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Dining in Dali

Dali dines on its mountain-and-lake setting. The Yunnan Province city — population 600,000 across the three districts of Dali Ancient Town, Xiaguan modern city, and the surrounding villages — sits on the western shore of Erhai Lake at the foot of the 4,000-metre Cangshan Mountain range. The cuisine is distinctly Bai (the local ethnic minority that has occupied this region for thousand-plus years and which still makes up over 60% of Dali's population), with signatures that exist nowhere else in China: rushan, the thin sheet-form fermented goat-milk dairy product locally called 'Yunnan cheese' that's grilled, fried or rolled-with-sugar; wild mushroom hot pot using the matsutake, porcini, and pine-mushroom that grow in the Cangshan forests; crossing-bridge noodles (guoqiao mixian) — the high-altitude rice-noodle-and-broth dish that the broader Yunnan Province is famous for, with Dali's version being among the most traditional; and Bai-style erkuai, the steamed-rice-cake that's eaten with a soybean dipping sauce as breakfast or snack.

The dining map clusters in two zones. Dali Ancient Town (Dali Gucheng) — the thousand-year-old walled-and-gated old quarter five kilometres north of the modern Xiaguan city — holds the iconic restaurants: Bailixiang and Jingjing Snack House for Bai cuisine, the Apricot Flower Restaurant for mixed Bai-and-Sichuan, Wo Zai Dali Deng Ni for wild-mushroom hot pot, plus dozens of smaller Bai-family kitchens along Renmin Lu and Foreigner Street. The Xiaguan modern city to the south holds the more presentable Cantonese-and-Sichuan rooms and the better hotel restaurants. The lakeside Xizhou village twenty minutes north holds the more rural Bai-cuisine kitchens, including the famous Xizhou erkuai market.

Reservations are not standard culture in Dali — most Ancient Town restaurants are walk-in only — but useful at the higher-tier kitchens during Chinese national holiday weeks (October Golden Week is the heaviest tourist period). English menus are universal in the Ancient Town tourist quarter and present-but-functional elsewhere.

Pair the food with a Yunnan-region rice wine (Erhai Lake's Yixiang and the Cangshan-Mountain Distilleries' Mibao are the two regional reference labels) or with a small flight of Yunnan teas (the prefecture is China's tea heartland, with the famous Pu'er tea aged in Cangshan-area cellars). The proper post-dinner anchor is the lakeside walk along Erhai Lake's eastern shore — the lake is genuinely beautiful at dusk and the cycling-and-walking path runs eight kilometres south from the Ancient Town.

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