I managed to contact the two Chinese ladies I met at the Dragon’s Backbone Rice Terraces. I borrowed a phone from the Yangshuo International Youth Hostel (actually I had to pay for it) and managed to contact them while they were still touring around Yangshuo. I needed to wait for them to come back and freshen up before meeting up in front of KFC along West Street.
By this time, it was already around eight in the evening and I was starving. We chose to eat at one of the Chinese restaurants within the area. The one we entered was a local food type of shop. We quickly got seated and there were a lot of patrons, so I hoped it was good. They had newspaper clippings of how famous the place is, most especially their chef.
The ladies ordered our food, I sure hope they know better than me what to order in these types of places. Turns out they already went to the village of Xingping and toured the river there. They were raving about how great the place was. I believe them, since I have already seen photos of the place, more especially so since the weather was very good that time of the day. I do plan to visit these places too but I’ll probably have to do it on my own.
Our food finally came, the main dish was the Beer Fish 啤酒鱼. This is a specialty food of this region and it does look impressive. The fish used here is fresh water fish, something I’m not really used to because all of my fish I’ve every had is from the sea. Their fresh water fish has a little bit more bones than the salt-water fish but it was okay. As the name implies, the fish in this dish is cooked with a little beer, but I couldn’t really taste the beer but it still tasted good.
The other dish was eggplant in claypot. It was an ordinary dish but still tasty. The fish was the really star of the show, and it seems that every other talbe is having the same thing. I can’t blame them, it was really nice. The restaurant was busy the whole time we were there and it seemed that service was suffering. My dinner mates were trying to get the attention of the waitresses to no avail, the waitress just kept popping back into the kitchen. I also tried to help but was also ignored. Only after 10 minutes of trying did we manage to get their attention. It would seem that popularity has its price.
This place is just a few stores down the KFC along West Street and should be quite easy to spot. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the name of the place. After a wonderful meal we paid the bill and head out to West Street to digest.
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