The season for Chinese Toon (or Xiangchun as it’s known in China) is short. The first shoots arrive in early April, and by May, they’re too big and no longer tender. Xiangchun is the only tree in Northern Asian with edible leaves, and thus, the arrival of the shoots in Beijing is one to be celebrated, marking the end of cold weather, as the city bursts into life.

More often than not we tend to discuss ‘Chinese food’ as one cuisine. But with a country the size of Europe, it seems obvious that Chinese food is varied and diverse. Indeed, depending on who you ask, there are three, five, seven or eight cuisines of China (and many more if you ask me).

Why does China use chopsticks and other utensils completely different from the West? It all comes down to fire. Fire is fundamental to cooking, but creating that fire was not always as easy for China as it was for other countries.

Chinese alcohol is largely unknown in the West, and it’s almost impossible to know where to start. In this guide, we unpack the world of baijiu and the importance of Moutai in China.

Da Zhong Dian Ping is one of most useful food apps in the world. A way to discover new restaurants all over China, but like many social media apps, there is a darker side that affects restaurant owners.

Towards the end of Van Tulleken’s book, Ultra Processed Food, a statistic jumped out at me: obesity rates in China between 1980 and 2015 went up by 800%. I explore how China’s diet has moved , like many other cultures, from a traditional diet of simple food to a diet largely reliant on fast food and UPF.

Chinese food had a reputation for being strange. But strangeness in food is often just unfamiliarity. Many textures are celebrated in Chinese cuisine where in others we’d try to eliminate them.

In 2016 I wrote an article on best coffee shops in Beijing. A lot has change since then. Here’s my updated list.

A fermented rice soup is not the most common of ingredients in the west, and even younger generations of Chinese might not know exactly what it can be used for, but all across China, different cuisines use it in different way.

In French cooking, we often talk of the ‘holy trinity’ of ingredients - onion, garlic and celery, but what are the equivalent in Chinese cooking?

There’s a strange phenomenon to do with food that happens the second you cross the border from your own country into another. Somehow your native food immediately descends into something hellish.

The recipe is simple. A self-described ‘killer dhal’ from Anna Jones. The ingredients list is fairly long, but nothing unusual or complicated to the process. And yet something was wrong with the onions.

I used to love chocolate, cakes and cookies, until I moved to China. It didn’t take long for my palate to adapt and now I find sugar far too sweet. It’s interesting to ask why?

Without the street food of Beijing, I wonder if I ever would have fallen for the city. I share some of my favourite snacks, many of which have faded from roadsides.

November 11th, 2015 I arrived in Beijing. It’s not an easy city to live in, but even on day one, there were glimpses of things I would grow to love.