Youtiao and a bowl of soy milk steaming on a steel street-stall counter at dawn

Food

Breakfast早餐

The meal foreign visitors miss almost universally, because they eat it in the hotel. Chinese breakfast is a street meal, it happens between about six thirty and nine, and it is regional in exactly the way dinner is: soy milk and fried dough sticks in the north; rice noodles in Yunnan and Guangxi; a wheat-batter crêpe folded around a cracker in Tianjin; wontons in soup in Shanghai; and in Guangzhou, breakfast simply is dim sum. It is also the cheapest good food in the country by a distance, and the best hour to see a Chinese city being a city rather than a destination.

What to do

Skip the hotel buffet once. Walk two streets and join whichever queue is longest.

Eat — Youtiao with hot soy milk, shengjianbao in Shanghai, jianbing anywhere there is a griddle.

WhereShanghai Beijing Guangzhou