User profile: joshwa

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Forums > Living in Kunming > GoKunming feedback

Minor enhancement request— in the thread update emails, can you put the name of the poster? Right now I get the content but I don't know who posted it.

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Forums > Food & Drink > Kunming Chinese Food

Will no one list actually good KM dishes?

* Chao Erkuai (my fave KM dish)
* xiao chao rou (simple stirfry of beef/pork with soy, chili, garlic, and green onion, and sometimes a little huajiao. I have no idea why it's so satisfying to me...)
* Erkuai bao youtiao (awesome street breakfast: a donut wrapped in a rice-flour gordita smeared with sweet peanut sauce)
* Mugua ji (chicken with a local tangy fruit; kind of like preserved lemon)
* many many kinds of mushrooms (stirfried or hotpot)
* Ru Bing (firm local goat cheese— best in little panfried sandwiches with yunnan ham in the middle; dip in sugar or peppersalt)
* Dai anything (missing good pho? get niu ba hu with xi mi xian, BYO mint, tho)
* Lu Ersi - A fantastically chewy and tender rice noodle (actually long strips of erkuai) stirfried in a thick spicy bean sauce...maybe too close to mixian for you?).

* Funny little sweet purple pancakes (don't know what they're called, you can get them at laofangzi)
* Some enormous pork rib thing (try it at 1918 gare le sud)
* Chrysanthemum greens salad with fresh chilis (yes, raw veg in China!)
* Fried shredded potatoes with pickled chive buds
* sweet and sour spareribs, usually there's a hint of sichuan peppercorn in the sauce
* stir-fried lilies with yunnan ham
* any of the tons of different pickles! Sour: Cucumber, lotus, rolled tofu skin, liang pi; sweet/sour/spicy: pineapple, tiny radishes, green plums.
* shaokao. seriously, you're clearly doing it wrong. Don't buy from the little metal stands that pop up at night; go to a proper place with the huge array of stuff on sticks (that's actually kept frozen until they day it's used!). The spice mixture here is unique to KM. Try the whole eggplant stuffed with pork, or the fish in chili paste, and especially the enoki mushrooms and the lotus root with glutinous rice.

(Yes, you're SOL if you're vegetarian and don't eat spicy food...)

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Forums > Living in Kunming > Are 楚家刀 knives (on 西昌路) any good?

There's no such thing as a knife that never needs resharpening. Get a steel and use it every time you use your knife and it will hold its edge longer. (note that using a steel does not actually create an edge, it just straightens the microscopic "teeth" that form on a good edge)

If you'd prefer not to use a stone to sharpen your knives yourself, take them to your local wet market and ask one of the meat vendors to sharpen it for you on their stone, or tell you what days the knife-sharpening guy comes around on his bike.

I have an el-cheapo Walmart "mainstays" 8" chef's knife, and used with a steel it stays reasonably sharp. I use it daily and have only needed to grind a new edge every two or three months.

Take care of your knives and they'll take care of you. :)

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Have been going here since they opened. Thoroughly enjoy the pizzas and the authentic american-pizzeria-type salads!.

The staff, while not always attentive, is at least very nice and patient with language difficulties. Their English is pretty good compared to almost anywhere else in KM. Earlier service problems referenced below have long since been dealt with.

(Restaurant management tip: make sure that whatever place your front-of-house staff has to hang out while working, it has view of the tables so they can occasionally pick their heads up and see what's going on.)

New! They have revised their menu recently, with the option to have fresh tomatoes instead of tomato sauce! This is excellent, as I've previously had to order this myself so they seem to have gotten the idea.

However: Since they changed the menu, I have ordered pizza 3 times, both with sauce option A (just fresh tomatoes), and I have received option B every single time. (They aren't just reversed— I've ordered B and gotten B, also). Very frustrating!

The B sauce isn't terrible, but it's not a standard Neapolitan sauce (uncooked canned crushed tomatoes, a little minced garlic or garlic powder, sugar, and salt), but more of a Sicilian sauce (cooked tomatoes, onions, oregano). On a Sicilian thick-crust pizza it'd be great, but a Neapolitan crust deserves a Neapolitan sauce. Yes, I am a spoiled NYC food snob, but when the kitchen gets it right, it's quite fantastic, and I forget that I am in KM!

(Almost. Except for the cheese. If I opened a pizzeria I'd fly in Mozzarella di Bufala nightly, and each pie would cost 250RMB. Back to reality.)

New! they now have proper takeout pizza boxes, so I can grab a few pies to go and eat in front of the TV.

However: The pizza oven only fits one pie at a time, so it takes forever, especially if there are other customers ahead of you. By the time I get home one pie is still warm but the other is quite cold since it had to sit and wait while the other one cooked.

Please, Lost Garden, get your sauce ordering system right, and build a bigger pizza oven!

And delivery! Delivery would be unspeakably awesome, even though I'd probably gain 50lbs and go bankrupt since I'd use it so often.

By

The address listed here is incorrect— it's on Jindingshan Lu, not Bei Lu.

If that's not enough for your taxi driver, tell him that it's on the western end of Jindingshan Lu, and to ignore the street numbers, as they are not in any logical order.