The best meal I've had this month wasn't in a restaurant. It was a ¥12 bowl of noodles from a lady who sets up her cart at the same street corner in Chongqing every evening at 6pm. She's been doing this for 18 years. Her broth simmers for five hours before she leaves home. The noodles come from a specific shop three streets over. She knows exactly when to scoop them for that perfect chewy texture. I brought an American client there once. He was nervous about street food. One bite later: "This is better than the ¥400 dinner we had last night." Here's what I've learned from 15 years of eating on Chinese streets: the best food is rarely in a guidebook. It's at the cart with the longest queue of locals. It's the lady who's been at the same spot for a decade. It's the place with one item on the menu because that's all they need to make. My advice: skip one fancy restaurant meal on your trip. Find a street cart. Point at what the person ahead of you ordered. Sit on a tiny plastic stool. It'll be the meal you remember.

My son asked me last week: "Mama, why do Chinese people eat with chopsticks?" I didn't have a good answer. So I asked my uncle, who's been a chef for 40 years. He said: "Because we cut everything in the kitchen. No knives on the table. The chopsticks are for picking up what's already ready." And that's actually a great way to understand Chinese food culture. Western cooking leaves the knife to the diner. Chinese cooking does all the work for you — meat sliced thin, vegetables bite-sized, everything ready to pick up and eat. The chopstick is just the tool that delivers it. The real skill isn't chopsticks — it's the rice bowl. Hold it close to your mouth and push food in. That's how locals eat. Keeping the bowl on the table and leaning down? That's what kids do (and my four-year-old still does it, sauce on his chin, every single meal). If you can handle chopsticks well enough to pick up a single peanut, you're better than most tourists. If you can pick up a slippery mushroom? You've graduated.

A German client asked me worriedly last week: "Will I survive China without speaking Chinese?" I told him about the time I watched a Swedish tourist order dinner at a busy Chengdu restaurant entirely through charades. He pointed at a neighbour's bowl, held up two fingers, and gave a thumbs up. The waiter nodded, came back ten minutes with the exact same dish, and the guy ate it happily. You don't need Chinese to travel China. But you do need three things: 1. Google Translate with Chinese downloaded offline. Point camera at menu, get translation. Not perfect, but good enough. 2. Pleco dictionary for when Translate fails. The handwriting input is a lifesaver for single characters. 3. A willingness to be wrong. You'll point at the wrong menu item, order something unexpected, and discover your new memorable dish. That's not a mistake — that's the experience. The three phrases I make every client learn: 谢谢 (thank you), 多少钱 (how much), and 这个 (this one — accompanied by pointing). With those three, you can handle 90% of daily interactions. My client survived. Thrived, actually. Ate his way through three cities without a single English menu.

Xi'an's Muslim Quarter at sunset is one of those places I'd send every traveller even if they had only one day in China. The narrow alleys fill with smoke from a thousand grill carts. Lamb skewers sizzle. Biang biang noodles get stretched and slapped on counters. Persimmon cakes fry in giant woks. The Yangrou Paomo (bread crumbled into lamb soup) at Lao Sun Jia is the same recipe they used 50 years ago. I bring every client here. The ones who love food leave overwhelmed. The ones who don't care about food also leave overwhelmed — because this place has a way of making you care. Two tips: go hungry (obvious), and start from the Drum Tower end working inward instead of the main gate. The crowds thin out and the vendors get more interesting the deeper you go.