Nanjing Feature Food

Traditional Nanjing cuisine is known as Jin Su cuisine and is notable for the emphasis placed on original flavor and carefully selected raw ingredients. Nanjing dishes are traditionally bright in color and use only a moderate amount of seasoning but a significant amount of oil.

Jin Su specialties that should be sampled include: Jinling roast duck, steamed duck cutlets, salted duck, Longchi carp and "Eight delicacies soup". The "Eight delicacies" are: fish, water chestnut, lotus root, vine, parsley, arrowroot and lotus seeds.This is a popular dish especially around "Moon Festival" time (roughly around the middle of August). There are numerous classical restaurants serving up these delicacies and the area around the Confucius Temple has some great places to taste good Nanjing food.

Western and Japanese food is also becoming increasingly popular and there is a good selection of Western and Chinese food available around the universities off Shanghai Lu. Browse our Restaurant Index for more detailed information. Of course, the big hotels such as The Hilton and The Jinling also have good restaurants. McDonalds and KFC are hugely popular here.

Nanjing Boiled Salted Duck
Nanjing is also called “the city of duck”, Nanjing people love to eat duck. Boiled salted duck has more than 1000 years of history. It’s features are that the meat is very tender, crispy and fragrant. The best boiled salted duck is made around the Mid-Autumn Festival, because that’s the time when osmanthus flowers bloom, and cooks put it in the duck. You can find this dish in almost every restaurants in Ninjing.

Silk noodle soup with duck blood
In the green-colored soup, duck blood is half floating around, it’s like translucent blocks of jades, and ivory intestine of duck, red duck's gizzard, they are crunchy chewy. Pick up a taste while it is hot, you can feel its lightly scented.

Qinhuai Eight Dishes
Qinhuai Eight Dishes refers to 16 kinds of deserts. They are: light Tea Flavored Boiled Eggs, spiced beans in Kuiguang Cabinet; yellow crab Clay oven rolls, Kaiyang Gansi in Yonghe Garden; duck pastry Clay oven rolls, sesame oil dry silk in Qifang Cabinet; Baked Scallion Pancake, Tofu Pudding in Liufeng Home; mixed lettuce, chicken noodles in Qi Fang Cabinet; Fried Beef Dumpling and beef broth in Jiangji Restaurant; thin sunflower noodle dumpling, red soup noodles with fish in Zhanyuan Noodle House; colored small cake, sweet-scented osmanthus small sandwich in Lianhu Pastry Restaurant.

Belly Noodle
Belly Noodle is the characteristic Nanjing flavor snack, originated in 1952. Belly noodle’s soup is filling with different materials and ingredients, it’s like a hodgepodge with belly skin, liver of pig, sausage, tomatoes, shredded meat, egg, vegetables, edible fungus and other ingredients in a pot of stew. Nanjing famous belly noodle are in Yiji Restaurant and Xuji Restaurant.