Nanjing Food

Nanjing has a relatively wide selection of local, regional Chinese and foreign foods, often at reasonable prices.

Traditional Nanjing cuisine is known as Jin Su cuisine and is notable for the emphasis placed on original flavor and carefully selected raw ingredients. Nanjing dishes are traditionally bright in color and use only a moderate amount of seasoning but a significant amount of oil.

The characteristics of flavor lie in its mellow taste, neither too salty nor too light, which suits the appetite of everybody. The sumptuous course preserves its natural flavor with fresh and good smell, crisp, soft and tender tastes as its main features.

Jin Su specialties that should be sampled include: Jinling roast duck, steamed duck cutlets, salted duck, Longchi carp and "Eight delicacies soup". The "Eight delicacies" are: fish, water chestnut, lotus root, vine, parsley, arrowroot and lotus seeds. This is a popular dish especially around "Moon Festival" time (roughly around the middle of August). There are numerous classical restaurants serving up these delicacies and the area around the Confucius Temple has some great places to taste good Nanjing food.

Western and Japanese food is also becoming increasingly popular and there is a good selection of Western and Chinese food available around the universities off Shanghai Lu. Of course, the big hotels such as The Hilton and The Jinling also have good restaurants. McDonalds and KFC are hugely popular here.

There are, in particular, a number of places around the Nanjing University Foreign Students' Residence that cater to Western palates. Otherwise Xinjiekou and Confucius Temple are generally good districts to browse for restaurants. For standard Chinese snacks - noodles, Sichuan hotpot, jiaozi and wonton soup - promising areas include Ninghai Lu, just north from the main entrance of the Normal University, the area just west of Fuzi Miao, and the area immediately southeast of Xinjiekou.

Nanjing is an ideal place to sample Jiangsu cuisine, most notably yanshui ya (salted duck), so renowned that it has now become a country-wide favourite. Other Jiangsu dishes worth trying include majiang yaopian (pork intestines), jiwei xia (a lake crustacean vaguely resembling a lobster, but much better tasting, locals affirm) and paxiang jiao (a type of vegetable that resembles banana leaves). The best areas of town to sample Jiangsu food are in the north of town, north of Gulou along Zhongyang Lu and northwest along Zhongshan Bei Lu.

Salted Duck (苴盐鸡)

Delicious and tender salted duck is a Nanjing specialty, rich in flavor but not too greasy. Salted duck hangs from many city shop windows and the best time to purchase and eat the duck is said to be August when the duck is seasoned with Osmathus flowers and has a delicate flavor.
The best place to sample this dish is in the Wan Qing Lou Restaurant in the south of the city.

Jinling Snacks (金临快餐)

Nanjing Confucian temple is the place of origin of Jinling snacks, which has a long history and a great variety of snacks. With the development of the municipal construction, the network of snacks has increasingly been developed. Apart from the Confucian Temple area, places of light refreshments and snacks have gradually come into being in a rather compact way, in Xinjiekou, Changle Road, Shanxi Road, Zhongyangmen, etc. there are such well-known snack stores as Liu Feng Ju (for jellied bean curd