Lost Plate Food Tours: The Best Way to Eat Your Way Through China (and Beyond)

We've done food tours in a lot of cities. Naples, Bangkok, Hanoi, Munich. Some were forgettable, some were brilliant. Lost Plate sits firmly in the brilliant category, and it's not particularly close.

We first heard about Lost Plate while planning our China trip on the 240-hour transit visa, and after doing both the Shanghai Evening Food Tour and the Shanghai Coffee & Breakfast Tour, we can tell you with full confidence: this is how you eat in China. Not at the hotel restaurant, not at the tourist-facing noodle shops in the main square. With Lost Plate.

Here's everything you need to know about what Lost Plate is, what they offer, and why we think they're worth every dollar.

What Is Lost Plate?

Lost Plate is a food tour company operating across China and Southeast Asia, with a growing presence in Portland, Oregon as well. Their model is straightforward: small groups, local guides, and restaurants you'd never stumble into on your own. No hotel buffets, no tourist traps, no menus in four languages posted outside.

Every tour is led by a local guide who actually lives in the neighborhood. They bring you to family-run spots, street vendors, and hole-in-the-wall restaurants with no English signage and zero interest in catering to outsiders, except that Lost Plate has done the legwork of building relationships with these places over years. That's the actual product: access.

You can book Lost Plate tours at lostplate.com and use code ADAMANDLINDS to get $5 off your booking. We get a small commission if you book through our link, which helps us keep doing what we do.

Our Experience: The Two Shanghai Tours

We went to Shanghai on China's 240-hour transit visa, which gives you up to 10 days to explore without a full Chinese tourist visa. It's a genuinely great setup if you're transiting through and want to actually see a city rather than just the airport. (We wrote more about that and how we handled connectivity with our Holafly eSIM - use code ADAMANDLINDS for 5% off - if you want the logistics side of China travel.)

For food, we booked both Shanghai tours back to back, one morning and one evening.

Shanghai Coffee & Breakfast Tour ($59)

This tour runs through the French Concession, which is one of Shanghai's most interesting neighborhoods. It's a mix of tree-lined streets, art deco architecture, and a coffee scene that genuinely surprised us. We went in expecting traditional Chinese breakfast and got something much more layered: old-school soup dumplings sitting next to single-origin pour-overs from a roaster that could hold its own in any serious coffee city.

The guide knew the history of the neighborhood and made it interesting without turning it into a lecture. At one point we were eating scallion pancakes on a sidewalk while she explained the neighborhood's colonial-era past. The French Concession has a complicated history and she didn't shy away from it.

For a family with kids, the morning tour is the more accessible option. Everything we ate was shareable, nothing was aggressively spicy, and the pace was relaxed. The girls cleaned their plates at every stop, which is a more meaningful endorsement than anything we can write.

Book the Shanghai Coffee & Breakfast Tour here - use code ADAMANDLINDS for $5 off.

Shanghai Evening Food Tour ($69)

The evening tour is where Lost Plate really shows its hand. The tagline is "clandestine cuisine of old-Shanghai, hiding in plain sight in the French Concession," which sounds like marketing copy but is actually pretty accurate. We walked down alleys that had no visible restaurants, ducked through a doorway, and ended up in a packed local spot with no sign out front.

You try at least 10 dishes across the evening. We had drunken chicken, red-braised pork belly, pan-fried soup dumplings (xiao long bao's crispier cousin), and a few things we can't identify but would happily eat again. The guide ordered for us in Mandarin and handled everything. All you do is show up and eat.

The evening tour has a slightly higher spice ceiling, so worth flagging if you're bringing young kids. Our girls did fine, but they've been eating Thai food for the better part of two years, so their spice tolerance is not typical.

Book the Shanghai Evening Food Tour here - use code ADAMANDLINDS for $5 off.

Lost Plate Tours: Full Lineup and Pricing

Beyond Shanghai, Lost Plate covers a solid chunk of China and has started expanding into Southeast Asia and the US. Here's the complete picture:

China Tours

Southeast Asia & USA Tours

Multi-Day Trips

For deeper dives, Lost Plate runs multi-day itineraries that combine food, culture, and guided logistics. These are full trip packages, not just tours.

Use code ADAMANDLINDS at checkout for $5 off any booking.

A Closer Look at Tours We Haven't Done (But Would)

We've only personally done the two Shanghai tours, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. But based on how those went, here are the others we're watching closely for future trips.

Beijing

The Beijing Hutong Evening Food Tour covers Han, Mongol, and Muslim cuisines across the historic hutong alleys. At $75 it's at the higher end of the evening tour range, but Beijing's hutongs are the kind of neighborhood where you genuinely need a local to unlock what's there. The $305 full-day tour with Great Wall access is a remarkable package if you want to cover serious ground in one shot.

There's also the Hutong Breakfast Tour at $39, which is one of the best-value entry points in the whole lineup - over 12 dishes across 6+ stops through Beijing's historic hutongs.

Xian

Xian's Evening Food Tour by Tuktuk is reportedly TripAdvisor's #1 rated food experience in the world, which is a claim that usually makes us roll our eyes, but given how Lost Plate operates, we believe it. Xian sits at the end of the Silk Road, and the Muslim Quarter has food unlike anywhere else in China: hand-pulled noodles, lamb skewers, pomegranate juice, and a density of flavor that reflects thousands of years of trade routes converging in one place.

