Over the course of our time in Xi'an, we failed at most of the things we tried to do: getting off buses at the right stop, arriving at museums before closing time, buying pants, and biking around the city walls. But we did not fail to return to the Muslim Quarter for most of our meals.

One of the more famous dishes in Xi'an is yang rou pao mo, a mutton soup that is served over broken pieces of unleavened bread. In most restaurants, you are given the bread to tear up yourself, and then a giant kettle of lamb stew is used to fill up your bowl. We went to a full-serve restaurant and were slightly disappointed when the stew and bread arrived pre-mixed. It was still yummy (bread in soup is almost always a good idea), but it seems like the participatory aspect is a large component of the tradition. We also got a chicken stew, shown on the left above, with a very thick chicken broth and long-stewed chunks of tender cartilage and meat. The rich chicken soup actually outshone the lamb stew on this occasion, but the yang rou pao mo is the one I'm excited to try making at home.

While yang rou pao mo is well-known, these two dishes are much more visible as you walk through the Muslim Quarter. They are prepared in large street-side woks and counters, so you're almost never out of sight of one or the other. The transparent cubes are stir-fried bean-starch jelly, a very firm, tasteless, jello-like substance that was coated with a spicy sauce, making for an odd experience of burning heat interspersed with remarkable blandness. The noodles are cool, and served with a dollop each of spicy and nutty (sesame?) sauces. While both were good, getting through an entire bowl of either of them seemed like a test of endurance for some reason — they just seemed more like side dishes than mains.

Another common street food is this fried bread stuffed with meat and vegetables, crisp on the outside and tender and savory inside. In fact, almost everywhere in the Muslim Quarter smells of dough and baking, steaming, or frying bread, especially in the mornings. This is delightful and sorely tempting — how I ever managed to be hungry for dinner when I could have one of these things in my hand at every moment of the day, I honestly don't know.

One last treat from Xi'an was this steamed rice cake, very similar to the steamed rice sweets we saw in Indonesia. Instead of being stuffed with palm sugar, however, this rice cake was dipped in a sweet sauce, sprinkled with sesame, sugar, and crushed nuts.