Exactly, Adrian — look for menus with photos, carry a dictionary to be able to communicate by pointing to words. I’ll also add: look at what other people are eating, and pay a visit to the kitchen if you can!

I’m sure the apps are great (thank you for the link and recommendation), but I have to admit it made for great story walking around China searching for Chinese food, without much in the way of Chinese language skills.

Next time!

For me the initial fear of miscommunication in China has triggered a six years (and counting) process of trying to master Mandarin – A language I fell in love with.

By the way, now there are apps that might save you the walk into the kitchen and help you find what you are looking for.

I’m sorry to hear that food in China grew tiresome for you after a while. For us, trying to find interesting Chinese cuisine was a priority. It just so happened that when we went looking for food, we usually found other interesting experiences and people.

I suspect that our food experience in China was especially good because of the different geographies and cultures that we visited (Uighur cuisine in Xinjiang, Tibetan cuisine in Xiahe, and the various specialties of places like Pingyao, Chengdu and Xishuanbanna). So when we found ourselves in a place like Shanghai, we knew we probably couldn’t go wrong, for example, in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant labeled “Xinjiang cuisine” where a Muslim guy was hand-throwing noodles.

We are big street food fans. To the extent that street food is available, we try it. In China, our dining ratio was probably 40/60 street food to restaurants (i.e., a place with a roof). That we ate in restaurants a bit more often than on the street during our first go-round in China (late fall-early winter) was primarily a function of the season/weather.

The street food scenes in Urumqi (Xinjiang Province), Beijing and Xi’an expand with the warm weather. However, we found Beijing’s Wangfujing and Donghuamen markets and Xian’s Muslim Quarter street food scenes to be somewhat contrived and clinical. I suspect that the Chinese authorities are trying to pull off what Singapore has done with its street food hawker centers. In the process, the Chinese authorities seem to have sacrificed a bit of authenticity and diversity for the sake of “cleaning up” street food. Regardless, we still found some great street food snacks on the back streets of both cities.

The most diverse, full-blown street food scene we experienced belonged to Kashgar’s night market (Xinjiang Province).

The “restaurants” that we tended to visit were informal, small, family-run hole-in-the-wall establishments where the kitchen is the dining room and the whole thing spills out onto the sidewalk and into a street market. We did eat in some larger, more sophisticated places, especially in Beijing, but we generally prefer eating in local low-key restaurants when we travel.