Day by day
Arrival — the calm-before: sweet-water noodles
Airport pickup, eSIM and Alipay sorted en route. We start gently: a bowl of tianshui mian — sweet-water noodles, the Sichuanese palate's quiet opening act — then an evening stroll through a night market to calibrate your spice tolerance before the real thing. Your guide issues the spice ladder: from here on, every dish gets a rating, and you choose your ascent.
The chili alphabet, learned at the source
Morning at a working spice market: er jing tiao vs. facing-heaven chilis, Sichuan pepper grades (you'll taste the numbing buzz on its own — it's a sensation, not just a flavor), dried vs. fresh vs. pickled, and the fermented black beans. You'll leave with a photo-vocabulary of thirty ingredients. Lunch: mapo tofu at the original mapo tofu house. Afternoon: teahouse recovery. Evening: a backstreet hotpot institution where the locals actually queue — offal optional, tripe and duck-blood-butter optional-optional.
Street breakfast crawl + afternoon off the spice
A six-stop Chengdu breakfast crawl: zheng's guokui (stuffed flatbread), dan dan noodles, sweet fermented rice, bobo chicken from the skewer basket, egg pancakes, and the thousand-layer cylinder cake. It's a lot. The afternoon is deliberately calm: naps, a walk, and a mild Guangdong-style dinner for your palate's rest day. Even pilgrims rest.
Pixian — the sacred paste
Day trip to Pidu, the county whose chili-bean paste (pixian doubanjiang) is the base of half the cuisine — "the soul of Sichuan cooking." You'll see the terracotta jars resting in the sun at a traditional workshop, learn the three-year fermentation timeline, and taste vertical flights of one-, three- and five-year paste. Lunch is a rural table where the stir-fries use the same paste, hours after you watched it in jars. Back in Chengdu for a free evening (recommendation list provided).
The masterclass — knife, wok, fire
Full day with a chef-instructor: knife skills (the gong cai "thousand-cut" cucumber), fire control on a proper Sichuan burner, and the four canonical flavor profiles of the cuisine — numbing-spicy (ma la), fish-fragrant (yu xiang), strange-flavor (guai wei), and scorched-chili (hu jiao). You cook a five-course feast and eat it. Certificate, recipe booklet, and a spice kit in your hand luggage. Final evening: the graduation hotpot — by now, your spice ladder is embarrassing your day-one self.
One last bowl, airport drop
Breakfast is a final bowl of niu rou mian — beef noodles — because you can't leave Sichuan without one. Then your transfer, spice kit packed, recipes in your bag. Flying on under the 240-hour visa-free transit? Paperwork checked at breakfast, not at the gate.
What's included
Included
- 5 nights in a 4★ boutique hotel (central Chengdu)
- Private English-speaking guide & car, days 1–6
- Airport transfers
- All market, workshop & spice-museum entries
- Pixian doubanjiang workshop day trip
- Full-day cooking masterclass + spice kit
- 12+ seated tastings & the 6-stop breakfast crawl
- All breakfasts, welcome dinner, 4 lunches, hotpot ×2
- eSIM with data, Alipay setup
Not included
- International flights
- China visa or entry permit fees
- Travel insurance (we'll remind you, kindly)
- Extra alcohol pairings
- Spice purchases beyond the included kit