Breakfasts
Included Lunches & Dinners
Included Special Meals
Add-On Special Meals
Self-Pay Meals
Breakfasts
All included breakfasts on Nexus tours are provided by the tour hotels. The hotels on my tour all featured extensive buffets of Chinese, European, and American breakfast foods, including dim sum, noodle bars, congee and other porridges, cereals, baked goods, eggs, meats, salads, many varieties of coffees, espresso drinks, teas, fruit juices, and more.
The breakfasts varied slightly in quality from one hotel to the next, with some being truly superlative, and others being merely good, but none of them were bad. In fact, we increasingly relied on having a good meal at breakfast, as the other tour food worsened over the course of our trip.
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Included Lunches & Dinners
I will agree with feedback I heard from others who have traveled with Nexus: the day-to-day lunch and dinner food provided on included excursions wasn’t really Chinese, and wasn’t western either. Though never really rising above mediocrity, the food was significantly better during the first 2-3 days of our trip, and much worse at the end. By days 5-7 we often found ourselves eating the bare minimum and just hoping to find a shop or restaurant that we could buy food from later.
The included lunches and dinners throughout the trip all followed a pretty consistent formula: a soup, a rice dish, a fried dish, and several varieties of stir fry with just vegetables or vegetables and meat.
The soups were not recognizable to me as resembling anything I have had before in China or the United States. For an example that is roughly indicative of the general trend, at one lunch the soup was warm chicken bouillon with tomato halves floating it, but no other ingredients. After the first few days, many people didn’t even bother to try the soups we were served.
The rice dish was usually plain steamed rice, but sometimes there were frozen peas or other vegetables mixed in with the rice. Sometimes the rice was hot and sometimes it was room-temperature or cooler. Considering the sanitation issues that still plague even urban centers in China, lukewarm food is a bit of health risk, but to my knowledge no one on our tour got sick.
The fried dish varied widely; at one lunch it was egg rolls filled with sweet red beans, a few times we had french fries, and at at several other meals we were served a fried meat that diners energetically debated the source of — was it chicken or fish? Or maybe pork? The mystery remains unsolved.
The stir-fried dishes were hit or miss, and suffered the most significant decline in quality over the course of the trip. Sometimes we would be served a flavorful mixed dish of meat and a variety of vegetables (pretty good); at other times a single low-cost ingredient, like plain stir-fried celery (meh); and, once, a fish on the brink that elicited looks of profound concern from those who tasted it, and remained largely uneaten (not good.)
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Included Special Meals
Hong Shao Paigu Braised Spare Rib Lunch (Day 4)
Itinerary Description:
“After featured local cuisine lunch, Wuxi is apparently best known for ‘Hong Shao Paigu’ or braised spare ribs, cooked in a ‘red style’, that is, a sauce of rice wine and soya sauce flavoured with ginger, cloves, anise and black pepper.” (sic)
This meal was never provided. Lunch on day 4 was included, and consisted of the standard lunch/dinner fare we had at all other daytime meals.
Dong Po Pork (Day 5)
Itinerary description:
“Enjoy a slow cooked Dongpo Pork which is cooked by braising fine-skinned and thin pieces of fat streaky bacon with famous Shaoxing wine in a sealed pot. When the dish is ready, the bacon will be moist and red, and the sauce well be thick and tasty. It tastes savory, sweet and full of body, but not greasy.” (sic)
This dish was served at dinner on day 5. The meal otherwise resembled every other included lunch and dinner, except that halfway through the meal a plate of cooked pork belly pieces was brought out to the table (much to my intense shock, given that none of the other itinerary meals had been served at all.)
The pork we were served matched the description of dongpo pork in roughly the same way that a lobster roll sold at a McDonald’s in Maine would match the description of a New England lobster roll, but as the only local dish promised by Nexus’s inclusive itinerary that actually appeared at a meal, I have to give credit where credit is due. About half the people at my table tried it and half didn’t; of those who tried it, one pronounced herself to have enjoyed it. (Also, yes, McDonald’s lobster rolls are a real thing.)
Xiao Long Bao Soup Dumplings (Day 6)
Itinerary description:
“Featured lunch Steamed Bun Xiaolong Bao- Xiaolongbao is a type of steamed bun (baozi) from the Jiangnan region of China, especially associated with Shanghaiand Wuxi. It is traditionally prepared in xiaolong, small bamboo steaming baskets, which give them their name.” (sic)
This meal was never provided. Lunch on day 6 was included, and consisted of the standard lunch/dinner fare we had at all other daytime meals.
This is the omission that actually annoyed me the most, not because I missed out on soup dumplings (I didn’t) but because this actually is a well-known delicacy from the Shanghai region, and any visitor to the area really shouldn’t leave without trying it. Two of my group members and I did strike out on our own on day 7, and procured some excellent soup dumplings at a restaurant in Shanghai, but I can only assume every other member of the tour never got to try them.
