijing's Grand View Garden, which is modeled after the garden described in the book. Other restaurants featuring this type of food are the Jinglun Hotel and Laijinyuxuan Restaurant in Zhongshan Park.

There are hundreds of medicated dishes that are infused with such choice tonic materials as ginseng, deer musk, bear's paw, Chinese wolfberry and soft-shelled turtle -- the cream of the crop of Chinese medicine. The "Yang Sheng Zhai" Restaurant at Xiyuan Hotel has the best reputation for such foods. Although it has been changed into a Sichuan restaurant, it still offers medicinal foods.

 Hotpot

There are basically two kinds of hotpot restaurants in Beijing: Mongolian style and Sichuan style. The staple of both types of hotpot is mutton ("yang rou"). The meat is usually sliced frozen so that it curls up into a tube. Then, the meat is placed into the hot pot -- a copper pot containing a boiling soup base. After a few seconds the meat is cooked and dipped into a sesame butter sauce. The action of cooking the meat in this way is called "shuan". Other "shuan-ables" include beef (fei niu), frozen tofu (dong dofu), Chinese cabbage (bai cai), bean sprouts (dou miao) and glass noodles (fen si). The spicy Sichuan hotpot has a soup base that can either be super-spicy or mildly less shocking to your taste buds, although the pot is often divided into spicy and non-spicy soup pots. The soup base for the Mongolian style is not spicy and usually consists of some vegetables and seafood.

Famous Mongolian-style hotpot restaurants are Neng Ren Ju at Baitasi and Dong Lai Shun east of Tian'anmen Square. The most well-known Sichuan style hotpot restaurant is Jin Shan Cheng, which has many branches scattered throughout the city.

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. All-you-can-drink beer is also included in the price.

  Traditional Snacks

Beijing has over 250 types of traditional snack foods. Many of them are made of glutinous rice, soybeans or fried materials. The king of all snacks is called "dou zhi". This is a strange-tasting, greenish-grey, fermented bean porridge, and if you can manage to eat a whole bowl of it you will earn great respect from your Beijing peers. Supposedly, it has an "acquired taste." For a taste of snacks from outside of Beijing, take a trip to Snack Street, just off Wangfujing Street. Starting from about 5:00 pm, vendors line up their stalls and start selling foods from all parts of the country. You can have an entire meal walking from one end of the street to the other, sampling some exotic and more typical everyday items.