Seasonings in Northern food are strong with the use of vinegar, garlic, scallions, leeks, and salt. Northern dishes can be oily with somewhat liberal use of salt, oil, and sometimes animal fat to add calories to the diet in the north’s bitterly cold and dry winter. Northern foods are usually steamed, boiled, braised, roasted, glazed, or fried, with boiling the most popular, and steaming the next most common method.

Mutton and pork are meats of choice for northern dishes. Mutton is a Mongolian and Muslim tradition and particular popular in the Muslim northwest. Thinly sliced mutton and pork are often used as hot pot dishes, together with mushrooms, bean sprouts, leafy vegetables, egg dumplings, and seafood.

Among the famous Northern Chinese food are Beijing's Peking Duck (glazed and roasted duck thinly sliced and wrapped in pancakes together with scallions), Mutton Hot pot, Tianjin's Fried Twist of Eighteenth Street (a deep-fried wheat bread served as a snack), and Tianjin's Goubuli Bread Dumplings (steamed bun stuffed with spicy meat fillings).

Northeastern Chinese cuisine (simplified Chinese: Dōngběi cài) is a style of Chinese cuisine in Northeastern China. Many dishes originated from Manchu cuisine. It relies heavily on preserved foods and hearty fare due to the harsh winters and relatively short growing seasons. Pickling is a very common form of food preservation, and pickled cabbage is traditionally made by most households in giant clay pickling vats. Unlike southern China,the staple crop

in northern China is wheat and it supplies the majority of the starch found in a northern Chinese diet where it is found in the form of noodles and steamed bun. Popular dishes include pork and chive dumplings, suan cai hot pot, cumin & caraway lamb, congee, tealeaf stewed hardboiled eggs, nian doubao (sticky rice buns with sweet bean filling), congee with several types of pickles (mustard root is highly popular), and cornmeal congee. Perhaps the most important characteristic of Northeastern Chinese cuisine is its utilization of suan cai.

Due to its riverside environment, the Heilongjiang style of the Northeastern cuisine is famed for its fish banquet, specializing in anatropous fish such as the trout banquet and the sturgeon banquet, and similarly, due to its mountainous environment, the Jilin style of the Northeastern cuisine is famed for its dishes that utilize game animals. Although by law, only farm raised animals are allowed for culinary use and such use of wild animals is strictly forbidden, this practice is still being criticized because critics argue that such use of farmed animals, despite the fact that they are farm raised, would encourage the consumption of wild animals.