Xi'an is a great food city, with a cuisine quite distinct from anything in eastern China. Wheat replaces rice as the staple — the city sits at the eastern end of the wheat-growing belt — and lamb, cumin, and chilli reflect a thousand years of Hui Muslim and Silk Road influence. The headline dishes are biang biang noodles (long, hand-stretched, served with chilli oil and vinegar), paomo (a torn-flatbread-and-mutton stew you assemble in your own bowl), liangpi (cold wheat noodles in sesame and chilli), and roujiamo (cumin-spiced shredded pork or lamb in a flat bun, sometimes called the Chinese hamburger).
The first stop for any food traveller is the Muslim Quarter around the Drum Tower — the densest concentration of street food in the city, and the place to eat lamb skewers, persimmon cakes, hand-pulled beef noodles, and pomegranate juice pressed in front of you. Beiyuanmen is the busiest food street; Huajue Lane behind the Great Mosque is calmer.
For sit-down meals, Lao Sun Jia on Dong Da Jie has been serving lamb paomo since 1898 and is the canonical Xi'an restaurant — busy, noisy, multi-storeyed. Defachang on the Bell Tower square is famous for its dumpling banquet — twenty-odd kinds of dumpling shaped like the things they contain. Outside the walls, the area around De Fu Xiang has a cluster of cafés and bars; the South Gate area has the more upmarket restaurants serving Cantonese, Sichuanese, and the Shaanxi-style hot pot.