By Li Jun (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-06-02 09:30

In a discussion with friends over where to go for dinner on a recent weekend, Yunnan cuisine won out over all the other choices.

In recent years, many eateries featuring this regional fare have mushroomed in Beijing. A lot of them are elaborately decorated with palm trees and batiks with minority themes and the waitresses and waiters are often outfitted in minority attire.

Still, my friends and I preferred an old simple restaurant where the cold rice noodles are delicious. Among the Yunnan restaurants we visited, this one had the best taste and the most reasonable prices.

But when we reached the street, we were disappointed to find it had been replaced by a busy construction site, where another skyscraper will soon spring up.

Childhood memory

Though I was born in North China, Yunnan is my second hometown as I grew up in this southwestern province, which features multiple ethnic minority cultures.

I always associate the local cuisine with a small rice noodle restaurant on the old Wucheng Road in Kunming, capital of Yunnan.

There were just about three tables in the restaurant hidden among the old wooden two-storey buildings along the narrow road made of stone slabs. Like most restaurants in Kunming of that time, customers had to queue up to find a seat. Many people would finish a bowl of rice noodle before finding a seat.

After paying what amounted to 5 US cents, you got a piece of paper that you handed in to the chef. Inside the kitchen, some eight kinds of ingredients such as soya sauce, vinegar, peanut powder and meat sauce were lined out on the table. The cook casually spooned a bit of this and that into the bowl, and the result was wonderful.

Both my elder sister and I were young and not accustomed to the hot peppers, which were invariably fried into the meat sauce, an indispensable ingredient for all kinds of rice noodles.

Even if you asked the cook for a "non-red" bowl, the dish would still be served with the sauce.

So in those days in the early 1980s, my parents would watch us two small girls holding big bowls, tears falling from their eyes because of the spicy peppers. But we still eagerly devoured the rice noodles till the bowl was empty.

My favourite was the rice noodles covered in condensed bean curd jelly (douhua mixian). Unlike the cold noodle dish (liangban mixian) which came with stronger peppers, or the noodles cooked in a small pot (xiaoguo mixian) that always had fragrant flowered garlic with a bit of soup, the bean curd jelly noodles were tender and warm, exactly the right stuff for a child's tender taste buds.

After coming to Beijing, I tried bean curd jelly noodles several times, but never was able to quite recreate the taste from my memory. Sadly, even if I returned to Kunming, the old restaurant wouldn't be there any more the Wucheng Road had been turned into a large commercial site studded with tourists.

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