Must-eat Chengdu

A bubbling pot of beef-tallow broth loaded with dried chilli and Sichuan pepper, into which you cook everything from tripe and goose intestine to potato slices, with a sesame-oil-and-garlic dip on the side. Chengdu's version is gentler than Chongqing's and fussier about the dip. The two words that save a foreign table are 鸳鸯锅 — the half-and-half pot.

Hotpot for people who hate menus: everything is pre-threaded on bamboo skewers in a fridge, you grab what you want, cook it in the red pot and pay by counting sticks at the end. Chengdu invented it as the cheap student version of hotpot; the cold-pot (冷锅) style — skewers already cooked and served in cold spiced oil — is the less scalding, less fierce cousin.

A small, dry-tossed bowl: thin noodles under crisp fried pork mince, preserved mustard greens (芽菜), chilli oil, sesame paste and a little vinegar — named for the shoulder-pole (担) hawkers of Zigong who sold it in the 1840s. Two liang (二两) is the size; it is a snack, not a meal, and the best bowls are in tiny places.

Thin slices of braised beef, heart, tongue, tripe and head-skin tossed in chilli oil, ground Sichuan pepper and sesame — a 1930s street cart run by a married couple, Guo Chaohua and Zhang Tianzheng, that became a shop and a China Time-honoured Brand. There is no lung in it, whatever the name says; the 'pian' is the offal slices.

Chengdu's wonton — thin-skinned, folded like crossed arms (抄手), served either in a clear pork-bone broth or tossed in red oil — from a shop founded in 1941 whose 'Long' is a pun on the teahouse where the founders met. The clear-broth bowl is the safest thing on any Chengdu menu.

Soft tofu in a glossy red sauce of chilli-bean paste, ground beef, fermented black bean and a final shake of Sichuan pepper — created in 1862 at a riverside eatery by the north gate run by a pock-marked Mrs Chen, hence the name. The most famous Sichuan dish in the world, and the version at the Chen family's descendant shop is still the reference: numbing, hot, scalding, tender.

Pork belly boiled, sliced thin, then 'returned to the wok' with Pixian chilli-bean paste, fermented black beans and garlic sprouts until the fat curls — the first dish on every Sichuan home table and the one cooks are judged by. More savoury than hot: the bean paste is the flavour, the chilli is incidental.

Ten small boiled dumplings of pure pork, no vegetable in the filling, drowned in a sweet-savoury chilli oil with garlic — an 1893 shop from Lizhi Lane whose name is now the dish. The oil is more sweet than hot, which makes it the first Sichuan chilli most foreigners actually like.

Rabbit chopped small, deep-fried dry and tossed with a mountain of chilli and Sichuan pepper, then left to cool — Zigong's 'salt-merchant' snack, made to be eaten cold from a bag on a train. Bone-in, spice 3, fiercely numbing, and the reason half the vacuum packs in the souvenir shops are rabbit.

Pork belly poached, chilled and sliced almost transparent, laid over cucumber and dressed with pounded garlic, sweet soy and a thread of chilli oil — the cold starter that shows off the cook's knife skills. The Lizhuang version from Yibin is the famous long-slice one; in Chengdu it is the summer opener on every table.

A single cabbage heart in a bowl of what looks like water and is in fact a chicken-duck-ham stock clarified for hours until it is glass-clear — the state-banquet dish that proves Sichuan cooking is about stock, not chilli. Spice zero, and the most expensive bowl of 'water' you will buy.

Diced chicken flash-fried with dried chillies, Sichuan pepper and peanuts in a 'scorched-chilli lychee' sauce — sweet, sour, a little hot — named for Ding Baozhen, a late-Qing governor of Sichuan whose court title was Gongbao. The overseas 'Kung Pao' with its gloopy sweet sauce and bell peppers is a different dish that borrowed the name.

Hotpot for one, cooked for you: pick vegetables, tofu and meat from the fridge, the cook blanches ('冒') them in a red spiced broth and brings the whole thing in a bowl with rice. Chengdu's lunch invention — everything hotpot gives you at a fifth of the price and without the ceremony.

The wedding-and-festival banquet of the Chengdu plain: nine big bowls, mostly steamed — pork belly over sweet bean paste and glutinous rice (甜烧白), pork belly over preserved mustard (咸烧白), rice-crumb steamed pork, meatball soup — served at courtyard tables in the countryside. Almost none of it is hot, and the sweet bowl is a dessert that happens to be pork.

A pork trotter simmered for hours with white kidney beans until the skin slides off the bone, served in a bowl of milky broth with a dip of chilli, soy and scallion on the side — the after-midnight soup of the streets round People's Park. The broth is spice zero; the heat is entirely in the saucer, so it is the best late-night non-chilli meal the city has.

Beef and beef offal poached to order in a clear, herb-scented broth and served with a dry dip of chilli and salt — from Suji, a market town outside Leshan, where labourers ate it squatting on the bench with one foot up (跷脚). A bowl is spice zero until you dip; it is Sichuan's beef noodle-soup moment, minus the noodles.

