Must-eat Beijing

Lamb or beef stomach cut into a dozen named parts, each dropped into boiling water for a few seconds and eaten with sesame-paste dip: crunchy, chewy, clean. The most anatomy-obsessed dish in the Hui (Muslim) snack repertoire; Baodu Feng, founded in the Guangxu reign and a China Time-honoured Brand, is the name to know.

Not fried and not mostly liver: pork intestine and a few slices of liver in a thick, glossy starch gravy heavy with garlic, eaten at breakfast with steamed buns. It was first made at Huixianju in the Qing dynasty; its successor, Tianxingju, is still on Xianyukou Street. The second of the three 'dare you' Beijing breakfasts, and the easiest to like.

A charcoal-fired copper pot of plain water, paper-thin hand-cut lamb swished for seconds, and a sesame-paste dip: the opposite of a Sichuan hotpot. Beijing's winter dish, born in the Muslim (Hui) kitchens — Donglaishun (1903) has the national-heritage listing, Jubaoyuan on Niujie has the queue.

The grey, sour, faintly rotten-smelling by-product of mung-bean starch, drunk hot at breakfast with crisp fried rings and shredded pickles. Locals love it; the city government's own guide admits the 'sour taste and fermented smell'. Know what it is, then decide — nobody will think less of you for one sip.

Pork intestine, lung, fried tofu and a wheat flatbread chopped into a bowl and drowned in dark, star-anise broth, finished with garlic paste, chive-flower and chilli oil. A south-city poor man's dish that grew out of a Qing palace recipe (苏造肉) made with cheap cuts; the third of the 'dare you' trio and the one locals get homesick for.

The one dish everyone comes for, and the one where the choice of shop matters most: Quanjude (since 1864) roasts over open fruit-wood fire for crackling skin; Bianyifang (self-dated to 1416) uses a closed 'menlu' oven for juicier meat. Both techniques are on the national intangible-heritage list, and both old houses are on Qianmen Street a few minutes apart.

Hand-rolled noodles, a dark fried sauce of pork belly dice and soybean paste, and a ring of raw vegetable 'toppings' you mix in yourself. The city government calls it a taste of home; it is the cheapest honest Beijing meal you will find, and the one where a proper shop serves the toppings in eight little dishes.

Thin-sliced lamb or beef marinated in soy, ginger juice and scallion, tossed with long chopsticks on a round iron plate over a wood fire — Beijing's own barbecue, older than the Korean import. 'Wan in the south, Ji in the north': Kaorou Wan (self-dated 1686, beef) and Kaorou Ji (self-dated 1848, lamb, by Yinding Bridge on Shichahai).

Small pork meatballs fried twice until the outside shatters and the inside stays juicy, eaten with pepper-salt or a garlic-vinegar dip. The plainest dish on a Beijing menu and the one old hands order first — you can tell a kitchen from a single meatball.

In 1925 former palace cooks opened a teahouse in Beihai Park serving 'imitation imperial' food; it became Fangshan, the restaurant that gave Beijing its pea-flour cake, tiny cornmeal buns and minced-pork sesame pockets. Worth it as a set-piece lunch inside the park — go for the pastries and the lakeside, not for gastronomy.

Shredded pork stir-fried in sweet bean sauce, rolled in tofu-skin sheets with scallion slivers: the same sauce-and-roll pleasure as Peking duck at a tenth of the price, on every home-style menu in the city. Order it when you want the duck ritual without the duck.

A whole lamb spine ('the scorpion', from its shape) braised in soy-and-spice broth and served bubbling in a big pot; you gnaw the vertebrae, suck the marrow, then cook vegetables and noodles in what is left. Not an old-brand dish — it went citywide in the 1990s — but it is what Beijing families actually eat on a cold night.

The solid cousin of douzhi: the sour mung-bean lees left from starch-making, fried with lamb-tail fat, soybean paste, snow-cabbage and thin chives, served with a well of chilli oil in the middle. Far easier to like than the drink — tangy, savoury, rich — and the dish that tells you a Beijing restaurant knows what it is doing.

