What most Chinese people eat for lunch? Top-10 bestselling most popular fast foods in China!
Updated: Sep 20, 2020
In our survey of Hangzhou's restaurants we found that the top 10 dishes ordered for lunch in the were: #10 green bean eggplant stir fry; #9 sweet and sour pork tenderloin; #7 country style pork green chili stir fry; #6 chili pepper paper-thin tofu strips; #5 fried fresh chili chicken; #4 preserved egg lean pork congee; #3 original recipe river snail rice noodles; #2 tomato scrambled egg; #1 dry wok cauliflower - all home-style dishes.
Out of the top 40 top-selling lunch time restaurants we checked we found that 25 sell home-style cooking – 9 restaurants specialized in congee; 3 restaurants specialized in the dish called “covered rice”; 1 specialized in dumplings. It looks like “country”, “home-style” or “taste of home” cooking is the most popular choice for takeaway lunches in China.
“What do Chinese people eat.” Search in Google or any search engine and you get a million opinions... and no evidence.
Hangzhou is the Chinese city Trendy Adventurer calls home, and although we’re locally born and bred, Hangzhou’s population is one of the most diverse in China. More than a quarter of the city call another place home - but they live and work in Hangzhou. They open businesses here, some open restaurants; others work on construction sites, deliver take away; some are students at university; others workers in office buildings.
What does this mean? It means Hangzhou is the perfect place to investigate what fast food Chinese people eat!
We used the international version of Chinese mobile app Alipay’s in-app takeaway service “Hungry yet?” to find answers to the question “what is the most popular fast food in China” and find out what do Chinese people really eat.
Here’s what Chinese people eat for lunch – the most popular Chinese food dishes, what’s in them, and the places that sell them.
[the top 10 best-selling fast food restaurants in Hangzhou]
Here are the top 10 best-selling Chinese fast food lunch restaurants – aka, the most popular take away food in this Chinese city.
What type of food do Chinese Hangzhou’ers eat for lunch? Out of the top 40 top-selling lunch time restaurants we checked we found that 25 sell home-style cooking – 9 restaurants specialized in congee; 3 restaurants specialized in the dish called “covered rice”; 1 specialized in dumplings. We can conclude that “country”, “home-style” or “taste of home” cooking is the most popular choice for takeaway lunches in China.
Here’s data for the top ten, including how many dishes each restaurant sold for the month (August-September 2020):
[the top selling dishes in Hangzhou’s top selling Chinese fast food restaurants’]
So what foods and dishes are China’s Chinese restaurants actually selling? What foods and dishes do Chinese people order for lunch? Let’s look at the top 10 bestselling dishes from each of these bestselling restaurants.
The top 10 dishes ordered for lunch in the were: #10 green bean eggplant stir fry; #9 sweet and sour pork tenderloin; #7 country style pork green chili stir fry; #6 chili pepper paper-thin tofu strips; #5 fried fresh chili chicken; #4 preserved egg lean pork congee; #3 original recipe river snail rice noodles; #2 tomato scrambled egg; #1 dry wok cauliflower.
#10 green bean eggplant stir fry
Amount sold this month Price (Chinese RMB)
1085 ¥9.9
A vegetarian stir-fry option is a popular standard option on any lunch menu. This dish commonly adds potato to become the “Three-vegetable stir-fry”.
#9 sweet and sour pork tenderloin
Amount sold this month Price (Chinese RMB)
1243 ¥21.8
Sweet and sour pork – loved by foreigners and Chinese alike. If you’re in China and not sure what to order, order this with #5 and a bowl of white rice. You won’t be disappointed. (I have actually just decided to eat this tonight 😉) . Note that this price point is also great – it’s standard to pay more than 30RMB per serve for this dish.
#8 cold mung bean soup
Amount sold this month Price (Chinese RMB)
1396 5
An unexpected sight. You may have thought that only Russians “make a thing” out of cold soup, but in Summer, Chinese restaurants sometimes offer this as a sweet, after-meal palette cleanser. This dish is popular with a popular Chinese restaurant not in the top 10 of this list, but in the top 40 – namely Stewed Pork Rice. I get this whenever I order that for lunch.
#7 country style pork green chili stir fry
Amount sold this month Price (Chinese RMB)
1659 ¥16
Number 7 on the Chinese take away popularity list is stir-fried pork and green chili (sometimes capsicum). This dish is another simple, common dish often prepared in the Chinese household.
