淄博烧烤zī bó shāo kǎo

The meal is the meme. You finish the skewers yourself on a small charcoal stove at the table. Then you lay a skewer on a thin pancake, add sauce and a green onion, pull the meat off and roll it up. Fans call the stove, the pancake and the onion 灵魂三件套, “the soul trio”.

People wrote 进淄赶烤, a pun on 进京赶考, “go to the capital for the imperial exam”. With the new characters it says “go to Zibo for the barbecue”.

A joke from that spring said 上次淄博这么热闹，还是在齐国的时候: “the last time Zibo was this busy was in the days of the State of Qi”, more than two thousand years ago.

The peak was spring 2023, and today the name mostly brings back that trend. The barbecue still draws visitors. The 八大局 market, famous since the boom, has had more than 18 million visitors a year since 2023, according to a 2026 report in the Economic Daily.

In early March 2023, college students began to fill Zibo’s barbecue restaurants. On March 8, a topic about students who group up and take the high-speed train to Zibo for skewers trended on Douyin’s local list, according to The Paper. Students and food bloggers then posted more videos.

By April, people came from far away. One diner told China News that he had traveled almost three hours from Beijing for dinner. Around the May Day holiday, hotels in the city center were almost impossible to book on travel apps, The Paper reported.