Dinner at Pingyao 平遥

It was finally night time and I decided that I would be leaving Pingyao the next day. Two days of wandering around the ancient town was enough for me. Maybe I wasn’t that much of a history afficionado. I leave that to the Chinese. For all of its ancient history, food seems to be a bit of a disppointment for me here in Pingyao. They do have some special food here but they didn’t seem to be that appetizing. Earlier, I had some nice Pingyao beef with fried rice, but the snacks weren’t that good.

I went along the main stretch of Pingyao ancient town to find out what I can have for dinner. There was one type of dish which intrigued me no end. It was something like a honeycomb made from what appeared to be noodles, except the holes were rounder. I decided to walk up to one of the restaurants to try them out. The dish is called kao lao lao 烤栳栳. The strangely named dish is really just rolled up noodles. You take each one of them then dip it in chili sauce. It was hugely underwhelming and I didn’t like it at all. There was too much of the noodle and the chili wasn’t even very nice. Shanxi province has numerous forms of noodles and this was apparently one of them. One of the more famous ones was Knife Sliced Noodles which I had in other countries.

I had another dish together with that it was called the Water Fried Beef Dumplings 牛肉水生煎. It didn’t seem fried, either that or it was a very poor rendition of it. Maybe it was just a name? Anyway, this one was not good either, a far cry from my yummy sheng jian I had in Shanghai. I could even finish the food there as I was already sick of eating them. Was it just bad luck that I ended up where a bad version was? Or doesn’t it really taste that bad?

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