The Xian Morning Food & Market Tour ($55) is another option if you want the street food angle without the tuktuk ride, and the full-day Terracotta Warrior tour ($209) combines culture and food in a way that makes logical sense for a first visit.

Chengdu

Sichuan cuisine is the most popular regional cuisine in China - 30% of Chinese restaurants serve it. If you're going to Chengdu, the Evening Food Tour by Tuktuk ($69) with at least 10 dishes across 4+ stops is a no-brainer. We spent time in Chiang Mai across two separate trips and have a high tolerance for heat, which means Chengdu is very much on our list.

The full-day Panda, Teahouse & Evening Food tour ($175) is what you'd book if you're visiting with kids who have any interest in giant pandas. The Giant Panda Base is legitimately one of the best wildlife experiences in Asia.

Southeast Asia Options

We've spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia across the years - Bangkok, Hanoi, Phnom Penh, Siem Reap. Knowing those cities as well as we do, the Lost Plate approach of going off the tourist path genuinely matters there too.

The Bangkok Evening Food Tour by Tuktuk ($69) focuses on old Bangkok and the regional depth of Thai cuisine that most tourists miss entirely. We did a great cooking class experience in Thailand (we made our own Thai dishes in Chiang Mai) but a dedicated food tour through the older parts of Bangkok was something we didn't get to on our first visit.

Hanoi is one we genuinely wish we'd had this option for. We were in the Hanoi area in 2022, and while we did a Jeep tour through Hanoi's backstreets, a dedicated food tour of the Old Quarter is a different animal. The Lost Plate Hanoi Evening Tour ($45) includes making your own banh mi and visiting the city's largest wet market, which is exactly the kind of thing that actually teaches you something about a place.

We spent time in Phnom Penh in October 2022 - rained the entire time, which affected our experience more than we'd like to admit. A proper morning market and breakfast tour ($39) would have been a good counterweight to weather-related misery.

For Siem Reap specifically, they offer a Free Market & Local Temple Tour - no charge, advance signup required. That's a remarkable entry point.

Portland

For those who don't have a China trip on the horizon, Lost Plate has expanded into Portland, Oregon with three options including a Coffee & Donut Tour ($65), the Food Carts, Pods, and Patios Tour ($105), and an Urban Wine Tasting Tour ($129). Portland's food cart scene is legitimate, and having a guide who knows which pods are worth the line is useful.

The Yunnan and Lijiang Options

One corner of the Lost Plate menu that deserves its own mention is Yunnan Province.

The Lijiang Cooking Class & Market Visit ($55) is a hands-on session with a local Naxi family in their home cooking studio. You visit the market first to shop for your ingredients, then cook and eat three dishes. That's a very different experience from a walking tour, and the Naxi ethnic minority culture in Lijiang is genuinely distinct from Han Chinese culture in ways that make it worth seeking out.

The multi-day Yunnan Tea & Horse Road trip covers Dali, Shaxi, Lijiang, and Tiger Leaping Gorge across 8 days. That's a serious commitment but it's through one of the most visually and culturally varied regions in China.

The Guangzhou Evening Food Tour ($59) is for Cantonese cuisine specifically - the dishes that only locals know about in a residential neighborhood that tourists largely skip.

And Suzhou's Alleyway Food Tour ($55) walks you through residential old-town Suzhou, which has been a center of wealth and culture in China for thousands of years. Suzhou is an easy day trip from Shanghai if you have extra days on your visa.

Who Lost Plate Tours Are Right For

Food tours in general don't suit every traveler, but Lost Plate's model lends itself well to specific types of trips.

They work particularly well if you're on a short itinerary - a 240-hour transit visa, a long weekend layover, or a focused city visit where you want to actually understand what you're eating rather than just photograph it. When you've got limited time in a place, having someone remove the decision-making overhead and take you somewhere real is worth the cost.

They also work well for families, provided kids are reasonable eaters. The pace is relaxed, portions are shared, and guides tend to be thoughtful about the group. Our girls have been eating across Asia for years, so new textures and flavors are normal for them, but even a more hesitant kid will find things to eat. Dumplings are universal.

Where they're less ideal is if you want maximum flexibility or prefer to eat alone at your own pace. Food tours are inherently group experiences, and you're committing to a route and schedule.

Booking and Discount Code

All Lost Plate tours can be booked directly at lostplate.com. Use code ADAMANDLINDS at checkout to get $5 off any booking. Tours fill up, especially the Shanghai and Beijing evening tours, so booking ahead is worth doing.

If you're planning a China trip and haven't sorted your connectivity yet, we use Holafly for our China eSIM - unlimited data, built-in VPN for navigating China's internet restrictions. Code ADAMANDLINDS gets you 5% off there too.

For more on what we've eaten across Asia - Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, and beyond - head to our YouTube channel.

FTC Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you book through our Lost Plate link using code ADAMANDLINDS, we earn a small commission and you save $5. We've done both Shanghai tours ourselves and genuinely recommend Lost Plate. We also partner with Holafly for eSIM connectivity - code ADAMANDLINDS saves you 5% there. All opinions are our own.