Beijing Food Stands Serve Up Tasty Morsels
Wangfujing Night Market Dishes Up Everything from Beetles to Beef
Mar 25, 2009
Nestled among the traditional chicken, pork and lamb kebobs, hungry diners will find trays of more unusual kebobs. Items like deep-fried grasshoppers, seahorses, beetles and silk worms. And don’t forget the deep-fried scorpions, which taste like popcorn, according to those who’ve tried them.
There are also trays of skinned snakes, crayfish and tiny birds as well as an assortment of different bird eggs.
Want fish sticks? Got ’em, complete with a stick rammed up the middle of a small, whole fish, which presumably has been cleaned out. There’s also small bird hearts, poultry gizzards and things most Westerners couldn’t identify, and probably wouldn’t eat if they could.
Wangfujing Night Food Market Serves Usual Snacks, Too
There’s also plenty to eat for those who have less adventuresome palates. The above-mentioned chicken, pork and lamb kebobs which are deep-fried, and then sprinkled with ground cumin and chili peppers.
There’s also chao mian, known in the United States as chow mein, but that’s about where the resemblance ends. On snack street, the chao mian is made of sti-fried thin noodles and shredded cabbage with maybe small bits of other veggies added.
Noodle Dishes Represent Regional Specialties
There are noodle dishes, each special to a different region of China. There are bowls of bean congee which resembles chocolate pudding. There are fried ground lamb and pork patties. There is a concoction made of spinach that is put in a sieve-like holder, then deep-fried with an egg on top, and comes out looking like a bird’s nest. There’s corn-on-the-cob in season. And there are dumplings, lots of dumplings, for the hungry to eat.
Chunks of colorful fruit are threaded on kebabs. Sliced pineapple is available in season. Glasses of juice are available, too. Cautious travelers may want to pass on the fruit items, however, as they may have been washed in tap water, which is generally considered not safe to drink in China.
Buy Enough Snacks, Make a Meal
The night food market has dozens of stands serving various dishes. It’s best for visitors to walk the length of the stands once just to see what’s available, then order what appeals to them on the way back. Traditional meat kebobs start at 3 yuan each (about US$.45). Most dishes will cost between 3 and 8 yuan, though the more exotic items, such as scorpions, can cost more. It’s possible for people to make a complete meal for under $2 per person by buying several snacks.
Wangfujing Night Food Market is open from late afternoon to about 8 p.m. daily. It’s located at the north end of the Wangfujing pedestrian mall in central Beijing. There are smaller snack streets in local neighborhoods, including Wangfujing Snack Street at the southern end of the street. But Wangfujing night food market is the one most tourists will go to. Even tourists who don’t eat there will enjoy looking at the variety of snacks available.
The stands are permanent now, with staff wearing uniforms, and disposable dishes being used. This is a far cry from 10-15 years ago when cooks set up shop every day and washed dirty dishes between lulls in business.
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