The private banquet kitchen of a late-Qing official, Tan Zongjun, kept alive since the 1950s inside the Beijing Hotel on Chang'an Avenue — slow, sweet-savoury, built on braised shark's fin and bird's-nest. It is on Beijing's municipal intangible-heritage list and a serious splurge; note that the signature dish is shark's fin, and you can ask for a set without it.

Thin lamb slices velveted and glazed in a sweet, glossy sauce of sugar, vinegar and sweet bean paste — a Hui (Muslim) classic whose odd name, 'it is like honey', is said to have been Empress Dowager Cixi's verdict. Story or not, it is the sweetest savoury dish in the halal repertoire and a good one for children.

A soft ball of steamed glutinous rice dusted in rice flour and stuffed with sesame, walnut and sugar — a Hui snack that a Ming palace eunuch was already describing in the 1600s. Traditionally the shops put it out at Spring Festival and sold it until the end of summer; now it is year-round, and it is the third of the 'palace snack' trio with wandouhuang and lüdagun.

A long strip of dough wrapped round a pork-and-scallion filling, folded like an old-fashioned 'dalian' shoulder purse and pan-fried gold — a potsticker's cousin, eaten with millet porridge and vinegar. Ruibinlou, the house that made it famous in Menkuang Hutong, lost its hutong home to the Qianmen rebuild; the pie itself is easy to find.

Steamed glutinous millet dough rolled round red-bean paste and tumbled in toasted soybean flour — named for the dust a donkey kicks up rolling in a field. A Manchu-era sweet that came down from Chengde with the banner families, and the one snack whose name is the whole story.

A fat beef-and-scallion pie shaped like the brass studs on a palace gate — about 3 cm tall, 5 cm across — pan-fried until the crust crackles and the inside is a pocket of scalding broth. A Hui (Muslim) snack, and the single most likely thing in this list to burn your mouth.

Not cheese: sweetened milk set with rice wine into a cool, wobbling custard, eaten with a spoon from a small bowl — a Manchu-Mongol dairy sweet that was a luxury in the old capital and is now a ¥10 stop on any hutong walk. Nailao Wei is the historic name — its founder learned the craft from palace cooks in the early Guangxu years and opened the 'Linji' shop in Dashilan in 1888; the Nanluoguxiang queue shop is Wenyu.

A griddled flatbread rolled with sesame paste and sugar, cut in wedges, eaten hot from the breakfast window with a bowl of soy milk or millet porridge. Nothing to research: it is the everyday half of a Beijing breakfast, the half that is not douzhi or chaogan.

Pleated open-topped dumplings with a thin, crimped 'skirt' of dough, filled with pork or with seasonal things — the house dish of Duyichu, founded 1738 on Qianmen Street and (the story goes) named by the Qianlong emperor after a late-night visit. Of all the Qianmen 'time-honoured brands' it is the one where you can simply sit down and eat well.

A dense, dark, spiral-layered bun of brown sugar, sesame paste and osmanthus, baked then rested until soft — an old breakfast bake with three hundred years behind it, and Dashunzhai's version, out of Tongzhou, is the famous one. Sweet without being a dessert.

Yellow peas boiled, sieved, sweetened with sugar and osmanthus and set into a cool, pale-gold cake that melts on the tongue — the refined palace version of a street sweet, sold by the box of ten at Beihai's Fangshan since the Republican years. The gentlest thing in Beijing snack cooking.

Despite the name there is no meat: a log of mung-bean starch, sliced and fried until the edges blister, eaten hot with salted garlic water. Once the starch was stuffed into pig's intestine and fried in lard; today's version is starch-only, and the only thing 'sausage' about it is the word.

Short stumps of Chinese cabbage blanched, packed with hot mustard, sugar and vinegar and left to cure — a nose-clearing cold starter the tourism site calls 'the head of the cold dishes' at a Beijing New Year table. It exists to cut through the fat of everything else on this list.

A sweet potato roasted slowly against the inside wall of a converted oil drum at a street corner, sold by weight, eaten out of its blackened skin with your hands going numb. Not a dish so much as the smell of a Beijing winter; you will know the cart by its chimney and the small crowd.

On Lichun — the solar term that opens spring, around 4 February — Beijing families 'bite the spring': thin wheat pancakes rolled round stir-fried bean sprouts, chives and egg, plus slices of soy-braised pork from the deli. Restaurants put it on for the week; if you are here in early February, this is the local thing to do that no guidebook schedules.

