A Chongqing neighbourhood market opens before dawn and is a different institution from the city's famous food streets, which operate in the evening and are aimed at visitors. The market is where households buy vegetables, freshwater fish, pork, tofu, pickles, chillies and preserved goods, and the fringe of small kitchens around it is where many of them eat breakfast. Because Chongqing is on a river junction, the fish section is unusually good: carp, catfish, eel and river shrimp, mostly alive in tanks and basins until the moment of sale.
The breakfast
The city's morning dish is small noodles - a bowl of thin wheat noodles dressed with chilli oil, sesame paste, soy, pickled vegetables, minced pork and sometimes a spoonful of the local pea-and-pork sauce, eaten quickly and standing or on a low stool. It costs very little, and it is served from about six in the morning. Alongside it there are steamed buns, rice rolls, fried dough, congee, soy milk and the flatbreads that the region eats with everything. This is the cheapest and most direct way to eat in Chongqing, and the quality is usually better than in the restaurants that trade on reputation.
What else is worth buying
Chongqing cooking depends heavily on preserved and pickled ingredients, and the market is the place to understand it: jars of chilli bean paste from Pixian, pickled mustard tuber from Fuling, salted vegetables, fermented tofu, dried mushrooms, bamboo shoots, preserved pork and sausage, and an enormous range of fresh chillies and Sichuan pepper in autumn. The city is also a major producer of citrus from the surrounding hills, and oranges, pomelos and tangerines appear in quantity in winter, along with the winter vegetables that go into the hotpots.
Practical notes
Go early - the vegetables and the fish are best before eight in the morning, and the breakfast stalls close by ten. Payment is mostly by mobile, though most traders will take cash. Take your own bag and expect to point rather than explain. Chongqing is humid and hot for much of the year, so markets are liveliest from autumn through spring; in high summer they start and finish even earlier. Any neighbourhood will have a market within a few minutes' walk, and asking at your hotel is more reliable than travelling to a famous one.
