Hakka Cuisine

Most visitors to Shenzhen eat Cantonese food and miss the city's actual local cuisine. The Hakka people settled this area centuries before Shenzhen became a Special Economic Zone, and their food is the real deal — hearty, salty, and nothing like the delicate Cantonese dim sum you'll find everywhere else.

The three must-orders are salt-baked chicken (盐焗鸡, skin golden and meat tender), stuffed tofu (酿豆腐, tofu pockets filled with minced pork), and braised pork belly with preserved mustard greens (梅菜扣肉, rich and meltingly savory). Pair it with rice and you have a meal that fueled the people who built this city long before the tech workers arrived.