The Best Places to Eat and Stay in China

Rooms here open onto private courtyards rather than shared corridors, which sets the tone for this resort at the foot of Shishan Mountain. Bai Yun serves Cantonese and Huaiyang cuisine across all three meals, including a health-focused menu, and the Lobby Lounge marks sunset with Banyan Tree's own evening ritual. Suzhou's classical gardens and water towns are a short drive away, making the mountain views feel almost too easy to come by.

Raw concrete, black steel grilles, and deep green tile define this boutique hotel inside Nantou's old walled city, a rare corner of historic Shenzhen where the lanes are too narrow for taxis to deliver you to the door. Warm wood and low lighting do the softening once you're in. Rooms have tea and coffee makers, and the ground-floor coffee shop pulls its own crowd. Michelin's Selected Hotels list includes it.

A serviced residence inside a massive financial complex in Hexi CBD, built for the kind of business traveler who prefers cooking their own breakfast to expensing another hotel buffet. The 220 apartments run from studios to two-bedroom suites, each with a kitchenette, washer-dryer, and city views. The gym and sauna are on site, the nearest metro two minutes on foot, and the Nanjing International Expo Center just over a kilometer away.

Rotary phones sit on the nightstands not because anyone misses them but because someone thought it would be funny, and they were right. This Moxy hotel near Shenzhen North Station keeps the lobby deliberately chaotic, folding the check-in desk, a bar, a reading nook, and a game area into one open floor anchored by a video wall. The gym runs boxing bags and pink bikes instead of treadmills, and Moxy Bar does Italian food and cocktails all day.

A wave sculpture runs the full length of the ceiling, which tells you something about how seriously this place takes its own idea. Chao Yue is a fine-dining Chaozhou restaurant where the kitchen reinterprets Chiu Chow culinary tradition through prix fixe menus built to feel like a single continuous argument. The service is unusually considered, and the room is quiet enough that it actually matters.

The indoor pool here is lined in dark tile under a coffered wood ceiling, moody enough that you half expect a film noir scene to break out. This contemporary resort sits inside the Shishan Cultural Centre, reworking Suzhou's classical garden aesthetic into something sleeker. Rooms face either the city skyline or a private courtyard, and the lobby lounge pours Biluochun, a local green tea, alongside a Nyonya-inspired afternoon tea.

Yoga mats and resistance bands come standard in every room at this 107-room IHG wellness hotel in Quanzhou's Fengze district, which should tell you where its priorities lie. The gym doubles as a yoga studio, the restaurant leans into local ingredients and health-conscious cooking, and the hotel organizes outdoor city walks and Zumba sessions for guests who find the minibar insufficiently motivating. The Kaiyuan Temple is a short drive away.

A curvaceous modern tower sitting where the mountains of Yantian meet the South China Sea, this is a big resort, the full 432-rooms-and-five-pools kind. Shenzhen's reputation for tech and commerce has buried the lede on its coastline, and the setting here is genuinely lovely. Rooms start spacious, many have balconies, and the sea-facing suites make a solid case for never drawing the curtains. Six restaurants mean you can stay put all week without repeating yourself.

Yandang Mountain and the Nanxi River fishing villages are within easy reach, which gives this Shangri-La a useful double life as both business hotel and base for slower exploration. Rooms run spacious with full desks and tea stations, the Horizon Club Lounge does evening drinks over city views, and the seafood buffet pulls from the nearby coast. Wenzhou is a city mid-transformation, and the hotel sits squarely in the middle of it.

Gensler shaped this full-service hotel around the Ou River, and the lobby's reception area frames the water the way a Chinese landscape painting would compose a view. Rooms have floor-to-ceiling windows, most pointed toward the river or the mountain light show that runs after dark. Three in-house options cover the bases: an all-day kitchen, a Cantonese and Wenzhou dining room with private rooms, and a lounge that trades coffee for cocktails at sundown.

