Eating: delivery, groceries, and food from home

Eating out is cheap enough that many people stop cooking entirely, and delivery is fast enough that the ones who do cook still order twice a week.

Delivery

• Meituan 美团 and Ele.me 饿了么 between them cover everything. Ele.me runs as a mini-program inside Alipay, which means no separate account.
• Set your address by dropping a pin on the map, not by typing it. Couriers navigate to the pin and phone you at the gate.
• Delivery is usually three to eight yuan and takes twenty to forty minutes. Rain doubles both.
• You will get a phone call from the courier. A missed call means the food waits at the compound gate — answer it, say nothing, and they will usually just leave it there.

Groceries with an imported shelf

Ordinary supermarkets carry ordinary Chinese food, which is excellent and about a third of the price. When you want cheese, rye bread, oats or a decent olive oil, these are the chains that stock them: Ole', City Super, Sam's Club, Metro, Aldi, Carrefour and Hema/Freshippo. The map below shows the branches we know about in each city.

Halal

Easier than most people expect. Lanzhou noodle shops 兰州拉面 and Xinjiang restaurants are on almost every other street and are halal by default; look for the green sign and the word 清真. The map layer below is what OpenStreetMap has tagged explicitly, which is a fraction of what exists.

Food from home

Three habits worth picking up

• Photograph the menu and run the camera translation over it. Every translation app does this and it works well on printed menus.
• Learn the four characters for what you cannot eat and keep them in a note. 不要辣 no chilli, 不要香菜 no coriander, and your own allergy written out by somebody who knows.
• Wet markets 菜市场 are cheaper, better and open early. Point at what you want; the number appears on a scale.