By Ye Jun (Beijing weekend)
Updated: 2007-11-09 10:48

Lan Hua Hua is named after a popular North Shaanxi folk song. Just by its name, most Chinese people would immediately realize that this is a restaurant serving cuisine from the region. It is one of a few Shaanxi restaurants that are bigger, better, and cleaner than the ordinary fast-food style smaller ones.

The restaurant offers plenty of popular home-style foods, yet the best is still the Shaanxi typical foods. That is, shredded cake boiled in mutton soup, oil-sprayed hand-stretched noodles, flour cake with pork stuffing, and seasoned flour noodles with wheat gluten.

If you order shredded cake boiled in mutton soup, you can ask the restaurant to shred the cake for you, but you can also shred the cake yourself, as many people would do in Shaanxi. There is a miniature, bite-size version of the flour cake with pork stuffing. The seasoned flour noodles with wheat gluten has the typical fragrant mixture of sour and spicy flavors.

Seasoned noodles with wheat gluten. One mutton skewer is enough for one person. It is deep-fried, and rather oily. A local produced sweet osmanthus-scented rice wine is also worth trying.

There are plenty of other choices on the menu, which are mostly ordinary Chinese home-style dishes. For two people, a noodle or mutton soup, with two cold dishes, plus a flour cake with pork stuffing for each, is really quite enough.

Lan Hua Hua
Asian Games Village branch: Northside of Wukuang Dasha, 15 Anhuili Siqu, Chaoyang District.
Tel: 010-64968181

Xibahe branch: 2/F Shihua Hotel, 14 Xibahe Dongli, Chaoyang district.
Tel: 010-64664360