Why Dali in China’s Yunnan province is such a great place for food adventurers

Restaurant-goers in Dali, in China’s western Yunnan province, are spoiled by the historical city’s abundance of quality ingredients. Fridges stacked with seasonal vegetables, tofu concoctions and fresh cuts of meat are common sights for diners to browse, while fried innards and fish vie for attention in giant metal bowls. Aquatic vegetables soaking in water line floors. This is farm-to-table, Dali style.\nThanks to its temperate climate and diverse terrain, Yunnan is suitable for growing all manner of produce, from rice and avocados to tomatillos and blueberries. Its culinary practices are equally varied, shaped by the traditions of over 20 ethnic communities that converge there.\nA two-hour train ride from the provincial capital Kunming, Dali, with its bountiful harvests and slower pace of life, is fertile ground for culinary experimentation.\nChang Hua, the chef behind Youshi, a modern Chinese restaurant, first visited the city after finishing culinary school in 2015, eager for a fresh start away from his home in Anhui province. He has called Dali home for over a decade.\nHis time in Yunnan has been a chain of experiments. He began with a makeshift catering business, delivering fried rice on his scooter. He later ran a couple of mala tang (spicy hotpot) businesses, private hotel kitchens and a small restaurant.\n\nInspired by a trip to Shanghai, where he tasted polished approaches to China’s southwestern cuisines, he opened Youshi in 2020.\n“It was in Dali [that] I slowly found joy in cooking again,” Chang says.\nThe restaurant is located in a rustic house perched on a hill overlooking the expansive waters of Erhai Lake. Just behind the house lies its farm, which is dotted with an eclectic mix of produce: tall stalks of kale, low-lying pumpkins, plump eggplants and petite tomatillos all share the space.\nLike many urban youths, Chang knew little about farming, but says the team is learning as they go. This newfound interest in cultivating the land is shared by many young chefs in Dali.\nTucked away in another corner of Dali is Trout Restaurant, named after the freshwater rainbow trout farmed in Yunnan. It was opened by chef-owner Xu Kai, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America who went on to intern at Eleven Madison Park in New York City and Gaggan in Bangkok.\nXu first visited Dali in the summer of 2022. “The moment I tasted a local tomato, I knew this was it,” he says.\n\nAfter a short stint in a Shenzhen kitchen, he returned in March 2023 to find a location for a restaurant, opening Trout Restaurant later that year.\nSince then, Xu and his team have maintained the restaurant’s 400 square metre (4,300 sq ft) farm, where plants grow amid rambunctious chickens and a goat.\nFor Xu, the restaurant’s interior speaks of Yunnan as much as the food. The team spent four months transforming an old wood workshop into their new home. Tables and chairs were crafted from local timber, while lamps were fashioned from fish cages and bee buckets. To ensure an intimate experience, Trout has just four tables.\nThe herbs and plants grown on-site seep into the menu. A mini distiller transforms geranium leaves into essential oil, lemongrass is steeped with corn cobs for a soothing tea, and Vietnamese coriander is blended into a sauce to pair with local beef.\nThe farm is still under development, but the restaurant already uses its own eggs, and fresh goat’s milk is coming soon. As winter deepens, pumpkins, peppers and pea shoots begin to grace the tables, along with perennial herbs like perilla and lemon balm.\nFor both Chang and Xu, maintaining a farm is a way to understand how things grow, from germination to fruition. Neither claims expertise, but both clearly relish getting their hands dirty.\n\nBeyond the farms stretches a vast universe of culinary possibilities, shaped by cultivated fields, foraged wilds, traditional diets and flavours imported from across the world.\n“Yunnan has simply the best ingredients – the seasonality, the quality, the diversity,” Xu says. “We as chefs cook the ingredients, but it’s really the ingredients that teach and shape us.”\nThe tasting menu at Trout I had that evening featured a wide range of ingredients from the province, including sour honey (a traditional remedy of China’s Dai people), cured ham from Jianchuan county, redtail catfish caught in the Lancang River, and marbled pork from a local breed called dong gua zhu (winter melon pig).\n“Many fine restaurants in bigger cities place a huge focus on ingredients from Yunnan,” Chang says. “We live and breathe here. We’re well positioned to showcase the quality of the produce here.”\nHaving lived in Dali for over a decade, Chang still sets out each November with his team to explore different corners of the province. Almost inevitably, a new flavour or technique will catch their attention.\nChang embraces the constraints and liberties of approaching Yunnan food as an outsider. “I am not making traditional Yunnan food. I try to work with local ingredients and borrow from local ways of cooking, but present them in new ways. Creating is what I’m good at.”\n\nXu views his restaurant as an introduction for those beginning to discover the richness of Yunnan’s food culture. He hopes to raise the profile of Yunnan in both China and the wider world as a gesture of gratitude to the land and people that took him in.\n“Yunnan is such a welcoming place for young people from all over the country. When I first moved here, I stayed with a local Bai family, three generations under one roof. They were endlessly hospitable, always inviting me to join them for breakfast,” he says.\nXu and Chang are symbolic of a shift in Dali’s old town, where finding new restaurants run by young chefs from elsewhere was once unthinkable. Today, the city hums with fresh culinary ideas.\n“It’s great to see more dynamism in the city, with all the new restaurants,” says Kang Hui, a Bai local who teaches cooking to visitors at the Linden Centre in Xizhou, a town about half an hour north of Dali by car.\n“At the same time, to truly experience Dali, you have to go out to the local shops and eat to your heart’s content.” (Certain new establishments offer only fashionably tiny portions.)\n\nAccording to Alice Zhang, head of leisure travel customer service at WildChina, years of lockdown due to the Covid pandemic pushed the industry to innovate.\n“Yunnan food gradually came to the forefront,” Zhang says. “Everyone now knows about Yunnan coffee, which also took off during the pandemic. We’re now starting to introduce travellers to Yunnan wine as well.”\nA thousand miles away in Hong Kong, Yunnan’s bounty is already widely enjoyed, from Pu’er tea to bowls of noodles at TamJai Yunnan Mixian. In November, its cuisine found an unlikely home at the newly opened Kimpton Tsim Sha Tsui Hong Kong, with the launch of Jija by Vicky Lau, a bistro inspired by flavours from China’s southwestern provinces, including Yunnan and Guizhou.\nLau was captivated by Yunnan’s food on her first visit in 2023.\n“How did I not know about Yunnan before? It’s every chef’s dream to find beautiful ingredients to work with year-round,” Lau says, cradling a box of hong guo shen, a sturdy berry grown in Yunnan.\nAlthough a veteran of French cuisine, Lau is eager to cook from a different pantry. “Yunnan food has more freshness and acidity than other regional Chinese cuisines. The herbs, spices and dips are so different from what I’m used to in French cooking, with its sauces and meat jus,” she says.\n\nLike Youshi in Dali, Jija openly adapts Yunnan flavours for local tastes. Yunnanese ingredients meet Hong Kong sensibilities: mushrooms appear in salads, soups and stir-fries, fresh herbs and spices season grilled meats, and a hearty fried rice with Yunnan cured ham, ganba mushrooms and Guizhou-style fried pork fat anchors the menu.\nIn Dali, Hong Kong and elsewhere across China, chefs who find themselves humbled by what Yunnan province offers are learning from locals and blending new flavours and techniques to create fresh culinary experiences.\n