Yancheng Eight-Bowl Banquet 盐城八大碗
Yancheng Eight-Bowl Banquet is featured among the local specialties of Jiangsu.
Photo adjustments
EXIF orientation normalized; resized without changing aspect ratio; converted to WebP. No subject edits.
Yancheng Eight-Bowl Banquet (盐城八大碗) is a set of eight large bowls from Yancheng (盐城), served in earlier years when local families hosted guests. The Yancheng city government puts it first on its list of the city's must-eat foods.
The eight bowls
Shanghai Observer (上观新闻), the Jiefang Daily news site, names the eight dishes. Four are farmhouse stewed tubiao (农家烩土膘), red-braised glutinous rice balls (红烧糯米圆), radish braised with dried mussels (萝卜烧淡菜) and shredded chicken stewed with glass noodles (鸡丝烩粉丝). The other four are a puffed egg cake (涨蛋糕), taro and dried shrimp thick soup (芋头虾米羹), home-style red-braised pork (家常红烧肉) and red-braised daozi fish (红烧刀子鱼).
Each bowl is half soup and half solid food. The site reads the big bowls as northern generosity and the soupy half as southern refinement.
From six bowls to eight
In Dafeng (大丰) in Yancheng, the older folk celebration feast was the six-bowl table (六大碗), laid on for birthdays, weddings and funerals. Its first dish is called toudaocai (头道菜), "the first-course dish"; its old names are zahui (杂烩), "mixed stew", and shao roupi (烧肉皮), "braised pork skin", and it has been a main dish at family feasts and at weddings and funerals across northern Jiangsu for more than a hundred years. As household incomes rose, the six bowls became eight, and a full formal banquet runs from a dozen to more than twenty dishes.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.