China

This was my last night at Beijing. We went out to a pretty nice restaurant that specialized in YunNan food. YunNan is top on my list of places to visit in China, even though I couldn’t make it there this time, at least I got to eat their food. The restaurant we went to is located in the YunNan Representing Office in Beijing (also YunNan hotel), so you know they are very authentic. These types of places are popular in Beijing. If you want good Sichuan food, you go to the Sichuan Representing Office in Beijing, and if you want good XinJiang food, you go to the XinJiang Representing Office in Beijing, seeing a trend here?

This place was much fancier than I expected. It was decorated very nicely, and we were even able to get a nice single room (or hut more precisely). The service was decent, and the food was good. It was definitely a good place to go for the YunNan food and to experience their culture a bit.

This was at the main entrance. In that big case is tea, yup, tea! It’s Pu-er tea cake, which is a type of fermented tea. Its value increases as it ages, it goes as high as tens of thousands of yuan. For this particular one, it’s probably on the really really expensive side.

Pretty floral decorations at the restaurant.

Here’s a not so good picture of the little bamboo hut we were sitting in. It was quite nice. We had a front door that closes so we wouldn’t hear all the noises outside and could have a private conversation.

One of the paintings hanging on the wall. I liked it a lot.

Our drink for the evening, tamarind juice. It was good! It was a bit sour, and sweet, and tasted almost like the Chinese sour plum drink. I’ll have to see if I can find it here in California.

The dish in the front was pickled veggies (云南泡菜), including cabbage, carrots, green beans. It was sour, a bit spicy (you could make it more spicy by using the ground hot pepper on the plate), and really salty. This would be a great appetizer dish to go with beer. The dish in the back was chicken, almost like a chicken salad, but with much more flavor. It was very very spicy, hard for me to eat, even with a lot of white rice.

This was bacon with green bell pepper (青椒腊肉). It was really good. The bacon was not what we were used to here in America, it tasted more like Canadian bacon (ham).

Steam rice with bacon and beans (清豆焖饭). This was really good too. The rice really absorbed the flavor of the bacon and the beans (not exactly sure what type of beans they were).

I think this was the most popular dish for us. It’s called DaJiuJia (大救驾), which means “great rescue”. I guess this was when the emperor (or someone of great importance) was escaping from something, there wasn’t a lot of food to eat, and he was starving. Someone from the countryside made this simple dish for him and saved his life, thus the name. It was simple dish with ground rice cakes, bacon and cabbage. It was full of flavor, the rice cakes were chewy and tasty (I have a dish made of these little rice cakes that I’ll post later so you could actually see what they look like). The whole dish was just wonderful.

Another one of my favorite. It’s grilled fish. I don’t really know what type of they were, but they were food! The skin was crispy and full of taste. Even the bones were edible. The meat was fresh and tasty. I couldn’t really tell what the outside spices were, but apparently this dish was in the Dai-ethnic style. I think I ate like 2 whole fish (they were small).

This last one was another famous YunNan dish. It’s called GuoQiaoMiXian (过桥米线), which means “over the bridge rice noodle”. There of course was a story behind this dish. A long time ago, in YunNan, a husband was studying for his national exam (to gain positions in the government) far away from his home. His wife wanted to visit him and bring him some good food to help sustain his energy. But he’s far away and the weather was cold, so she came up with having soup noodle, covered with a layer of chicken fat (from soup) on top to keep the soup warm. Thus a famous dish was born. When we were served the dish, the noodle and the vegetables and the soup were served separately and we had to put them all in the pot together. This wasn’t as special as I anticipated. The soup was good, very light and full of chicken flavor. There definitely wasn’t that layer of fat on top.