Eating vegan in China: restaurants, dine-in

Eating vegan in China may not be the easiest thing, but with the right tools you can totally do it.

What makes it difficult to be a vegan in China is not only the language barrier (very few people have the ability or the will to speak English), but the scarcity of reliable vegan options: it’s NOT like traveling in Vietnam (where you can easily find vegan places on the street), Europe (where you can find vegan options or accidentally vegan traditional dishes in most places), Sri Lanka (where vegan food is widely available) etc ….

If you are a vegan and are planning a trip to China you need to be prepared and master a couple of APPs.

If you are a vegan in China, especially as a tourist, you will need to find vegan restaurants where you can feel safe about the food you are going to eat. I have lived more than 2 years in China and I have always avoided omnivore restaurants as I really don't feel safe about them. Most of the times even veggies or tofu may be cooked "with just a little meat" to improve the flavour, so... no thanks.

Your best option to find a vegan restaurant is an app called DIANPING (大众点评) (good luck with verification system 🙂 )

Dianping is an app that you can use both for finding attractions, restaurants, events, but also to buy tickets and meals.

If you have an android phone you can search for it on your play store, download the app with an APK or check their webpage.

If you have an Iphone things can be more complicated as you will need to change the settings on your app shop: Dianping is only available if you set it to China. I don't know how but I was able to do that without using and confirming my Chinese number as I want my Iphone to work with my western settings.

After getting the app you can use it to find restaurants and buy meals

Being a vegan in China requires some skills, but they can be mastered quickly 🙂

The first issue with Dianping is that it's in Chinese, so you will need to navigate through it with some intuition and the help of a couple of tricks that I am going to show you. I speak ZERO Chinese but I have learned to use the app just with the icons.

The first thing you need to know is how to say VEGAN in Chinese: the word is SU, the character is 素.

So you can just start writing SU or copy and paste the character.

The app will show you some suggestions, just click on the one that means vegan restaurant as underlined (sometimes they are translated as "vegetarian", but the are basically vegan).

You will then see a list of places that won't mean anything to you, so open the map as shown by the pink arrow (the app will find your location).

Once you have opened the map click on the place that's best for you, you will see a small preview. Click again and the app will open the page of the restaurant: here you will see reviews, prices, and the meals that you can buy (I often choose this option as most of the times I don't know what to order, so a fixed menu will be just fine. It will also probably be cheaper that ordering a la carte).

You will also see the address of the place, right next to the icon of a car, just click on it to open the map with the directions (you will also have the possibility to order a cab).

If you, like me, don't speak Chinese, you will need some tools to translate the Dianping app.

Some of the methods are using another phone to scan the information and translate with any app (google lens, Iphone translation app...), or you can download a floating on-screen app that allows to translate whatever you need (but they usually run on google, so you will need your VPN on, and Dianping doesn't work when the VPN is on.... I'd avoid this option), or, if you are lucky, your telephone may have a translation tool which is not an app: if you have it you can find it next to the flashlight/wifi/airplane mode area.

You can also take a screenshot and translate it with Alipay, WeChat, Lens etc... This may be a bit time consuming but it's not bad.

MY METHOD:

After years of living in China without speaking the language I have discovered that the best way to translate the Dianping app is to send the link of the place that I want to visit on my WeChat (there is a personal chat called File Transfer, if you don't find it just send a message to a friend :-)), open it and translate the whole thing!

If this method looks too complicated you can also use the Dianping miniprogram inside WeChat instead of the app, but it will have less functionalities (to find it just write Dianping on the WeChat search bar).