Early morning - why breakfast is a street meal here
Xi'an eats breakfast standing up. The stalls open at six, run hard until about nine and are packed away by half past nine, and what they sell belongs to the wheat-and-lamb culture of the Guanzhong plain rather than to anything you will find south of the Qinling. There are two families of food in the same lane: the Hui breakfast, which is halal and built on beef and mutton, and the Han breakfast of thick soups and steamed and griddled wheat, which arrived with migrants from the Henan and Shanxi borders. This is the hour when the city is at its most itself and its most comfortable.
The bowls, one by one
Marou hulatang is the one to start with: a beef-bone broth thickened with wheat flour, filled out with potato, cabbage and carrot and studded with small beef meatballs, seasoned hard with white pepper and finished with a spoon of chilli oil. It is not the Henan hulatang, which is thinner, hotter and uses gluten; the Xi'an version is thicker and milder, and it comes with a tuo tuo mo that you tear into the bowl. Youcha mahua is the opposite pleasure - wheat flour roasted in beef fat with sesame and peanuts, cooked into a savoury porridge and served with a fried dough twist left to soften on top. Doufunao is jellied tofu under a gravy of soy, vinegar, chilli, pickled mustard and fried soybeans. And there is the bread: the big hard guokui, tuo tuo mo, and dancai jiamo - a fried egg and vegetables folded into a split flatbread, which is the closest thing here to a sandwich.
Where to go - Sajinqiao and the Xiaonanmen morning market
The morning route runs through the Hui quarter and out to the wet market inside the Xiaonanmen, the little south gate: stalls of vegetables, dried chillies, fresh noodles, pickles and live fish, with a row of breakfast cookshops along the edge where market traders eat at seven. It is the best single stop in the city for this meal, partly because everything is made within sight of the table and partly because nobody there is performing for an audience. A tea stop finishes the morning - a covered bowl of Shaanxi green tea, or an eight-treasure tea with rock sugar and dried fruit if you want the sweet version.
Cultural Insight - the wheat line
Chinese cooking divides along the wheat-and-rice line, and Shaanxi sits firmly on the wheat side: bread appears at every meal, including the first one of the day, in half a dozen forms, and the habit of tearing bread into soup by hand recurs at lunch and at dinner. The meat tradition is the other half of the story. Hui and Han cooking in Xi'an both lean on beef and mutton rather than pork for the soup pots, and the pepper, vinegar and chilli temperament of the breakfast table is closer to the northwest than to the rest of central China. If you are travelling on to Chengdu, Shanghai or Guilin, the change in the first meal of the day will be the clearest sign you have crossed something - congee, dumplings and sweet soy milk instead of soup, bread and chilli oil.
Practical notes
Half of these stalls have no English and no printed menu, which is why this is run as a private morning rather than left to chance; your guide orders, explains and pays. Portions are large, so the route uses shared bowls and small servings at each stop instead of one helping each, and the timing is arranged so that the market is at its busiest when you arrive but the group is not standing in one queue for twenty minutes. Vegetarian versions of the tofu and the bread dishes are easy; the soups are built on meat stock and cannot be adapted, so tell us at booking if they should be left out. The morning works in both directions and can start at 06:00 if you would rather see the very first pots come off the stove.
Meals
Breakfast
Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.
