In this trip, we spent a LOT on food. We purposely asked the agency to exclude meals from our package, so we can truly experience the local food. Yunnan is a place full of cultural surprise, and we strongly believe it is also in the food!
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Lunch at Dunno where
Due to time constraint, we had our first Lijiang lunch at the attraction itself. Ordinary food, slightly more expensive, but still tasty. Maybe we were hungry, coz it was 3pm already! :p
Cost: 100
Address: Unknown, Lijiang
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Dinner in Motel
When we checked in at our motel (田园牧歌客栈) in Shuhe told own, the owner and shop keepers are all having their dinner. They asked us to join them, and immediately cooked 5 dishes for us, fresh from the kitchen! Guess what? It cost only RMB60 for the 3 of us!!
Look, they are all simple and easy to cook dishes, but we never know we can cook like that. The one on bottom right is just fry potato thin slices with eggs. This is very yummy, but of course oily – imagine it!
Cost: RMB 60
Address: 丽江, 束河古镇开文六社康普巷 (束河办事处旁)
Tel: 0888-5115922
Website: http://www.tymgkz.cn/
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Breakfast in Shuhe
Our first breakfast in Lijiang was like this:
Top left – these are their pao and buns. The plain bun is supposed to be eaten with the chilly on the top right.
Bottom left – our guide said that this is their favorite local drink, so we tried. Yuck! It tastes like butter melted in water. It is called SuYouCha (酥油茶).
Bottom right – simple fried egg in flour. Nothing special.
Before we left, we packed a puff from that lady – looks like our curry puff but non-spicy filling inside, all vegetables. Our guide told us those are actually non-local food, apart from the tea! :p
Cost: RMB47. Quite expensive!
Address: Just in front of the motel we stayed.
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Ripped-off Lunch
Our next lunch was a ripped off lunch. After visiting the Tiger Leaping Gorge, the driver said it is too long to get back to town and he recommended a place for us to eat. He is of no good intention, coz this place is a ‘black shop’. I’m sure he got big commission.
Well, the place actually looks great, as it was by the river with good scene. They do not have menus, so we have to go to the kitchen and order based on what we see à a unique way of ordering here, also in other parts of Yunnan.
Here is their kitchen - they cook rice outside:
This is what we ordered. On the left are the raw ingredients on the shelf, and on the right are the final cooked dishes. The bottom row is蚕豆, which I never know can be eaten like this – quite delicious!
Here is a flower dish that we ordered. Yes, we ate flowers fried in egg!
Well, so far, the taste is not bad, actually quite nice. But when this final dish came out, it really upset us. This is the famous local dish - boiled chicken with mushrooms (草菇炖土鸡).
There wasn’t any chicken meat. We paid for half chicken, but we couldn’t find any meat! Where did the meat go for the drumstick and the breast? They were just bones and bones only! Look how watery the soup is! We suspect that they took the meat and gave us the bones only.
It cost us RMB147, and RMB75 went to that stupid chicken dish alone – all we paid were chicken bones only.
The name of the shop is 江鱼潭伊家园. Beware! This is how the restaurant looks (quite cozy on the right photo). If you are brought there, you may still proceed as the taste is quite good, but please avoid ordering their chicken.
Cost: RMB 147
Address: 江鱼潭伊家园 near Tiger Leaping Gorge
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A-Ma-Yi Restaurant, Naxi local food in Lijiang Old Town
We have read about this restaurant before, and we purposely asked the guide to bring us there. Upon verification with the locals, it is true that this shop is run by a real Naxi local. Amayi (阿妈意) is a lady who is very famous in her cooking. She is retired now and passed this shop to her son. The restaurant is located inside the Lijiang old town, in a secluded area – that’s why not many know of this place! It took our guide some time to find it too!
We invited our guide to join us for dinner, and she explained those dishes to us. I actually can’t remember what we ordered and the pictures taken wasn’t clear. Roughly, I could remember we ordered fried potato (like French fries but in spicy sauce), fried mushrooms (干扁茶树菇), and two other very spicy dishes which I couldn’t take, plus a broiled chicken with toufu (豆腐炖土鸡). Yes, we were very upset with the lunch and want to try an authentic boiled chicken again.
Look at the picture below – that is a good comparison between the lunch chicken (left) and the one we got from Amayi (right).
The one on the right has so much ingredient that you can see from the surface. The one from lunch, we could hardly find anything!
Cost: RMB 138
Address: 丽江古城五一街小石桥
Tel: 13988895592
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Motel Breakfast
Here is our second breakfast, just before leaving the motel – we spent only 2 nights there. It was just plain porridge with some pickles. The porridge is so hot that it helped warmed up our body – it was very cold on our last day in Lijiang!
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Vermicelli Soup
There is one other specialty in Yunnan, which is their vermicelli soup (过桥米线). Before leaving Lijiang, our guide let us try this. Well, they brought up the meat, egg, noodle and soup, in separate bowls. What we had to do was to mix them and eat. A bit different in the way they eat, but the taste is similar to our noodle soup here, with a bit of spiciness.
Cost: RMB 41 for 3 bowls
Address: Just around Lijiang Old Town entrance, next to the taxi stand.
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