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A huge chunk of Chinese culture is devoted to food and drink. There are hundreds of different dishes, and each region has its own distinctive flavor. The majority of Chinese restaurants in Beijing feature what is known as "family style dishes" (jia chang cai), which are basically the most common types of food that any self-respecting Chinese can make at home. These dishes are usually a combination of the spicy Sichuan style (chuan cai) and the more hearty Shandong style (lu cai). True Sichuan style restaurants have a special type of tea called Eight Treasures Tea. This tea is poured from a kettle with a yard-long spout, which the boy (it's usually a boy) wields skillfully. Aside from jia chang cai restaurants, there are also many places that are devoted to a certain type of food. Specialty restaurants include such classics as Donkey Flesh King, Dog Meat City and Fat Sister's Meat Pies.

Shanghai style (Shanghai cai) tends to be sort of sweet and features lots of seafood. Shanghai restaurants have been quite popular for some years now. Guangdong eaters have a reputation for eating "everything with four or more legs except for the table, and everything that has wings except for airplanes." All of the really funky dishes you hear about like live monkey brains and raw rat babies are Guangdong (Cantonese) style dishes (yue cai). However, there are lots of excellent, non-scary Guangdong dishes, and the seafood is especially tasty. Northeastern dishes (dongbei cai) are usually composed of large quantities of meat in thick, fairly salty sauces. Potatoes also feature heavily in dongbei cai. This is a great style of food to have in winter. Other famous schools of Chinese food include Huaiyang and Shanxi styles. There are also a number of regional minority cuisine.

Uygur Food

The Uygurs are a Muslim minority from Xinjiang Autonomous Region in the Northwest. There are Uygurs all over the city selling lamb shish kebob, but there are two places where they are fairly concentrated together, one is tempted to call them ghettos. These two locations, Weigongcun and Ganjiakou, abound with Uygur restaurants. If you are walking by around dinner time, prepare yourself to get accosted by "grabbers", sort of like "greeters" at other restaurants, except these guys tugs on your sleeve and try to drag you into their place. Nothing hostile, just very persistent. The best thing at these restaurants is the roast fried spicy mutton (chao kao rou), square noodles in tomato sauce (chao pian'r), and the round nang bing, a type of bread which is scrumptious when piping hot, and hard as a rock when cool. There is also a smaller, fatter type of round bread which can satisfy a bagel-craving. The roadside shishkabob can be delicious, too, but is not always the paramount of sanitary foodstuffs.

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