A taste of Xishuangbanna you can’t miss out on

Early this year I went to Xishuangbanna where I had the most amazing plate of food. I have been in China for nearly 5 years and this right here is probably my favourite. This taste of Xishuangbanna is traditional and tropical.

Xishuangbanna has a lot of fresh food partly I feel due to the farms being right there and the style of cooking. Not a lot of oil is used and the dishes usually come with a sweet spicy sauce of some sort that elevates the flavour. This plate of food was filled with a variety of tastes and texture each working in harmony together. The lettuce leaves there to be used as wraps or one could simply eat each section alone.

Pineapple rice a traditional taste of Xishuangbanna

In the centre of the plate, there is a pineapple that has sticky sweet rice in it. The rice is not too sticky to stay stuck in your mouth. It also is not too sweet that one would think it is a dessert.

Traditional sauces

There were two sauces that one could use to put in the lettuce leaves to build the wraps. One was a spicy brown sauce and the other more of a sweet and sour sauce. Both worked very well with each meat dish on the plate. The flavour was never over powering as to over take the taste of the meat. Each sauce rather lifted the meat into the spot light.

The variety of meat

There were some fresh prawns still with their skins on. They had a fresh herd taste to them, perfectly cooked. Then there was some chicken which was crispy on the outside so that when you took a bite you got that crunch. The chicken meat however was tender and juicy. Along side the chicken was some pork belly, now one normally thinks of pork belly as being rather fatty but this was not. This was rather meaty with a taste of fat. My personal favourite was the pork with the sweet and sour sauce. A whole fish cooked in spices with a the perfect mix of sweet and spicy added the tropical feeling to the dish.

The sides

Along side with the perfectly sweet rice, the meat cooked to perfection and elevating sauces were some fresh cucumber, watermelon and prawn chips. The prawn chips worked well as a spoon to scoop some of the rice and eat like that.

What I loved so much about this dish was how fresh it was. How each aspect of the dish had a totally unique taste. When eaten together they became alive and filled one with the feelings of being in the tropics. If ever in Xishuangbanna I highly recommend you go have lunch at this restaurant. The address is 菩提大道雨林古树茶旁边巷子景勐寨8-109.