Food Charm

The traditional Chinese food has 8 main different sections, differentiated by provincial cuisines. The most popular cuisines are Sichuan Spicy Food, Cantonese Cuisine, Northeastern Cuisine and Shanghai Local Food. In the past, cuisines didn’t flow away that much to the other regions, the soil determines the character of the people living on it, so do the taste. The big difference in taste also made the local cuisine stronger developed. It was hard to taste different cuisines at one place, the story in Qing dynasty was only the emperors can enjoy the whole country’s cuisines, which was called Man Han Quan Xi, to describe the countless delicious cuisines.

 

After a few years’ urbanization and labor floating, citizens are already quite in mixture, different cuisines became quite needed. By this market developing, a sophisticated restaurant business is rising up from mussy private kitchen to conceptual venues. Food question for people also transits from how to cook to how to choose, because of the abundant menus.

 

Online communities help them to choose, also came up for this trend. Now the city-master communities are already on top of the local portals. It becomes easy to select from others’ comments but also hard to differentiate from a long list with similar cuisines, which absolutely makes the restaurants headachy to change.

 

The new style is fusion, either different cuisines mix, like Sichuan mix Shanghai local, much more suit for local customers, however, food is not authentic anymore but acceptable; or different concepts mix, themed restaurants are also booming in China, especially in cities, always someone are looking for feeling but not only food. Typical options like Jade Garden, Lost Heaven, they’re concentrating on environment more than food taste, music, decoration, art gallery and so on. Due to these innovations, they’re talked in town by stylish people and foreigners. Lost Heaven, a Yunnanese folk cuisine restaurant has an astonishing number of 80% foreign customers, which is too panoplied that not really acquired by Chinese.

 

Another factor of Chinese food culture is the cooking traditions. While restaurants is more and more covering people’s daily diets, going to a restaurant is not as distinguished as before, which was rare and symbolized. The whole country is discussing about where to have a nice dinner, people don’t have interests on cooking, who can cook already can be regarded as unique.

 

Although these charming food and restaurants are quite popular with urban people, China was not a restaurant country before. People loved to cook at home, to treat guests at home, and even to host a big wedding dinner at home. At that time, youngish especially ladies should learn from mother about cooking, which is an important criterion of a good wife. Nowadays, less and less people choose wife by this criterion, although social discourse is calling for a back of the cooking tradition. Of course it was a bit emphasizing the social role of gender, but on the other hand, families are less connected without the kitchen.


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