Exploring Chengdu's Vegetarian Street Snacks

Mention Chengdu cuisine, and most people immediately think of numbing-spicy hotpot and Sichuan cooking, easily overlooking the fact that this city also has a deep tradition of vegetarian street snacks. The fertile Sichuan Basin yields an abundance of soy products and mushrooms in astonishing variety, giving local vegetarian cooking an exceptional foundation of ingredients — even setting the chili aside, the results are still remarkably layered and delicious.

Sichuan-Style Takes on Soy and Mushrooms

Chengdu's vegetarian snacks fully embody the Sichuan culinary philosophy that “every dish has its own style, and a hundred dishes have a hundred flavors” — soy products of every kind are transformed through numbing-spicy, sour-and-spicy, and Sichuan-pepper treatments into a dazzling array of forms, while wild mountain mushrooms add rich layers of umami to vegetarian hotpot and cold-tossed vegetarian dishes alike.

Places Worth Seeking Out

When exploring vegetarian food in Chengdu, keep an eye out for the following kinds of destinations:

• Around temples such as Wenshu Monastery cluster a number of vegetarian restaurants with long histories
• Vegetarian hotpot restaurants have grown rapidly in Chengdu in recent years, offering a wide choice of broths and mushrooms
• Street food stalls often carry naturally vegetarian options like tofu pudding (douhua) and cold jelly noodles (liangfen)
• A new wave of vegetarian restaurants has begun weaving Sichuan flavors into creative cuisine

Exploring vegetarian food in Chengdu is a good moment to set aside the stereotype that vegetarian food means bland food, and brace yourself instead for a richly layered adventure in numbing, spicy, savory flavor.