#6 chili pepper paper-thin tofu strips
Amount sold this month Price (Chinese RMB)
2304 ¥12.5
Not only vegetarian, but cheap and tasty. Some of the other dishes on this list appeared in the top 3 bestselling dishes of 3 or 4 top 10 lunch takeaway restaurants (so the sales were added together), but the sales on this dish are all from just one restaurant. I don’t know if I tried this in the 3 years I’ve been here, but next time I try it I’ll be getting it from the ‘Yao Family Neighborhood Home Kitchen’. The number speak from themselves – this is what Chinese people are ordering.
#5 fried fresh chili chicken
Amount sold this month Price (Chinese RMB)
2,307 ¥22.8
Also known as “Kung Pao Chicken”. It seems like the dish at foreign Chinese restaurants in also popular back at home in China. The dish also has its origins in Chinese home cooking.
#4 preserved egg lean pork congee
Amount sold this month Price (Chinese RMB)
3,075 ¥18
The super popular breakfast dish – so popular that its popularity is spilling over into the lunch time take-away time slot. (actually, Chinese companies tend to start the day a little late. I’m guessing people just didn’t get to enjoy their congee at breakfast)
The black-green colored preserved egg deserves special mention here – I know I didn’t expect seeing anything like this on a breakfast menu before encountering it here in China.
#3 original recipe river snail rice noodles
Amount sold this month Price (Chinese RMB)
3080 ¥32.9
Some of you may be thinking that “River Snail Rice Noodles” might just be a brand name – but NO. These noodles are made by powdering river snails and adding them into the rice flour mix used to make the noodles. The snails add nutrition, and a special, characteristic flavour which Chinese customers evidently love. I’ve never tried it.. but they look alright.
#2 tomato scrambled egg
Amount sold this month Price (Chinese RMB)
5,456 ¥9.9
#1 dry wok cauliflower
Amount sold this month Price (Chinese RMB)
6,037 ¥14
Top dish #1 and #2 are the epitome of simple home cooking, and they prove a simple and undeniable point:
THE MOST POPULAR CHINESE FAST FOOD IN CHINA IS HOME COOKING; THE MOST FAMOUS CHINESE FOOD IS HOMESTYLE CHINESE; THE BEST CHINESE FOOD IS COUNTRY, TASTE OF HOME COOKING.
But this raises the question: what exactly does “country lunch" mean?
What exactly is “home-style”/"country" Chinese food?
If you your life up to this point hasn’t been very Chinese, then there’s going to be a gap between your idea of “home cooking” and what your likely to be served on when you sit down at that Chinese tea farmer or flute craftsman’s table.
Shout out to Master Ding and his family, master flute craftsman and great cooks.
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“Home-style” = “like you would eat at home”. “Country” = “what you would eat in a country home”.
A Chinese home-style meal is the type of meal you would expect to receive if you sat in on a family dinner or lunch in a big Chinese household. Thus breakfast, lunch and dinner can all be “home-style meals” – they just need to be typical Chinese home dishes.
So what exactly does a mealtime in a Chinese household look like? What’s different to how we eat?
1. The table setup.
First, the table setup. In China, your plate is tiny and starts out empty.
At the Chinese dinner table each person’s place is typically set with a small plate (not much bigger than a saucer), a small rice bowl, a ceramic soup spoon and of course, chopsticks. Tables are typically round.
2. Where the food sits before it goes to your mouth.
The number and variety of dishes at every meal.
When each dish arrives from the kitchen it is placed in middle of the table with the others, within reach of everyone’s chopsticks. Dishes stay there as they are eaten away, pinch-by-pinch, by everyone around the table.
Rather than preparing a single main dish with one or two sides (e.g. spaghetti Bolognese with garlic bread), it’s standard practice for Chinese homes tend to prepare a variety of simple dishes.
We do a version of this in the West too, actually: In some ways this meal layout is similar to Christmas feasts and family gatherings back in Australia, but whereas Australians sitting around such a feast will plate up their own personal pile of food and focus on that, the Chinese way is to leave it it the center of the table, taking only small amounts at a time.
Country/home-style breakfast, lunch and dinner? What are some typical “homestyle dishes” I could make?
Above we gave the top 10 homestyle take away dishes, all of which can be considered examples of home style cooking. So how to make these? Some are simple, so let's start there. Let me introduce to you the simple dishes I learnt at the university dorms when i shared a kitchen and table with Chinese friends.
Australian and Chinese alike, university kids generally don’t know much about cooking. Making Chinese uni friends is the best way to get a first-hand experience of the home cooking at its easiest. Here’s what I learnt to cook with them:
Seasoned potato string
Super common. Super simple. Here are some recipes:
Tomato fried eggs
Also very common. Note that some of these recipes get kind of fancy – all you really need is oil, shallots, tomato, eggs, salt and maybe a little chicken stock for flavoring.
Red-braised ribs
Super easy, super tasty. Recipes here:
