How to Order Food in China When You Don't Speak a Word of Chinese

Published 2026-10-30 · 71Asia Tours

Every traveler I've met shares the same private fear before their first meal in China: you sit down, the waiter drops a menu with sixty dishes and no pictures, and you have no idea what happens next. It never goes as badly as you imagine. The system is friendlier than it looks; you just need to know how it works.

Pick the right kind of restaurant for day one

If the idea of a full sit-down meal stresses you, start smaller. Mall food courts are the gentlest entry point in every big city: each stall shows plastic food models or photos, you point, they punch a number, you pay and collect your tray. Noodle shops are nearly as easy, because the menu often has fewer than ten items and the ingredients sit in a glass fridge you can point at.

Save the banquet-style places for day three, when you've warmed up.

The three menus you will actually meet

Picture menus

Plenty of restaurants, especially in cities used to tourists, still hand you a laminated menu with a photo for every dish. This is the ideal case. Point, hold up fingers for how many, done. Prices are printed under the photo.

QR code ordering

The most common setup now: a QR code on the table, you scan it with Alipay or WeChat, and the menu opens on your phone. You order and pay in one flow, and dishes arrive without you talking to anyone. The catch is that the page is usually in Chinese only. The fix: screenshot the menu, run it through a translation app that handles images, and read what each dish is. In tourist cities, many of these pages have an English toggle at the top right.

Text-only menus

The old-school places, often the best ones, hand you a booklet of characters and nothing else. This is where a translation app earns its keep. Camera-translate the page and you'll get a rough but usable idea. Machine translations of dish names are often funny; "ants climbing a tree" is a real Sichuan noodle dish with neither ants nor trees in it. Translate for ingredients, not poetry.

Pointing is a complete strategy

Do not underestimate how far this gets you. If a dish at the next table looks good, catch the waiter's eye, point at it and say "zhege" (这个), which means "this one." In noodle shops and dumpling places, walk up to the glass case and point at what you want. Fingers work for quantities up to ten. Nobody minds. I have ordered entire dinners this way, and the one time it went sideways I ended up with cold pig ears, which is a story, not a disaster.

Ordering for a Chinese table

Here's the mental switch: restaurants are not about individual plates. Dishes arrive when they're ready, land in the middle, and everyone reaches. Rice comes in individual bowls, but everything else is shared. The rough rule is one dish per person, plus one: two people order three dishes, four order five. Aim for balance, one meat, one vegetable, something with tofu or egg, plus rice or noodles.

Solo? Order one dish plus rice. Noodle shops and rice-with-toppings places assume one person, one bowl.
Rice may not arrive automatically. Say "mifan" (米饭) or point at the rice column on the menu.
Soup is a dish, not a drink. If you want something to sip, that's the free tea on the table.

Spice, and the famous "a little spicy"

Chilies are optional in most kitchens, but you have to say so. The three phrases that matter: "wei la" (微辣) for mild, "zhong la" (中辣) for medium, "bu yao la" (不要辣) for none. Now the warning: in Sichuan and Chongqing, "mild" is what most of the world calls hot. If you're slightly unsure, order "bu yao la" there, then add chili oil from the jar on the table until you hit your limit. Locals in those cities eat heat levels most foreigners simply cannot.

Getting attention and paying

There is no tipping anywhere in mainland China. To call a waiter, a short "fuyuan!" (服务员) across the room is completely normal, or press the table bell if there is one. If you ordered by QR code, payment already happened and you just leave when finished. Otherwise the waiter brings a paper slip, or you take it to the register. Cash still works but is increasingly rare; Alipay or WeChat Pay is the default.

Small things that trip people up

Water is served hot or warm by default, never iced. For cold, ask for "bing de" (冰的).
Tea is free and refilled without asking. Tap water is not drinkable anywhere.
Portions are bigger than they look. One dish per person is genuinely enough.
To take leftovers away, say "dabao" (打包) and they box it up.
In hotpot places you fill out an order sheet with checkboxes, usually with no English. Staff are used to confused foreigners and will help.

How this plays out city by city

Beijing: duck restaurants walk you through the ritual, and cheap zhajiang noodle shops have short menus. Xi'an: in the Muslim Quarter you point at skewers and flatbread directly. Chengdu: at chuan chuan stalls you grab skewers from the pot and pay by counting sticks. Chongqing: xiaomian shops use paper order slips; check the spice box on the slip. Shanghai: food runs sweeter, and local benbang places usually have picture menus. Tibet: menus are short, noodle soups and momos are safe bets. Zhangjiajie: restaurants near the park keep bilingual menus; smoked pork and he ye ba (leaf-wrapped sticky rice) are the local things to point at.

Hong Kong, Macao and Taipei are easier: English or Portuguese on menus in the first two, and Taipei's night markets use order slips where pointing works just as well.

None of this requires talent. It requires walking in hungry, pointing with confidence, and being willing to eat something you didn't expect. That last part is where the best meals come from.

Written by the team at 71Asia Tours, a China-based tour operator with licensed Spanish- and English-speaking guides. Browse all tours · About us · Our guides · Reviews · FAQ