Known for its spicy, stir-fried dishes, Hunan cuisine has enjoyed a surge in popularity in recent years, but not everyone is happy about it
At 9 p.m. on April 1, half an hour before her train arrived in Beijing, food blogger “Zhengqi Kong” opened a food delivery app and ordered several dishes from Hunan restaurant Xiaoxiangge so that they would be waiting for her at her accommodation. Despite the late, spicy, and oily dinner going against everything she knows about maintaining a healthy diet, eating Hunan food when traveling in and out of Beijing, as well as frequenting the capital’s Hunan restaurants, has become something of a ritual for the 28-year-old over the last several years.
“I don’t eat Xiaoxiangge every day, but if I don’t eat there for a while, I start to miss it terribly,” the blogger surnamed Kong, a native of eastern China’s Shandong province, explained to her more than 150,000 fans on the microblogging platform Weibo.
Kong is not alone. Xiang cuisine (湘菜), hailing from central China’s Hunan province and best known for its punchy, fresh spice and stir-fry cooking style, has become a hit around the country in recent years, especially among younger diners. On Weibo, the hashtag “How delicious is Hunan’s Xiang cuisine” has garnered over 160 million views and 36,000 discussions, while the lifestyle app Xiaohongshu features more than 890,000 posts on the topic.
Xiang cuisine’s national spread over the last two decades reflects the migration of Hunanese around the country. The 2020 national population census by the National Bureau of Statistics showed that over 18.7 million Hunanese worked outside of the province, accounting for 28.3 percent of its entire population. Accordingly, thousands of Hunan restaurants now dot China’s major cities. In Shanghai, the Hunan government boasted that the number increased from around 20 in 2006 to over 5,000 in 2021, while in Shenzhen, Jiuxing Travel, published by New Weekly magazine, counted over 7,000 Hunan restaurants.
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