This neighbourhood market in Haidian is great for an inexpensive starter kitchen, stocking crockery, glassware, utensils and cookware. In the adjacent marketplace, you’ll find a food hall with butchers, fish and veg galore, as well as noodle makers and pickle sellers, plus a tofu maker with a comprehensive selection. Outside the food market are shops selling chopping blocks, traditional cast-iron woks and even ceramic crocks.
Known as the ‘Sell Everything Center’, this Guomao institution also has a tea market – useful if you can’t be bothered to go all the way to Maliandao. This massive market has a wide array of goods available, from restaurant equipment and hotel supplies to coffee paraphernalia and heavy appliances such as mixers and ovens. A large wet market features the standard butchers, fishmongers and plenty of produce. This huge area also has vendors selling cleaning supplies, booze, dishware and glassware – everything you need to open your own restaurant, if you dare.
This is the largest wholesale supply market that can be explored on foot (there is a larger one in Beijing, but that requires a car). Yuegezhuang is its own little village – a cluster of buildings, each offering meat, seafood, dried pantry goods, hotel and restaurant supplies, vegetables, fruit and more. While there, lunch at the newly renovated canteen (see Cheap Eats) to round off the day. Be warned: vendors open and close at different times, but unless wholesale buying is your trick, a pre-dawn visit shouldn’t be necessary.
Hardware & equipment
If you think you might open a hotel or restaurant or you just want some heavy-duty kitchenware, you’ve got options in the city, but this single-building supply centre narrows down the choices more easily. Its three floors display everything from stoves and cleavers to cleaning products, stemware, coffee paraphernalia and service kit for buffets. Heavy equipment such as refrigerators and ovens are available in both local and imported models. Bakeware and cookware are well represented here too, with pans and moulds for most of your baking needs and beyond.
This street shop stocks local inexpensive household necessities including simple kitchen utensils. There are plenty of peelers, ladles, bamboo scrubbers and spatulas to buy, plus traditional cast-iron woks and light – but useful – cast-iron frying pans. Stir-fry and sear your heart out. Other basics include a line of traditional enamelware, as well as manual meat grinders to let your inner sausage-maker loose. Well worth a visit if you’re near Guijie.
Produce markets
This morning market closes by late afternoon. Inside, you may be deafened by the cries of the hawkers loud-mouthing their wares. There is a choice of seasonal fruits and vegetables, while the outer stalls line the walls with everything else you may need. This market is small but concise, and it even has its own Shanxi noodle maker selling fresh and dried noodles made with different flours, including corn and oat. At one end is a grain seller whose variety includes over 20 types of rice, grains and a bevy of dried beans.
This is as close as you’ll find to an open-air farmers’ market deep in Beijing’s Koreatown. Umbrellas shade tables displaying a huge range of fruit and veg. In season, a single vendor offers a half-dozen green bean varieties, while another hawks baskets of eight types of local cherries. White, yellow and violet-tinged ears of corn come in sweet and sticky varieties. Vegetables strut their stuff with less common wild-foraged greens. A cluster of collard leaves speckled with tiny holes is evidence that bugs ate here and survived – a rare sign of pesticide-free vegetables – but meat and fish products are better sought elsewhere. Like
mantou? Look out for the queue of customers waiting for these light, fluffy, well-textured buns at one end of the market.
Also known as Rundeli Shichang (得立菜市场), this market’s local name is also its hutong location – the dual identity is because this location is actually state-run. The Deshengmen Street side lane is lined with stalls selling Shandong-style
jianbing, a papery and lighter version of the usual pancake treat. Head through the gate to discover a hangar that hums with calm fervour despite its largesse. The central marketplace is full of fruits and vegetables, while skirting the edge is everything from sesame and peanut pastes to fresh noodles, dried goods and spices.
Jing Shen Seafood Market (京深海鲜市场) This fresh fish market used to be situated beneath Hongqiao Pearl Market, but has since shifted its tanks over to this giant market in southwest Beijing. This is the spot to get wholesale fish and seafood – mostly live. Parrotfish, sturgeon and other exotic swimmers list for hundreds of RMB on restaurant menus. Instead, come here to DIY and save a bundle. You’ll find small skinned eels, live abalone, geoduck and marine life you’ve never seen before. This is the largest retail fish market open 24 hours a day, but it is busiest during early mornings. Buy in the market, then hoof it to the second-floor canteen, where folks cook your purchase for a minor fee. Just don’t wear flip-flops.
Not to be confused with Sanyuanli Market, this morning market is over by late afternoon (like most local markets). Set inside a small park, a steady roar can be heard from outside. From inside, you may be deafened by hawkers loud-mouthing their wares. Like most markets, seasonal fruit and vegetables are available while the outer stalls line the walls with everything else you may need. A Shanxi noodle maker sells fresh and dried noodles including “cat ears” (猫儿) made with different flours including corn and oat. At one end is a grain seller whose varieties include over 20 types of rice, every form of wheat from bran to berries as well as a bevy of dried beans. Flours go beyond your wildest imagination.
