Evening - the Hui quarter and why the food is here
The Muslim Quarter is not a market laid on for visitors; it is a residential quarter of perhaps twenty thousand Hui, Chinese-speaking Muslims whose ancestors settled around the Drum Tower from the Tang dynasty onward, and in numbers under the Ming. The Great Mosque on Huajue Lane, founded in the eighth century and rebuilt in its present form in the Ming, is the centre of it. Because the community keeps halal rules, the quarter has always cooked for itself, and out of that came one of the best street-food traditions in northern China - beef and lamb rather than pork, wheat rather than rice, and a heavy hand with vinegar, chilli and cumin.
Beiyuanmen - the main lane, and the bowl that matters
Beiyuanmen runs about five hundred metres north from the Drum Tower and is where the restaurants with names stand. Lamb pao mo is the dish the city measures itself against: a bowl of mutton broth, glass noodles and sliced lamb into which you tear two flatbreads yourself, piece by piece, until the bowl is full of fingernail-sized scraps; the kitchen takes it away, cooks the bread through in the broth and brings it back. Tearing it yourself is not a gimmick - a machine-cut bowl is considered a mark of impatience. Lao Sun Jia, founded in 1898 and still on the same street, is the standard-setting house, and a plate of sweet pickled garlic comes with it. The same ritual applies to hulutou pao mo, made with pig intestine, which is a Xi'an breakfast rather than a dinner.
The rest of the table
Laozhi roujiamo is the local sandwich: pork belly braised for hours in a spiced broth, chopped and packed into a baiji mo baked until crisp, which is the dish foreigners sometimes call a Chinese hamburger and locals simply call a bun. Majiang liangpi is cold starch noodles dressed with sesame paste, garlic water, vinegar and chilli oil, served in summer and eaten all year. Zeng gao is steamed for hours in a deep pot in alternating layers of glutinous rice and jujube, then cut into slabs and weighed; jing gao are its palm-sized cousins on sticks, dusted with sesame and rose. Add persimmon cakes fried in oil, cold rice zongzi with honey, cumin lamb skewers off the charcoal, and sour plum juice to drink.
Sajinqiao and Dapiyuan - where the city itself eats
Beiyuanmen is the visitor lane; the locals eat a little further out, on Dapiyuan and around Sajinqiao, five minutes' walk northwest of the Drum Tower. The cooking is the same and the prices are lower, the queues at half past seven are made up of families rather than tour groups, and several of the best-known shops here - for beef soup, for sour dumplings in broth, for cold beef sliced thin - have no English sign and no interest in acquiring one. Your guide orders at each stop, explains what is in the bowl, and handles payment, which is by phone rather than cash almost everywhere. The walk between the two markets is part of the evening: it takes you past the back of the Great Mosque and through streets where people are still doing their shopping at nine at night.
Cultural Insight - eating rules of the quarter
Two things worth knowing before you start. First, the food is halal, so no pork and no alcohol anywhere in the quarter, and asking for a beer will get a polite refusal; sour plum juice and tea are what is drunk, and the wineskin of the old quarter is a bottle of apple-flavoured soda. Second, portions are large and the stalls are close together, so a walk of one street can easily become a full dinner - the guide will pace the stops and cut the list short if you are full, and it is worth saying at the start how much you intend to eat. Vegetarian bowls exist but are not the quarter's strength; say so at booking and the route will be rearranged around the tofu, bread and vegetable dishes it does well.
Meals
Dinner
Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.
