1 Sept 2012 ~ Lunchtime in Beijing

Listening to: Sister Nancy ~ Bam Bam


My training class went out for lunch everyday. They were excellent hosts and provided a wide variety of delicacies, from traditional Beijing and Thai, to Cantonese (the Partner owns the restaurant designed with the street names of Hong Kong) and traditional YunNan.

Most lunches occurred at The Place, a nice area with wide streets, various shopping scenes as well as eclectic restaurants.

Where am I again?

To get there we walked by these "Easter Island" statues.

Our "final" lunch together was at the Middle 8th YunNan restaurant.

The province of Yunnan is located in the far southwest of the country. The capital of the province is Kunming and borders Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam.

This cuisine is an amalgam of the cuisines of the Han Chinese and other ethnic minorities of China. As the province with the largest number of ethnic minority groups, Yunnan cuisine is vastly varied, and it is difficult to make generalisations.

Many Yunnan dishes are quite spicy, and mushrooms are featured prominently.

Another important characteristic of Yunnan cuisine is the wide use of flowers as food. We savored the jasmine flower omelet as an opener.

Another egg dish included an egg frittata-like dish.

Hot post potatoes with scallions, chicken and chili peppers was so hot I had to order more herbal tea!

The final course was a stuffed whole fish. Unwrapping the fish unfolded a mound of flavorful rice.

As a side note, I received a warning this week from YouTube that one of the videos I posted from the Chinese New Year parade was copyrighted as it included the macarana song (or so I concluded), so I had to remove the video.