Just off the main shopping street of Wangfujing is Donghuamen Night Market, a popular destination for locals and tourists alike. It showcases an array of Chinese street food from all over the country, from marinated chicken skewers, to stir fries and grilled silk worms. Most tourists come here to see the more exotic food like scorpions, snakes and seahorses, but the reality is that these were only available on one stall and none of the Chinese were eating them, just a few young Westerners egged on by their camera toting friends, before returning to their banana pancakes.
The majority of Chinese people are here just to get a simple dinner – often a taste of their home province. In keeping with this we started on the high turnover, fresh Beijing specialities such as garlic fried slivers of sticky rice and grilled squid. A stuffed pancake was pretty decent, and a selection of the steamed buns was tasty if a bit too chewy. There’s also nothing attractive about a group of people chowing down on entire lamb’s legs.
Drawn to one stall by a selection of photogenic starfish I avoided trying it by getting a sea urchin sashimi which is probably what made me ill for the remainder of the evening, but overall the market is definitely an experience worth trying for a cheap dinner as nothing cost over ¥12.
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