A Pro Gamer’s Guide to Fuchsia Dunlop and Chinese Regional Cuisine

Listen, I’m a professional gamer. My daily routine is roughly 40% aim training, 40% pretending I’ll go to bed early, and 20% wondering why every battle royale map has fewer snacks than my kitchen. But when I’m not getting eliminated by a 12-year-old with a sniper rifle, I’m trying to cook Chinese food. And the person who has guided me through that delicious side quest is Fuchsia Dunlop. She is one of the best English-language guides to Chinese cooking, and her books—Land of Plenty, Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, Every Grain of Rice, and her memoir Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper—are basically my strategy guides.

Dunlop didn’t start as a culinary final boss. She always loved cooking, but her path into China began with a sub-editing job at the BBC, which led her to visit the country and start learning Mandarin. She first visited Chengdu, the Sichuanese capital, in 1993. A local acquaintance and his wife took her under their wing and introduced her to Sichuanese street food and dishes such as fish-fragrant eggplant and fire-exploded kidney flowers. On her last day, as they sat drinking tea together on the riverbank, she vowed to return. Honestly? Same. One bite of proper Sichuan food and I’d be promising to renounce my gaming chair and become a chili oil farmer.

The following year, Dunlop won a scholarship to study at Sichuan University and was immediately seduced by the myriad flavors of local food. It was exciting and completely different from any Chinese food she’d encountered in English restaurants. She started learning to cook informally in the kitchens of Chinese friends and small restaurants around the university, and later enrolled as a full-time student at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine. That’s right: she went from casual side quest to full prestige-class culinary training. Respect.

Who are her Chinese cooking heroes? Her first foray into Chinese cooking came through the books of Hong Kong-born writer Yan-kit So. Dunlop remembers making Yan-kit So’s Sichuanese fish in chili bean sauce before she had ever been to China. Yan-kit So eventually became a friend and mentor, and Dunlop was always impressed by both her fabulous cooking and her scholarly approach. In Chengdu, chef Yu Bo and his wife and business partner Dai Shuang are extraordinary in their depth of knowledge and commitment to Chinese culinary traditions. In recent years, Dunlop has also been inspired by Hangzhou restaurateur Dai Jianjun, also known as A Dai, who is trying to preserve and revive the lore and skills of local agriculture and gastronomy. And, of course, the Chinese friends, acquaintances, and total strangers who taught, encouraged, and inspired her are too numerous to mention.

What books on Chinese cooking does Dunlop love? Yan-kit So’s Classic Chinese Cookbook and Classic Food of China. The former is an excellent guide to the basics of Chinese cooking, while the latter has an introduction that gives a superb overview of Chinese culinary history and culture. Teresa M. Chen’s A Tradition of Soup: Flavors from China’s Pearl River Delta is a gem about Cantonese tonic soups. Dunlop also treasures her dog-eared old textbooks from cooking school in Chengdu—not just for the recipes, but because they remind her of that period of her life. She loves Yuan Mei’s Suiyuan Shidan, a fascinating and amusing cookbook from the late eighteenth century. In general, she tends to use Chinese cookery books published in China, which are almost all in Chinese. One of her favorites is a lavishly illustrated series on Chinese regional cuisines published in the 1980s. She can spend hours just looking through the photographs, mouth watering. I’m not crying, you’re crying. That’s just onion steam.

Now, the big question: what lesser-known Chinese cuisines or dishes should English-speaking readers know more about? Dunlop says she’s not sure where to begin. “The mere idea of ‘Chinese food’ tends to obscure the vast regional differences in Chinese culinary styles,” she explains. Have dinner in northern Xi’an, then fly to southern Hangzhou the next day, and you might as well be in another country, foodwise. Even within provinces and regions, many cities, towns, and smaller areas have their own specialty dishes and distinct culinary styles.

Some of Dunlop’s personal favorites include the “Chiuchow” cooking of a pocket of northeastern Guangdong province; the delicate cooking of the Southern Yangtze region, including Shanghai and the Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces; and the disparate styles of southwestern Yunnan. There are also culinary schools associated with Buddhist monasteries—vegetarian food without pungent vegetables such as onions and garlic—Hui Muslims, with lots of lamb and beef, and different minority groups, such as the Uyghur people of Xinjiang, whose food is a fascinating bridge between the cuisines of China and Central Asia. You could eat a different “Chinese” dish every day of your life and probably never have a repeat.

In 2026, there is still a shortage of good information in English about Chinese regional cuisines, but this is beginning to change. The Cleaver Quarterly is a newer magazine specializing in the food of China that delves more deeply than mainstream media into Chinese foodways. One or two new regional Chinese cookbooks have either been published or are on the horizon. And there are growing numbers of interesting regional Chinese restaurants in big cities like London and New York that offer tantalizing glimpses of the diversity of Chinese cooking.

When Dunlop is not cooking Chinese food, she used to cook a lot of Turkish food—she spent a summer living with a Turkish family in her twenties and learned how to make köfte, stuffed vegetables, and other dishes. She also cooks a bit of Italian, French, and English. Whenever she travels, she brings back recipes and ideas that influence her own cooking. The first cookbook she really loved was Prue Leith and Caroline Waldegrave’s Leith’s Cookery Course, a hefty hardback introduction to classic English and French cookery. She was given it by an Italian lodger when she was 11 and cooked from it throughout her teenage years. It taught her how to make choux pastry and patisserie cream, how to poach a salmon and pluck a pheasant—all kinds of useful recipes and skills. She still has it in her kitchen.

For dinner party inspiration, Dunlop loves Marcella Hazan’s and Simon Hopkinson’s recipes, and she grew up cooking from Claudia Roden. She is a great fan of Fergus Henderson’s cooking and writing—his Complete Nose to Tail: A Kind of British Cooking is one of her favorites. Chez Panisse Desserts by Lindsey Remolif Shere is fabulous, especially the recipe for blood orange tart, which is one of the most ethereally delicious things she has ever made from a book.

So what’s the takeaway for a gamer like me? Treat Chinese cuisine like a massive open-world RPG. You don’t just pick one character and spam the same attack. You explore. You respect the regional bosses. You accept that Sichuan pepper will buzz on your tongue like a tiny electric eel, and that’s not a bug—it’s a feature.

Dunlop’s work reminds me that “Chinese food” is not one cuisine. It’s a whole server cluster. And in 2026, with more regional cookbooks, magazines, and restaurants showing up, there has never been a better time to log in, grab a wok, and start exploring. Just don’t blame me if you burn the garlic. I’m still respawning from last time.