Sit down at a real Yang Rou Pao Mo restaurant in Xi’an and the first thing that happens is nothing gets cooked. Instead, a server hands you two dense, hard rounds of bread and walks away. You’re expected to tear them apart yourself — into pieces the size of rice grains, ideally, though nobody will … Read more
Order Liang Pi anywhere outside China and there’s a decent chance it shows up on the menu under “summer specials,” next to the iced drinks. In Xi’an, nobody would think to file it there. Walk down almost any street in the city in the dead of winter and you’ll still find a vendor slicing thin, … Read more
Before you can order it, you’ll probably see it written down somewhere — on a restaurant sign, a menu, a T-shirt in a tourist shop — as a single, enormous Chinese character that looks less like writing and more like a small diagram. It’s not a typo and it’s not decorative. It’s a real character, … Read more
Step off an overnight train in Xi’an at two in the morning, and the first thing that greets you outside the station isn’t silence. It’s the smell of cumin and chili oil, the clatter of ladles against giant woks, and a line of red-lit food stalls stretching farther than you can see. For over a … Read more