The Salvo brothers set up a Neapolitan pizzeria in Beijing and, somewhere along the way, made it a serious reference point for the form across Asia. The dough is soft and properly blistered, the crust light enough to suggest restraint but satisfying enough to suggest experience. Classic pies lean into tradition without apology; a few contemporary options show the kitchen hasn't stopped thinking. Pasta is on too, and the room is spacious and wine-lined, the service polished without stiffness.

A luxury hotel on the Yangtze River with nearly 400 rooms, built for the Chinese business elite but happy to welcome anyone who enjoys grand public spaces and landscaping without feeling like they're sleeping in a lobby. Rooms stay warm despite the lavish fittings, and guests leave with a complimentary tea set. The health club runs to indoor tennis and bowling, and there are multiple high-end restaurants and a spa on site.

Cultural references woven through the interior design signal what this modern luxury hotel is aiming at: business travelers from China's corporate class who don't want to feel like they're staying in a generic airport-adjacent box. The Bao'an district puts you close to the international airport and the convention center, which says everything about the crowd. Multiple restaurants run from an all-day option to a late-night noodle bar, so you're covered whatever the schedule demands.

Two HBA-designed spiral staircases cut through the lobby before you've even found the check-in desk, which sets the tone for this sleek city hotel in Hangzhou's Future Sci-Tech City. Suites run to quilted sage headboards, gold-patterned rugs, and floor-to-ceiling views. The heated indoor pool stays open year-round behind glass walls. West Lake and Xixi Wetland are both within 40 minutes by car for anyone who eventually ventures out.

A hotel that takes its fashion district name seriously, with rooms in warm wood tones, jewel-red accents, and geometric throw pillows that stop just short of requiring a mood board. Part of Accor's MGallery collection, it sits in Longhua with floor-to-ceiling windows framing either garden greenery or the Shenzhen skyline, and higher suites look out toward the hills. The details do the talking; nothing here feels like it arrived by default.

The 270 rooms look out over Qiandeng Lake, which softens the surroundings of Nanhai's financial district considerably. This is a full-service Marriott hotel, so expectations of marble bathrooms, warm wood interiors, and two in-house restaurants are met without drama. Man Ho handles Cantonese cooking with a fusion lean; the Foshan Kitchen runs international all-day dining. The Foshan Ancestral Temple, a landmark of Lingnan architecture, is about 20 minutes by car.

Jade and bronze details drawn from a Neolithic culture thread through the contemporary rooms, which start at a generous 45 square meters, the kind of space that makes a business trip feel almost voluntary. This is a full-service InterContinental in suburban Hangzhou, ten minutes from the David Chipperfield-designed Liangzhu Museum. Indoor and outdoor pools, extensive meeting space, and two restaurants round things out for whoever needs them.

A luxury city hotel perched over the Jinjiang River waterfront, the InterContinental Quanzhou sits inside a sprawling retail and entertainment complex that includes, yes, an amusement park. None of that carnival energy crosses the threshold. Inside it's stately and calm, with rain showers, 49-inch screens, and soaking tubs angled toward the river in the higher rooms. Cai Feng Lou handles local Quanzhou and Fujian cooking at the high end.

Check-in happens at Bar Moxy, which sets the tone: this is a hotel that skips the marble lobby in favor of a drink and a barstool. Rooms are compact and unapologetically functional, with floor-to-ceiling windows, walk-in rain showers, and enough USB ports to charge a small film crew. It sits close to the convention center, Hongqiao rail, and the airport, which explains the guests. The front desk doubles as a local guide, so ask.

The Grand Hyatt's flagship dining room sits right on the edge of West Lake, and the kitchen leans into that geography, building its menus around the fish and seafood at the heart of Hangzhou cuisine. It's a formal, elegant space where the cooking is careful and precise, the service polished, and the whole experience reads as a special-occasion destination rather than a casual drop-in.

A sourdough made from a starter the kitchen has kept alive since day one is a quiet statement of intent. Emmelyn is a contemporary French restaurant in Zhujiang New Town, running seasonal set menus and à la carte, with ingredients that move between Qiandao Lake caviar, French oysters, and Iberian ham. The chef trained across New Zealand and Australia before landing here, and the cooking sits squarely where French tradition meets a lighter, modern hand.