Farewell Dinner (Day 7)
Itinerary Description:
“This evening, enjoy Farewell Dinner Shanghai cuisine, also known as Hu cuisine, is a popular style of Chinese food. In a narrow sense, Shanghai cuisine refers only to what is traditionally called Benbang.” (sic)
One member of my group attended the Farewell Dinner on day 7, while the rest of us skipped out in pursuit of some real Shanghai cuisine. She reported that the food was, again, not different from the standard lunch/dinner fare we had at all other daytime meals, and continued the trend of worsening quality that we observed throughout the second half of the tour. For more detail on this included meal and our alternative dinner plans in Shanghai, see the full write-up of day 7.
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Add-On Special Meals
Peking Duck Banquet (Day 1)
Itinerary description:
“This evening, delight in an optional banquet (USD$35/person) featuring the famous ‘Peking Duck’.” (sic)
No one in my group bought this add-on, as we had plans to get peking duck on our own, with a Chinese friend who lives in Beijing. Because we didn’t participate, I can’t provide any first-hand feedback. Based on my experiences with all the other food-related excursions/inclusions on the tour, I can’t imagine this was a high quality or authentic meal, but perhaps it was the rare exception.
What I do know for certain is that $35 per person would cover peking duck for two people at most restaurants specializing in peking duck in Beijing. For example, we had a fantastic meal (the best of our trip, in fact) at SiJi MinFu, where a whole peking duck goes for about $35 with pancakes and condiments. We split a whole duck among four people because we were getting other dishes as well, but one duck would be plenty for two people on its own. For more detail on our alternative dinner plans in Beijing, see the full write-up of day 1.
All this to say, an authentic peking duck in a fine-dining restaurant in Beijing is literally half the price of Nexus’s add-on. Skip it, and strike out on your own for something vastly cheaper and vastly more delicious.
Beijing Zha Jiang Mian Lunch (Day 1)
Itinerary description:
“This package also includes a traditional Beijing Zhajiangmian (‘Fried Sauce noodles’) as lunch.” (sic)
This meal was not provided as such, but it was replaced with a family-style lunch in the home of a local family in the HuTong district of Beijing on day 1. Two members of my group bought this add-on, and they reported being very satisfied with the meal, which actually was cooked and eaten in a local family’s home. Some copies of Nexus’s itinerary do seem to list the correct meal description, and others don’t. Ours did not, but I believe the tour members who participated in the substitute activity probably enjoyed it more than the alternative.
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Self-Pay Meals
This section covers only those self-pay meals that are scheduled by Nexus as part of the tour schedule. Any self-pay meals that we purchased as part of our self-guided excursions during free time are detailed in the daily reviews.
On two occasions we ate on the bus while traveling between cities. One of these lunches was an included lunch that turned out to be a boxed sandwich meal. The other lunch was a self-pay meal, for which we were brought to a truck stop/rest area along the highway in the Shanghai area.
For the truck stop lunch, our group was dropped off at a truck stop that included a food court with a number of hot food vendors. Our tour guide, Leo, did not accompany the tour into the food court. This presented a problem almost immediately, as a large number of tour members had dietary restrictions that they could not communicate to food court staff, none of whom spoke English.
As the only Chinese speaker present, I spent this entire meal break translating for tour members to ensure that their food did not contain meat, pork, lard, etc. Ultimately, I spent so long translating that I was unable to spend any time finding good food for my own group-mates, who ended up eating what turned out to be some of the most unpalatable gas station food I have ever encountered in any country.
The tour leader was aware of the dietary restrictions among the tour members, and still chose to abandon them in an environment in which they had no way to communicate their dietary needs and secure food they could actually eat. Nexus boasts a full-service tour experience, with a translator and guide available at all times. That was not the case, and I really can’t imagine what happens on Nexus tours that do not include Chinese-speaking participants. It was pure coincidence that I was present to help; on other tours I suppose travelers just go hungry or gamble with their health on unknown food items.
The only other scheduled self-pay meal was dinner on day 4. On this day we arrived at our hotel in the evening, after a long bus ride from Suzhou, and were told the hotel would be in a nice area with many restaurants. This was untrue. The hotel was in a remote and rundown area of town, with a lot of road construction, a small street market, and several two-table noodle shops a few blocks away. I didn’t see any of our fellow tour members adventuring out into the surrounding neighborhood, so I really have no idea what or if they ended up eating that night.
My group members and I located a corner store where we were able to buy some snacks to take back to the hotel. One member of our group was asked to pay over five times the sticker price of a food item, and this attempted price-gouging was only prevented because I was able to speak to the shop owner in Chinese. Again, no attempt was made by the tour leader to help tour members secure food for themselves. The hotel’s remote location all but ensured that foreign tourists would be unable to communicate with any food purveyors they encountered, and obviously also exposed them to the possibility of abuse.
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Nexus Holidays Tour Review 
