Dining · Chinese · Xi’an
DeFaChang Dumpling Restaurant
A Bell and Drum Tower dumpling house founded in 1936, famous for a banquet of many differently shaped and filled dumplings.
The Restaurant
De Fa Chang has been making dumplings on West Street at the Bell and Drum Towers Square since 1936. The city’s tourism pages treat it as a cultural stop as much as a restaurant: a place for visitors to taste Shaanxi flavours and learn something about Xi’an’s history. Its dumpling-making skills were added to Shaanxi’s intangible cultural heritage list in 2010.
The famous format is the dumpling banquet, a feast in which every dumpling is different in shape, filling or colour. The restaurant holds a Guinness record for 318 dumpling-making techniques, and the Shaanxi government’s tourism site quotes the line that one dumpling has one form and one taste.
What Arrives at the Table
Photographs on the Chinese government’s time-honoured brands page show dumplings in sour soup, dumplings coloured with vegetable juice, and frog-shaped dumplings arranged with lotus-root snacks. The Shaanxi tourism page recommends the dumpling feast and the sour-soup dumplings. The dumpling feast and a three-fresh-delicacies dumpling won the national Golden Tripod award in 1989.
It is a spectacle meal in the old centre of Xi’an, worth planning around a visit to the Bell and Drum Towers.
Sources: Shaanxi Tourism: Time-honored Xi’an food, De Fa Chang; China Services Info: Time-honored brands in Xi’an. Check the official websites for current information.
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