Chengdu invented the tingling málà flavour that defines Sichuan cooking, and it eats around the clock. Three days here take you from wholesale chilli aisles to the 1862 shop where mapo tofu was born, ending in riverside bars.
Chengdu's oldest wholesale spice and seafood market, trading 05:00–19:00. Sacks of erjingtiao chillies, Hanyuan peppercorns, ladled Pixian doubanjiang and live river eel fill the aisles. The dried-goods lane sells vacuum-packed spice mixes far cheaper than any airport shop.
The 1941 wonton house on Chunxi Road serves chao shou floating in red chilli oil, plus a sampler tray of roughly twenty Chengdu snacks — zhong dumplings, dan dan noodles, sweet-water noodles, glutinous rice balls. Ground floor is counter service, upstairs sit-down.
Sichuan's living teahouse ritual, running since 1923: bamboo chairs by the lake, a lidded gaiwan of jasmine or zhuyeqing, endless hot-water top-ups from a long-spouted kettle, and ear cleaners working the tables with tuning forks.
Yulin's low-rise lanes south of the second ring are Chengdu's neighbourhood eating district. At the chuanchuan joints you pull skewers of chicken gizzard, beef, quail egg and lotus root from a numbing broth and pay by the stick at the end.
The dish's birthplace, founded in 1862 by a pockmarked cook's wife beside Wanfu Bridge; the flagship still trades on Xi Yulong Street. Tofu arrives volcanic in beef-fat chilli oil under a snowfall of ground peppercorn, with rice to cool it.
Founded in 1933 by Guo Chaohua and his wife, whose 'husband and wife lung slices' contain no lung at all — beef tongue, tripe and shin in chilli oil with crushed peanuts and celery. The Zongfu Road store still slices to order behind glass.
China's only interactive cuisine museum, 30km northwest in Pidu district, home of doubanjiang. Halls trace three millennia of Sichuan cooking past fermentation jars, then a chef teaches you to grind chilli in a stone mortar and cook your own mapo tofu.
Chengdu's best-known upscale hotpot house, opened 1986 and now in a banquet hall on Qintai Road. Take the split pot — butter-and-chilli one side, bone broth the other — with tripe, duck intestine and hand-sliced beef lowered in for seconds.
The Tang-founded monastery runs a canteen where monks' cooking mimics meat — mock duck, gluten 'twice-cooked pork', bamboo shoot and mushroom soup — served around 11:00–14:00 in a courtyard. The tea garden beside it pours bamboo-leaf green from dawn.
A queue forms daily for guokui — flatbread stuffed with minced pork, beef or fuqi feipian, pressed on a flat griddle then baked against the wall of the drum oven underneath until it blisters and shatters.
A 1920s wooden teahouse in Pengzhen town, 40 minutes southwest: packed earth floor, kettles on a coal stove, wooden benches worn smooth, and old men playing cards and smoking bamboo pipes from sunrise onwards.
Chengdu's riverside drinking strip on the Jin River: Panda Brew pours Sichuan-pepper pale ales, the Lan Kwai Fong courtyard bars mix baijiu cocktails, and barbecue skewer stalls along the embankment run past 03:00.