The most misleading name in the cuisine: thin beef or fish slices poached in a chilli-bean broth over a bed of garlic shoots, celery and lettuce stem (the three the provincial standard names; many kitchens use bean sprouts), then buried under dried chilli and Sichuan pepper and doused with smoking oil at the table. A salt-merchants' dish from Zigong; spice 3 with heavy numbing, and there is no polite version.

A whole rabbit head braised in chilli-and-pepper stock, eaten with the hands: split the jaw, suck the cheeks, dig out the brain. Sichuan eats most of China's rabbit and this is the dare — from Shuangliu, the airport district, whose 'Laoma' shop made it a brand. Spice 3; the five-spice (五香) version is the same head without the fire.

Beef tossed in toasted, spiced rice crumb and steamed in a small bamboo basket until soft, finished with chilli oil and cilantro — the old Chengdu snack-shop standard, and in 2027 Michelin put two beef specialists on the Bib Gourmand list for it. Rich, gently hot, and one of the few Sichuan classics with no pork.

Chengdu's sweet counter: fermented glutinous rice (醪糟) warmed with tiny rice-flour balls and an egg, silver-ear fungus stewed to a syrup, and the sesame-filled tangyuan of Lai Tangyuan, a brand dated to 1894 (MOFCOM) that only settled on Zongfu Road in the 1930s. Zero chilli, faintly boozy, and the breakfast for the morning after a hotpot.

A braised duck brushed with hot maltose syrup so the skin sets into a thin, sweet, crackling shell over savoury meat — Leshan's gift to Chengdu, now sold from cold-cut windows all over the city and eaten cold by the quarter. Not a Chengdu dish, but Chengdu is where you will meet it; zero chilli.

A whole duck cured, smoked over camphor leaves and tea, steamed, then fried until the skin is mahogany — the banquet duck of old Chengdu, fragrant rather than spicy, and the dish the Rongleyuan school of high Sichuan cooking is remembered for. Zero chilli; one of the great answers to 'is there anything not hot?'

Chengdu is the gateway city for Sichuan's Tibetan prefectures, and the streets round Wuhou Shrine are its Tibetan quarter: butter tea, yak stir-fried with flatbread, barley tsampa, momo dumplings, and lately 'Tibetan pizza'. The city's English site (carrying a Xinhua report) calls the restaurants 'a hidden gem' for more seasoned diners (its words) — and they are, almost entirely, chilli-free.

Warm, just-set tofu pudding in its own whey, eaten two ways: the Fushun way, savoury, dipped piece by piece into a chilli-soy saucer and chased with rice; or the Chengdu snack way, sweet or salty in a bowl with crisp fried noodle threads (馓子). The tofu itself is spice zero and vegan; the saucer is where the heat lives.

Shredded pork with wood-ear and celtuce in a sauce of pickled chilli, ginger, garlic, sugar and vinegar — 'fish-fragrant' because these are the seasonings once used for fish, not because there is any fish in it. Sweet-sour-savoury with a mild kick; the dish to order for the person who says they don't like Sichuan food.

A clear, trembling jelly rubbed by hand from the seeds of a nightshade plant (冰粉籽) and set with lime water, served in brown-sugar syrup with hawthorn, peanut, raisins or a spoon of fermented rice — the thing every hotpot house brings at the end to put the fire out. Spice zero; the hand-rubbed (手搓) kind has bubbles, the packet kind does not.

The glass counter on every Chengdu street: duck necks, rabbit legs, chicken feet, lotus root, tofu skin and eggs simmered in a master stock, chopped and bagged to eat walking or with beer at home. The 1925 house Pansunshi turned the habit into a brand; 'spicy' (麻辣) and 'five-spice' (五香) are the two lanes, and five-spice is the chilli-free one.

A palm-sized pancake of egg-and-flour batter baked in a tiny copper pan, folded round a filling of your choice — pork floss and pickled greens, or cream, or chocolate — from a pushcart with twenty little pans going at once. Chengdu's own, found nowhere else; the sweet fillings are spice zero, the savoury ones mildly hot.

Slippery sweet-potato-starch noodles in a pork-bone broth with braised intestine, peas and a spoon of chilli oil — Chengdu's morning bowl, ordered with a guokui on the side to dip. Red (麻辣) or white (白味) broth is your choice; the intestine is the point, so order something else if offal is not.

A spiral of dough rolled with spiced minced pork and scallion, griddled in oil and then finished standing on edge in the oven under the pan until the layers puff and crackle — from Juntun in Pengzhou, north of the city, and now the thing you eat with a bowl of intestine noodles. The brown-sugar (红糖) version is the sweet, chilli-free twin.

A wobbling block of pea or rice starch jelly, cut into strips or shaved into spirals (旋子), dressed cold with chilli oil, vinegar, garlic and soy — the Sichuan summer street bowl. Yellow (pea), white (rice or mung), and the Chuanbei style from Nanchong with its hotter dressing; the jelly is nothing, the sauce is everything.

The two sweets that end a Sichuan meal: lianggao, a cool set rice cake from Yibin sliced and drowned in brown-sugar syrup, and ciba, pounded glutinous rice fried in fingers, rolled in soybean flour and glazed with brown sugar. Both zero chilli; ciba is the one on every hotpot menu.