Sanyuanli Vegetable Market (三原里菜市场)
Sometimes known as Xingyuanli, this market is local living 101 for expats. Prices here are slightly higher but an overall better quality makes worthwhile one-stop shopping for frozen puff pastry, cheese, mushrooms and truffles, whole chickens, meyer lemons, numerous nuts and avocados. You can even pick up an electric hand mixer in a jam. Hard-to-find fresh herbs such as flat-leaf parsley and tarragon can be found. Tanks of live fish and seafood are clean and with good variety. Butchers hack up what you need and mince meat to order.
Nanhu Market (南湖市场)A covered hangar holds everything you can imagine deep in Beijing’s Korean-populated Wangjing north of Lido in Chaoyang district. A sea of fish and marine life are available here, swishing in tanks or glassy-eyed on ice. On some days you can find dog meat here if you look for the nervous man with a sparsely stocked table and tail hanging over its edge. Korean-style butchered meats predominate, including thinly sliced packets of marbled beef and pork in chillers, but most are meat-on-hook style. Produce here is often gorgeous and easy to choose from with one a household/clothing goods section on the side. If you want anything Korean from pickles and kimchi to seedless ground chili, you’re in the right place.
Speciality goodsLao Jiu Fang (老酒坊）
For customised hooch, this
baijiu spirits shop has different degrees of alcohol magnitude. Traditional wines and spirits in ceramic casks are sold by the measured ladle. Choose your poison in strengths as high as 70 per cent alcohol content for some strong medicine. Sorghum and other grains make up most of the swill here, often consumed as a daily tincture. A rack of Chinese herbs and animal parts also allows for medical remedies that can be steeped in a traditional jar for your own home brews.
Yipin Chuwei Hutong Cheese and Chocolate Shop (一品出味烘焙专营店) Here, you can find quality imported bulk chocolate such as Valrhona and Cacao Barry, as well as limited pastry and candy-making supplies including leaf gelatin and quality cocoa powder, cocoa butter and a few chocolate moulds and cake liners. A small fridge holds imported cheese, including mascarpone and mozzarella – it’s nothing fancy but, if you want a hunk of emmental or raclette, you’re in luck. With its strange range of goods and dry pantry items, this bizarrely located shop is just another of those ‘only in China’ things that also has a strong Tabao presence.
Liubiju Pickle and Sauce Shop (六必居)First opening its doors in 1530, Liubiju is the oldest shop of its kind in Beijing so deserves its legendary status. For nearly 500 years, this pickle and soybean sauce maker has been keeping Beijing well fed with preserved vegetables. Pickles here are not brined, rather cured in different seasonings. All manner of sauces made with soybean are sold in bottles, jars or pouches. Stop here the next time you meander through the new Qianmen.
Beijing Friendship Store (北京友谊商店)Long-term residents might recall the days the Friendship Store was the only place in town to find foreign goods but times have changed along with the newly renovated Friendship Store. A first floor wine cellar holds a considerable selection of international wines with wine fridges for sale next to a less impressive ‘tea garden’. A long hall for sipping and tasting wines is surprisingly well designed. On the second floor you will find a truly international assortment of packaged products sorted by nationality. It’s like a UN supermarket.
Qiyuan Market (起源超市)This unassuming shop looks like any other sundry supplier until you enter for a closer look and find a treasure trove of Indian spices and pantry goods as well as a small refrigerator housing herbs and lesser-found produce - a lifesaver when you can’t get to Sanyuanli. Small packets of dried spices, nuts, chilies, and pastes are all sold as well as grains such as basmati rice and lentils.
Boulangerie Nanda
After ten years in New York, Taiwanese native Jennifer Yeh came to China to open organic bakery Boulangerie Nanda. Delicious quiches, muffins, cakes and sourdough rye bread shine.
The well-known Wang Shi Chinese honey chain produces an overwhelming variety of honey products based on different processing techniques and plant sources. We love the huaihua honey, which has a delightfully sweet, floral aftertaste.
Amid the maze of flowers and plants in Laitai Flower Market, you’ll find the Yujingyuan stall offering seeds and potted herbs such as basil, mint, lavender and rosemary, all for around 10RMB each.
Butchers and delis
This French butchery boasts a wide array of fresh cuts and meats. Boucherie Michel’s cold cuts, rabbit paté and roast chicken impress on the deli side, in addition to a decent selection of cheeses including brie, raclette and saint-nectaire.
This tiny neighbourhood deli offers a surprisingly large range of wine, cheese and pasta alongside Western-style cuts. Fresh bread arrives at 10am, daily, but we think Chez Gerard’s cookies are the real prize.
Taste Spain’s fine range of products includes varieties of manchego cheese, hand-sliced jamon, olives, sherry and Spanish spices and an eye-opening selection of wine. We go for the olive oil and thyme tortas.
If you know a terrific market or shop to add to our listings, send an email to fooddrinktobj@gmail.com