Beijing is a city of extreme. You can buy the most bizarre snacks and bites here right on the street. Deep-fry starfish, scorpions on a stick, and grilled snake. The animal lover in me is horrified by seeing these disturbing things. Still, food is part of the local culture and you have to respect this when visiting a country. But not all the street food in Beijing is weird, there are also a lot of delicious snacks you can buy right off the street. Take for example Baozi (steamed buns), Lao Nai (fermented yogurt), or Bing Tanghulu (fruit on a stick covered sucre syrup). Delicious! Beijing also has a lot of great cafe culture where you can enjoy homebrew beer, cakes, and sweets. In this blog post, I am sharing three great places to eat in Beijing.
Read next: What to do in Shanghai: three places you don’t want to miss.
Wangfujing snack market
The number one place I was looking forward to trying was the Wangfujing Snack Market, the most well-known food market in Beijing. It takes place every day and it is part of the Donghuamen Night Market. The stalls are located at the corner of a long shopping street (the Wangfujing street) and at first sight, it’s kind of strange to see this food market next to the luxurious brands. But if you look a bit closer, the street food offered here isn’t that cheap as you might think. For example, I paid 25 Yuan for five Baozi (€3,50 / 3,80 US dollars). Pretty expensive for street food. But it’s still a fun experience to see this spectacle of colors and smells. This vivid market offers you an insight into snacks from various parts of China.
How to get here: Wangfujing Street, Dongcheng. Get out at the metro station Wangfujing.
Grilling at White Tiger Village
A great place to sitting down is White Tiger Village. A cafe we randomly found during our wandering adventures through Beijing. Navigating the Chinese capital was a nightmare. Usually, we left our hostel with a plan to find that one cafe but we ended up in a totally different cafe because we couldn’t find it. That same thing happened on the evening we ended up at White Tiger Village in the Xiang’er Hutong. We didn’t mind, because it gave my boyfriend the opportunity to try Chuanr. These are traditional meat skewers with cumin seed, salt, pepper, and sesame oil. Originally this snack comes from Xinjiang, western China. For vegetarians, they also had grilled veggies on a stick and spicy soups. They also sold delicious locally brewed beer (A Brewing Co.). Worth checking out!
How to get here: 84 Xiang’er Hutong, Dongcheng. Get out at the metro station Beixinqiao.
Sweet treats at Cheese Home
No dinner is complete without dessert. Luckily Beijing has some nice dessert cafes. One of them is Cheese Home, a cheese-colored café where you can eat delicious homemade cheesecakes. And as I’m a big fan of dessert I just had to try this. So after we filled up at White Tiger Village we headed down to Cheese Home for something sweet. For a dessert cafe, Cheese Home is pretty big. You can take a seat on the long benches at ground level or you could go upstairs for more seating areas. Apparently, this place is prepared for dozens of cake-eating sugar rush crazy people like me.
How to get here: 257 Dongsi Bei Dajie. Get out at metro station Zhangzizhonglu.
Have you visited the Wangfujing Snack Market? What are your favorite places to eat in Beijing?
