Morning - east into the orchard country
The day starts early and goes east, out of the city and across the Wei river plain to Lintong, the district that sits under Mount Li about forty kilometres away. This is orchard and market-garden country rather than a monument: the Lintong pomegranate is a protected local product with a harvest from late September, the small bright huo jing persimmon ripens in October, and the villages between Xinfeng and Daiwang grow most of what they eat. You walk a market in the morning with your guide - vegetables, mountain greens, dried chillies, fresh noodles and the flatbreads being baked on the griddle - and the lunch that follows is bought and cooked within a few kilometres of the table.
Lunch - a farmhouse table in the Guanzhong style
The meal is in a nong jia yuan, a farmhouse kitchen with a courtyard, and it is the reason for the drive. Stone-baked bread - a dough pressed onto heated pebbles, a method the Guanzhong plain has used for centuries - comes first, with a dish of fried free-range eggs and, in spring, toon shoots. Then a local chicken cooked with dried chilli and potato, hand-pulled saozi noodles with pork and diced vegetables, jiang shui yu yu - cornflour drops poached in a sour fermented broth and eaten cold - and stir-fried greens from the hillside. Pomegranate juice is served in season. The cooking is plain, sour and savoury, and it is not restaurant food: it is what a family in this district eats when it has guests.
Afternoon - back into the city
You drive back to Xi'an through the middle of the afternoon, which leaves time to rest at the hotel before the evening. Your guide uses part of the drive to explain the three kitchens of Shaanxi, because the night market is arranged to show them: the north of the province cooks millet, lamb and potato, and eats noodles with mutton; the Guanzhong plain, where Xi'an sits, cooks wheat, pork and vinegar, and puts bread in everything; and the south, towards Hanzhong and Ankang, cooks rice, river fish and chilli in a way that is much closer to Sichuan than to the rest of the province. The three are the same size on a map and completely different at the table, and the food is the easiest way to see the geography.
Evening - the night markets
The evening begins at Sajinqiao, the Hui street northwest of the Drum Tower, which is where Xi'an families actually eat: cumin lamb skewers, beef soup, sour dumplings, fried persimmon cakes, and the noise of a working street. Then on to Yongxingfang, inside the Zhongshan Gate, a lane of food stalls reorganised in the last decade around the province's regional cooking - Qishan noodles with pork, hot rice noodles from Hanzhong, mutton noodles from Yulin, steamed noodles from Ankang, and the Qianzhou four treasures. In the courtyard at the centre there is rice wine served in a small bowl that you throw to the ground when you have finished it, a Shaanxi drinking custom turned into an evening's entertainment. Dinner is assembled across the two markets rather than eaten in one place, which is the point of the evening.
Cultural Insight - why the market beats the restaurant
A province that has fed itself for three thousand years puts its range on the street, not on a menu. Two streets of stalls in Xi'an can take you from lamb and millet in the north to rice and chilli in the south without leaving the city walls, and the cooking is done by people who grew up with it rather than by a kitchen cooking for a dining room. The other advantage is volume: at a night market you can eat four small things from four stalls, which is not possible in a restaurant. Ordering is by pointing and by phone, and portions are generous enough that a group of two or three should share one bowl per stop. Say at the start how much you intend to eat and the walk will be trimmed or extended to suit.
Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Accommodation
Overnight at your 4- or 5-star hotel in central Xi'an.
