The case for eating small
Chengdu's reputation rests on hotpot and on banquet cooking, and both are excellent. But the city's own everyday food, the food people eat standing up on the way somewhere, is a repertoire of small dishes that grew up around street vendors and are named after the vendor or the lane - the dumplings of a man named Zhong, the wontons that borrowed a syllable from a teahouse, the noodles sold off a wooden pole carried across the shoulders. A single restaurant cannot serve this repertoire properly, because each dish belongs to a different counter. So the day is a trail, not a meal.
Number one - the dumplings
Zhong dumplings are the cleanest introduction to Chengdu's idea of seasoning. They are small - a bowl holds ten, about fifty grams - filled with pork and nothing else, no vegetable, no second meat, and served swimming in red oil built from chili ground and cooked with rapeseed oil, mixed with a special dark soy, sesame oil and garlic. The taste is hot without being harsh, and then sweet at the back, which is the signature. The first shop was opened in 1893 by a man from the Zhong family; the signboard naming the lane went up in the 1930s. The dish is now a provincial-level item of intangible cultural heritage, and if you want it without chili, a clear-broth version exists and your guide will order it.
Number two - the wontons
Sichuan calls a wonton a chaoshou. This is not a local invention - wontons go back to the Han - but the Chengdu version is defined by its stock: chicken, duck and pork simmered hard and then long until the broth goes white. Order the plain version first, so that you taste the soup before the chili arrives, then try the hot-and-sour and the red-oil versions alongside it. The shop that made the dish famous opened in 1941 and borrowed its name from the teahouse where the founders hatched the plan, substituting one character for another to make it sound auspicious. It is now on the list of China's time-honoured brands.
Number three - the noodles off a pole
Dan dan noodles were not a restaurant dish at all. They were sold by a vendor who carried everything he needed on a bamboo shoulder pole - stove at one end, bowl, noodles and seasonings at the other - and set up wherever he found customers. What made them work is the topping: minced pork fried until dry and crumbly, with preserved vegetable, chili oil and Sichuan pepper, tossed through thin, chewy noodles. In 2013 the dish was named one of China's ten great noodles. We eat ours the way the vendor intended, at a counter, in a small bowl.
Number four - the one that makes a noise
Sandapao is a rice-cake dish with a piece of theatre attached. Balls of glutinous rice are thrown hard against a wooden board, and the impact makes three heavy beats on a metal plate behind it; the balls then fall into a tray of toasted soybean flour and come out coated. They are served with a dark brown sugar syrup. It is sweet, chewy and fun, and it is the one dish on this trail that children never forget.
Number five - the egg cake
Dan hong gao began beside a Confucian academy in the Qing dynasty and has been sold off a small copper pan ever since: a batter of egg, fermented flour and brown sugar, poured into the pan and cooked to order in about a minute, crisp at the edge and soft inside. You choose the filling. Classic savoury is minced pork with preserved vegetable; classic sweet is cream and pork floss, or simply brown sugar.
And to finish
Depending on appetite we close with tang you guo zi - glutinous rice balls fried and rolled in sesame, sometimes called swan eggs - or with a bowl of ice jelly, the cold dessert that exists in this city specifically to be eaten after chilies. Between the stops your guide does what guides here should do: orders, translates, explains what is in front of you, and tells you honestly which dishes are an acquired taste.
Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
