Chuan Chuan Xiang (skewer bars)

Chuan chuan xiang shops are scattered throughout central Chengdu — look for rooms filled with communal tables, large pots of reddish broth in the middle, and customers pulling skewers from refrigerated display cases arranged along the walls. The skewers hold everything: sliced beef, tripe, lotus root, tofu skin, mushrooms, quail eggs, enoki mushrooms, sweet potato.

The eating procedure is informal: take a bamboo basket, fill it with skewers from the display cases, place it in the communal pot, wait two minutes, remove the skewers and eat them. Repeat indefinitely. Pay by the skewer at the end. The total cost for a satisfying meal is very modest. Most establishments have no English menu; point at what looks good.

eating out restaurant
A story
Chuan chuan xiang — "strings strings fragrance" — is the street food form of Sichuan hotpot. The principle is identical: you select bamboo skewers of ingredients from a display case and dunk them yourself in a communal pot of mala broth. But instead of a gas burner at your table, the pot sits over charcoal in the middle of the room, and you pay at the end by counting empty skewers. The format originated in the Chunxi Road area in the 1980s and has since become a staple of Chinese street food culture nationwide.