As the capital city of Hainan Province, Haikou has some excellent food and cuisine available. Exotic fruit and seafood abound here and coconuts, mangoes, bananas and pineapples are sold all over the city at a fraction of the price elsewhere in China. Coconut milk is a popular drink but despite the abundance of all this exotic fresh fruit, it is not commonly  used for cooking with.

Hainan dishes do however, feature a lot of seafood and unusual fish. Mussels, crab meat, eel and crab all feature largely on menus throughout town. Hele Crab is a particularly tasty Haikou dish and a good place to sample this is in the restaurant in the Heyou Seafood Restaurant. Other good, (less aquatic) Haikou specialties include Wenchang Chicken and Jaiji Duck and the Yuegangchao Restaurant serve some excellent Hainan specialties.

Standard Chinese cuisine is also popular here and there are some good family style restaurants around town serving up cheap hot pot which is becoming increasingly popular here, despite the juxtaposition of temperatures between the food itself and the temperature outside! Jichang Lu, Longhua Lu and Longkun Lu are good streets to hunt around for this kind of thing, lamb hot pot is particularly popular with locals here.

The market on Bailong Nan Lu has a fun and lively atmosphere and is a good place to do some people watching and sample some more unusual and tropical fruit. The large immigrant population here hang out around these parts and the wonderful clothing and costumes of some of the minority groups light up the streets around these parts.

International cuisine is widely available here too and most of the big hotels cater to western tastes, cashing in on the hordes of tour groups who pass through the city. The Irico Hot Spring Hotel has a few excellent restaurants serving high quality continental and Chinese dishes.