Smoked black plums simmered with hawthorn, osmanthus, liquorice and rock sugar, served ice-cold — Beijing's summer drink since the imperial kitchens, and the correct thing to order with grilled meat, hotpot or duck instead of a soda. Sour first, sweet after, faintly smoky.

Tart hawthorn berries on a 20-centimetre bamboo skewer dipped in rock-sugar syrup that sets to glass — the sound of winter in Beijing is the crack of that shell. Only good when it is cold outside; in summer the coating weeps. Now made with strawberries, grapes and yam too, but the hawthorn one is the original.

Beijing 'shakes' its Lantern Festival dumplings: a cube of filling is tossed in a tray of dry glutinous flour, sprayed with water and rolled again and again until it grows a rough coat — the opposite of the southern hand-wrapped tangyuan. In the week before the fifteenth of the first lunar month, queues form outside the old shops to buy them made in front of you.

The polar-bear-labelled orange soda in a returnable glass bottle — born at a 1936 ice factory, first bottled in 1951, lost to a foreign joint venture in the 1990s and back on the shelves since November 2011 with the same bottle, metal cap and tangerine flavour. Order it with your hotpot; the deposit on the bottle is part of the ritual.

Beijing's first Western restaurant open to the public, built with Soviet help in 1954 inside the Soviet-style Beijing Exhibition Center: chandeliers, columns, borscht, beef in a clay pot and a menu the tourism site says has barely changed since opening. For a generation it was where you took a date to feel grand — locals pair it with the Xinqiao Hotel, 'Lao Mo in the north, Xinqiao in the south', the two Western-food landmarks both built in 1954. Go for the room and the time-capsule, not for the cooking.

The bakery beside the Xinqiao Hotel near Chongwenmen: it grew out of the bread-and-pastry counter of the hotel's Sino-Japanese joint-venture restaurant Xinqiao Sanbaole (opened 28 January 1985 with Marui Shoji and Sapporo Breweries — 'Sanbaole' is Sapporo in Chinese), Beijing's first self-service bakery. It still sells cream rolls, sausage buns and a French loaf to a queue of regulars. Beijing's two old Western-pastry names are two eras: Yili is the 1906 home-grown one, Sanbaole the 1985 joint-venture one; go if you are at the Beijing Railway Station or the Legation Quarter anyway.

A dense, sweet loaf studded with candied fruit and walnuts, in the same wax-paper wrapper since the 1950s — from Yili, the 'bread king' founded in 1906 and a first-batch China Time-honoured Brand. Not a bakery you visit; a bag you pick up in any Beijing supermarket to understand what 'Western food' meant to the city before the reforms.

Beijing's tea is not a local leaf but a local habit: green tea scented with jasmine blossoms, which the city drank because its hard water hid everything subtler. Zhang Yiyuan (1900) and Wu Yutai are the two old houses, both with the scenting technique on the national heritage list; a tin from either is the lightest souvenir you can carry.

A gift box of eight small baked pastries — jujube paste, green plum, rose, bean paste, pepper-salt and so on, each stamped with its name — that began in the Qing palace kitchen and became the standard Beijing present. Beijing Daoxiangcun (1895) is the shop; add a bag of candied fruit leathers (果脯) and you have the edible souvenir sorted.

Vegetables cured in soybean paste — sweet-savoury cucumber, radish, garlic, the famous 甜酱八宝菜 — from a shop that dates itself to 1436 and whose sign is said to be in the hand of the Ming minister Yan Song. The pickling technique is national intangible heritage, the shop on Liangshidian Street behind Qianmen has a small museum, and a jar is the savoury souvenir.

A courtyard restaurant in Wudaoying Hutong, a few steps from the Lama Temple, serving multi-course lacto-ovo vegetarian set menus with live guqin — Michelin's 2026 Beijing guide keeps it at two stars with a Green Star. The vegetarian fine-dining address most foreign visitors know (Lamdre, promoted to two stars in 2026, is the other); expensive, quiet, and the answer when a vegetarian in your group has eaten enough douzhi — vegans must say so when booking.