“Rather go without salt for three days than without tea for a single day,” Chinese Proverb.

I’m in love with Chinese tea. I drink it every day and every time I come back to Europe I bring some nice tea packages to my family and friends. Most important, I buy a ton of tea for myself.

My favorite Chinese tea is the Long Jing, the green tea produced close to the West Lake of Hangzhou. I also like flower tea and Pu’er, the fermented tea from Yunnan Province.

If you do a quick search on the internet you’ll find a lot of information about Chinese tea.

I decided to limit this first article about Chinese tea to two topics that I find interesting: the different classes of Chinese tea and the most famous tea brands of China (for each class of tea there are many different brands, for instance you have the Long Jing green tea from Hangzhou, the Bi Luo Chun green tea from Tai Hu and so on). [Read more…]

The first time you go to China you’ll hear recommendations of what not to eat from friends and relatives. According to many people, you shouldn’t even go near street food, but it’s so delicious that it would be a real shame not to!

With a little prudence and a little good sense (a good rule would be to only eat cooked foods), you should survive street food without any problems.

Walking down Chinese streets you’ll soon realize that finding food is really easy: everywhere in the city you’ll find cheap little restaurants. But even more characteristic and unique are those that I would define as “mobile restaurants”. You can say that there’s no lack of ingenuity, and if you want to sell, why settle for a fixed location?

Anywhere in China you can admire little trucks, wagons, tricycles or bicycles equipped for the transport, and even the cooking of food. At the end of the evening these hardworking mobile vendors can then take all their equipment and comfortable return home.

The variety of street foods are numerous and depend on the region you’re in. [Read more…]

No panettone for Christmas, no Easter cake, and definitely don’t expect lentils for New Year! We’re not crazy, we’re in China. But don’t worry, even here there are typical holiday dishes, so let’s discover these culinary traditions for the Chinese holidays together!

春节 e 饺子 (chūnjié and jiǎozi) – The Spring festival and ravioli

The Spring festival (春 “Spring”, 节 “festival”) is also known as the Chinese New Year, and is the most important holiday for the Chinese people. It falls between the end of January and the beginning of February, and to celebrate it there isn’t a family that doesn’t eat ravioli!

The 饺子, besides having a symbolic meaning (the pasta of the ravioli encloses and keeps the filling together, just like a family, protected and united), is also the perfect occasion for getting the whole family together to prepare the ravioli, to then eat them all together.

For information on the ravioli, you can click this link, and find it under the heading “First dishes”.

As the Chinese New Year is “the” Chinese holiday, eating some ravioli is certainly not enough to honor the traditions. If the Chinese usually eat enormous quantities of food for every important event, for this holiday the custom is even greater. [Read more…]

In this guide you’ll find descriptions of the most famous – and delicious – dishes in Chinese cuisine, with the name in English and Chinese (both in characters and in pinyin).

For those who are already 中国通 (zhōngguó tōng), experts on China, going to a restaurant and leaving satisfied isn’t a problem.

But who of us doesn’t remember of our early experiences, menu in hand, in front of an insistent Chinese waiter who has decided not to let you look at the menu in peace, perhaps looking at a dictionary for some of the hundreds of characters in front of our eyes?

I still remember my first meal in China: traumatized by my arrival in this country where, despite three years of studying the language, nobody seemed to understand me, I decided to go to a familiar and international setting: McDonald’s.

The first stumbling block was in finding fast food since no one seems to know it by this name. To my great surprise, after interminable minutes of walking and a growling stomach, finally it was there before me, like a mirage of an oasis in the desert, 麦当劳 (Maidanglao) the Chinese name for McDonald’s!

Not at all discouraged by the long trip by plane, the loneliness that started showing itself, and the difficulties in communicating, I decide to go in, confident to find a non-hostile environment. I take a few steps toward the counter, walking with my head up, despite feeling a myriad of dark eyes pointed toward me to examine the foreigner.

I finally arrive at my destination and I hear myself say “yi ge burger” in a bad mix between English and Chinese. [Read more…]

I started to occasionally drink green tea when I moved to China, in 2010, because I wanted to cut out black coffee. I became so addict to it that, before to move to Thailand, I bought 1 Kg of Longjing Chinese green tea.

Now that I’m not in Asia anymore, I buy it online, directly from China.

Also, at the beginning of 2011, I became interested on weight loss because I had gained ten Kg thanks to fatty Chinese food and a bad knee that made me impossible to practice any sports for around six months. I lost the ten Kg in three months, and I think that green tea, which by then I was drinking daily, played an important role.

After years, I still drink green tea daily. Today I’d like to share what I consider the best benefits of green tea and, at the end of this article, how I make sure to drink green tea every day (I’ve got a routine!). [Read more…]

After pollution and shitty internet connection, I think the most common complaint among the expats living in China is:

“Since I’m in China I became so fat.”

It doesn’t surprise me. Most of expats tend to settle for a diet based on Jiaozi (Chinese dumplings), Lanzhou Lamian (delicious Muslim noodles) and deep fried pork meat. Not exactly the best for losing weight.

This was my case too: when I arrived in China, on June 2010, my weight was around 68 Kg. On December I had stabilized around 74 Kg, which for a guy of 172 cm means only a thing: I was way out of shape.

So I decided that my New Year resolution was to lose at least 6-7 Kg. I was lucky enough to stumble upon a book that challenged all my beliefs on food and diet. The book is quite famous, it’s called “Four Hour Body” and was written by Tim Ferriss. [Read more…]