Finalist for the 2024 IACP Award for Literary or Historical Food Writing A Newsweek Nonfiction Pick for Summer 2024 • An NPR " Books We Love " Pick • A Food & Wine Best Food Book of 2023 • A Financial Times Best Food and Drink Book of 2023 • One of Smithsonian 's Ten Best Books About Food of 2023 The world’s most sophisticated gastronomic culture, brilliantly presented through a banquet of thirty Chinese dishes. Chinese was the earliest truly global cuisine. When the first Chinese laborers began to settle abroad, restaurants appeared in their wake. Yet Chinese has the curious distinction of being both one of the world’s best-loved culinary traditions and one of the least understood. For more than a century, the overwhelming dominance of a simplified form of Cantonese cooking ensured that few foreigners experienced anything of its richness and sophistication―but today that is beginning to change. In Invitation to a Banquet , award-winning cook and writer Fuchsia Dunlop explores the history, philosophy, and techniques of Chinese culinary culture. In each chapter, she examines a classic dish, from mapo tofu to Dongpo pork, knife-scraped noodles to braised pomelo pith, to reveal a distinctive aspect of Chinese gastronomy, whether it’s the importance of the soybean, the lure of exotic ingredients, or the history of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine. Meeting food producers, chefs, gourmets, and home cooks as she tastes her way across the country, Fuchsia invites readers to join her on an unforgettable journey into Chinese food as it is cooked, eaten, and considered in its homeland. Weaving together history, mouthwatering descriptions of food, and on-the-ground research conducted over the course of three decades, Invitation to a Banquet is a lively, landmark tribute to the pleasures and mysteries of Chinese cuisine. "Fuchsia Dunlop’s masterly new book, Invitation to a Banquet . . . [is] a serious and intrepid work of culinary history . . . a thesaurus of the senses. If you don’t live within 100 miles of a real Chinese restaurant, or an H Mart, this book will not only entertain and instruct you―it might make you go mad with longing." ― Dwight Garner, New York Times Book Review "Sweeping. . . . Chinese food has long been dismissed by outsiders as salty, unhealthy and made from creepy ingredients. In Invitation to a Banquet , Ms. Dunlop sets out to change those misguided views. The result is a joyously sensual, deeply researched and unabashedly chauvinistic read, a feast for anyone curious about how 1.4 billion people eat." ― Eugenia Bone, Wall Street Journal "Fuchsia Dunlop’s rapturous Invitation to a Banquet . . . reveals a universe of delights, innovation and versatility so deep and broad it will subdue even readers who believe they know all about the cuisine." ― Howard Chua-Eoan, Bloomberg "This book is an erudite joy that makes you yearn to taste the delights Dunlop describes. Her sensory writing is so vivid that I felt I was actually there with her in the food markets of China." ― Bee Wilson, Sunday Times (UK) "Dunlop has written a 400-plus-page book about a cuisine that, by her own estimation, doesn’t much interest westerners. It’s a decision born of the same confidence and originality that has made her such a successful recipe writer (including for the FT). She’s also a brilliantly effective describer of things, conjuring the 'wet crunchiness' of a chicken’s foot and the 'skiddy' texture of duck intestines in this exciting, non-linear history." ― Harriet Fitch Little, Financial Times "In 30 years of exploring and documenting the country, [Dunlop] has done for China what Elizabeth David did for Mediterranean food and Claudia Roden did for the Middle East. . . . Dunlop’s desire to educate and enlighten finds its fullest expression in Invitation to a Banquet ." ― Tim Lewis, Observer "[Dunlop's] latest is one of her most ambitious works to date. . . . While the book brims with descriptions of delectable feasts, this is more of a historical deep-dive than it is a travelog. Above all, Dunlop wants her readers to approach Chinese food on its own terms and to challenge common misconceptions about it. She explores a time before rice’s dominance, when emperors offered sacrifices to “Lord Millet”; why the roots of Japanese sushi lie in Chinese zha ; and why the wet markets unfairly maligned in Western press in 2020 are essential to communities." ― Diana Hubbell, Gastro Obscura "Dunlop makes a compelling case for the superiority of Chinese cuisine, but in a delighted and expansive rather than chauvinistic way. . . . She makes an equally compelling case that what Westerners think of as ‘Chinese food,’ meaning what most can find at their local takeaway, is neither inauthentic nor wrong. Instead, it is a diasporic offshoot that reflects local tastes but is about as representative of the cuisine’s diversity as a frozen pizza is of Italy’s. Immigration and adventurousness have