Food and Restaurants

Visitors to Guangzhou never fail to be amazed at the size and scope of the city's restaurants, some large enough to seat literally thousands of diners on each of their multiple floors. Nowhere in the world do people eat out as much as they do here. Every self-respecting establishment has a full array of live fish and fowl on display for patrons to inspect before eating. Freshness, a major factor in Cantonese cuisine, is deemed to be so important that everything is kept alive, either in huge water tanks or tightly grilled cages. For an overseas visitor this can all be rather daunting. Requests for "chop suey" and "chow mein" will be received with blank stares; menus are overflowing with bizarre delicacies such as stir-fried giblets and all mannerof chicken's feet.

Recently, statistics showed that there were almost 20,000 restaurants in Guangzhou and that locals spent more per capita on dining out than any other city in China. Particularly renowned are Cantonese soups; often they include ingredients that claim to have therapeutic properties. Soups in the south are served first in the meal while in the north they're served last. Another local specialty is baizhan ji, a boiled chicken chopped into bite size pieces and served with soy sauce or a dipping paste of ginger and green onions. Beijing may have its duck, but the quack doesn't stop there. Guangzhou's barbequed duck is equally famous - it's served in small pieces with a plum sauce or a light gravy dip.

The Cantonese love affair with all that's edible goes beyond the three daily meals all of us are familiar with – the Cantonese gourmand also partakes in yun cha or zao cha, ham cha and xiao ye (which could literally be translated as morning tea, afternoon tea and late night snack). Yum cha, literally meaning to drink tea, is more commonly known in the West as dimsum, which roughly translates as "heart's delight." It's usually eaten in the morning - and can be as early as 6 or 7 am or in the afternoon and consists of small steamed or deep fried dishes served in round bamboo containers. Dishes are diverse, from steamed buns with meat fillings to shrimp dumplings to marinated tripe. Yum cha is more than an eating excursion, but are rather social events - the restaurants tend to be loud and boisterous places with families and friends gathered around large tables with restaurants wheeling out endless trolleys of freshly made dim sum dishes to accompany piping hot cups of tea. Ordering is easy, just point to what's on the trolley.