Best resources for researching China eateries

Regional Dining Discussions Asia Pacific
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I may go to China, specifically Shanghai, Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Huangshan next month. Haven’t decided whether I will go for sure. But if I go, the intention is to eat very well, everything Shanghai and Jiangzhe, from low end, mid range, high end. What are some of the better resources to research eateries in China?

I know Little Red Book. Trying to focus on quality rather than restaurants with Instagram-like fame with good looking dishes/ interior than actual flavors. I also read already @Google_Gourmet 's trip reports from last year. Any magazines, blogs, Yelp like service?

What are some of the seasonal dishes for June? Yangmei, I think. Probably too early for hairy crabs. What else?

Also, I may get some good huadiao. Where can I find the absolute best that I can get my hands on?

Thanks in advance!

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The Michelin Guide to Hangzhou has a good mix of well-established places (e.g. Lou Wai Lou) and the latest favorites (think, Ru Yuan, Jie Xiang Lou):

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Back in the day I used to use dianping.com for research. Now it looks like you have to sign up? I am not sure…

I enjoy looking for specific dishes, and you can kind of do that on baidu

You might try searching for Suzhou restaurants (as an example), and see what comes up. I spotted this video from DavidsBeenHere. He often does a lot of research before going some place. I can’t vouch for this video as I haven’t seen it.

In this day and age, there is no longer one source to go to it seems and some of them have gone away.

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WeChat and QQ

But those groups are invite only, unfortunately.

They’re very much like HO, but, less chatty.

Publicized guides are very superficial and generally not helpful.

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You have groups that you can invite me to?

For Wechat, I never really understand artificially dividing a group of people interested in talking about a certain topic into groups of 500 seems like quite inefficient.

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I would except I’m not a member myself.

My mother is.

I can ask her.

What is your WeChat ID or barcode? You can PM me, Sam.

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so the previous question is for detailed research in advance. Now if let’s say if I am on a particular street full of eateries, and wants to pick the best/ most reliable out of them, or weed out the duds, quickly, any website / app that people use?

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I haven’t found any. Most people are not HO-type. Usually you’ll end up at a fancy place if you look like a foreigner, or people will find whatever is trending on social media. (And I feel it’s gotten worse with Deepseek.) The private WeChat groups dont have much activity from my experience. I dont even seek those groups out anymore. You have to trust your onion-ness and use trial and error, you can easily get a 50% success rate. (But every now and then, you end up with the perfect companions and it’s easy. I should post my most recent experience.)

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I like Amap. Their restaurant rating may not be super reliable, but will do when i need something quickly in the neighborhood.

I dont like Redbook, too much fluff and girl influencer videos to sort through before finding the good info.

Deepseek is just trained on the same website/ apps. I found it not super useful for onion like recs, but it will answer basic questions quickly if i have no idea about a topic. Certainly much better than Chatgpt, Claude, Gemini etc.

In particular, Deepseek answers one question quite decently if i am at a place for only a day or two and have no other good resources at hand and havent done any other research- what are the specialty dishes for a particular city that i must try?

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