A vendor hurls three lumps of warm glutinous rice dough onto a board rigged with brass discs — bang, bang, bang — they bounce into a tray of toasted soybean flour and are served under brown-sugar syrup. Street theatre first, sweet second; the food itself is a plainer cousin of Beijing's lüdagun.

Glutinous-rice balls deep-fried in brown-sugar oil until the shell is dark and crackly and the inside hollow and chewy, rolled in sesame and threaded four or five to a stick — the old-street breakfast sweet that became the snack-street photograph. Zero chilli; best within a minute of leaving the oil.

Noodles as thick as chopsticks, chewy enough to fight back, in a dressing of sweet reduced soy (复制酱油), chilli oil, garlic and sesame — 'sweet water' names the sauce, which is sweet first and hot second. A small bowl, eaten as a snack between a liangfen and a douhua.

Ye'er ba: a glutinous-rice dumpling, sweet (bean paste) or savoury (pork and pickled greens), steamed inside a folded leaf that perfumes it — the Chengdu-plain New Year snack that old-town steamers sell all year. Tang mabing: the flaky sesame-and-sugar cake of Jiezi old town near Qingcheng Mountain. Both spice zero, both bought by the bag on a day trip.

A milky soup of local Jianyang goat and offal, boiled hard with crucian carp for body, served with a dry chilli-salt dip and a plate of cilantro — what the whole city queues for on the winter solstice, when Xiaoguanmiao Street turns into one long soup kitchen. Spice zero in the bowl; the winter dish that happens to be mild.

The Taoist mountain's table: chicken stewed with ginkgo nuts, smoked farmhouse bacon, the mountain's own green tea, and a milky kiwi liqueur — the four things every farmhouse inn at Qingcheng serves, and the reason to eat lunch on the mountain rather than back in the city. Nothing hot; the bacon is smoky, the chicken clean.

For a few weeks in March and April Chengdu menus fill with the first shoots: 香椿 (Chinese toon) scrambled with eggs, and 折耳根 (fish-mint root, houttuynia) tossed cold with chilli and vinegar — the one Sichuan flavour that divides foreigners into lovers and never-agains. Order both once; you will know which side you are on in a bite.

Chengdu has one of the densest café scenes in China and two streets where it clusters: Xiaotong Lane and Paotongshu Street behind Kuanzhai, and Tangpa Street south of Taikoo Li. The city's own English site has been reporting 'spicy coffee' — chilli and Sichuan-pepper lattes, plus broad-bean-paste (douban) coffee and garlic coffee (the city site's list) — as the local twist. The douban one is the Sichuan jar in a cup; order one for the story, a flat white for the coffee.

A lidded bowl on a saucer, a pinch of jasmine tea, and a kettle-carrier who keeps topping you up for as long as you sit — the Chengdu teahouse is the city's living room, and this is the ticket. Bitan Piaoxue is the local jasmine with the petals left in; Zhuyeqing is Emei's flat green tea for people who want no flowers. Not a dish, but you will spend more afternoons on it than on any dish.

South of the centre, Tongzilin is where the consulates, international schools and the Korean community settled, and so where Chengdu keeps its Korean barbecue, bakeries and the Western restaurants that homesick residents actually use. Not a 'must' for eating Sichuan — a must for the day you cannot face another chilli.

The savoury souvenirs on every Jinli and Kuanzhai counter: Zhang Fei beef from Langzhong (sliced; the old black soot crust was dropped by the maker in 2003 — today's is plain-skinned), 'lantern-shadow' beef from Dazhou (sliced thin enough to see light through, fried crisp in chilli oil), and vacuum packs of Zigong cold rabbit. Only the lantern-shadow beef comes in a five-spice, chilli-free version.

The three jars that make Sichuan food taste of Sichuan: Pixian douban (sun-fermented broad-bean-and-chilli paste from the county west of the city, aged in open vats; Pixian is now Pidu District — the paste keeps the old name, so search maps for 郫都区), a vacuum brick of hotpot base, and Hanyuan Sichuan pepper, the 'tribute pepper' that numbs cleanest. All three are in every supermarket and at the airport; together they weigh a kilo and cost under ¥100.

Southwest of Tianfu Square, the streets round the Huangcheng Mosque are where Chengdu's Hui community has eaten for centuries: beef-stuffed crisp pancakes (牛肉焦饼), clear beef soups, beef noodles, and hotpot houses that swap beef tallow for vegetable oil and hang the 清真 sign. For Muslim travellers this is the only reliable lane; for everyone else it is the beef side of Sichuan.

Two answers at two prices. Xiangyuan (香园) is Wenshu Monastery's own 'Zen-life' hall — a buffet of temple vegetarian food, mock-meat mapo and twice-cooked 'pork' included, for about the price of a bowl of noodles. Mixun Teahouse, in a Qing courtyard at Upper House Chengdu (formerly The Temple House), is the one-star, Green-Star version whose menu the guide says takes its inspiration from Daci Temple's vegetarian kitchen.