You must eat Hunan cuisine, and you have to eat it seriously, so I chose a time-honored restaurant: Baisha Laowei.

1 The taste of old Changsha I heard from local friends in Changsha that this is an old store with a long history. It combines the essence of Hunan cuisine with thousands of years of history. The dishes are rich in variety and large in portion. The per capita consumption is only 60 to 70 yuan, which is very cost-effective.

It is really close to the people, so it gradually became more and more famous, and now it has opened a chain store.

The hall of Baisha Laowei is very large, and the names of each private room are familiar place names in Changsha City.

The flavor of old Changsha can be seen everywhere here: rows of Changsha snacks are under the tile kilns on both sides of the corridor. The "thousand-year spring water" from Baisha Ancient Well is used to make tea. When checking out, I saw that the accounting room uses a wooden bead abacus.

The Hunan cuisine in this store is relatively exquisite in appearance and relatively beautiful in presentation.

Why do you say that?

In fact, most of the time, Hunan cuisine does not focus on presentation, and the tableware is simple and plain, which looks a bit rough. The people in this land probably focus on the fundamentals. When it comes to taste, Hunanese are not good at it.

Not ambiguous.

In Changsha, it’s not very common to see soup and spicy soup, as most of the food is highly processed.

Changsha's delicacies are mostly smoked and heavily roasted, and they are willing to thicken the food and use oil.

All kinds of delicacies, including those flying in the sky, swimming in the water, and jumping in the grass, are all available in Changsha.

2 Hunan cuisine? Must-eat list? There are more than a hundred Hunan dishes on the menu of Baisha Laowei. They are all the old flavors that Changsha people have grown up eating. I will take stock of a few classic ones that I have eaten this time and are also popular among northerners.

A must-try dish in Hunan cuisine restaurants.

① Friends who have traveled to Changsha must have discovered that when dining in Hunan restaurants and old Changsha snack shops, before they even sit down, they are served with a plate of pickled dried radish, that is, Changsha-flavored "pickles".

, the same is true in this Baisha old flavor.

This simple side dish is crispy and appetizing. It is easy to be ignored, but it is a real "Changsha old flavor". You must remember to try it.

②. In the eyes of me, a northern tourist, the stinky tofu here seems to be more "authentic" and has a "rough" color, not the black one.

After asking some local friends in Changsha, I found out that Changsha’s stinky tofu has more than one look.

Stinky tofu is the most famous street snack in Changsha. It is made from soybeans. When it is first made, it is yellow in color. The difference lies in the brine.

Black stinky tofu uses black soybean brine, while this "rough" color stinky tofu uses other brine.

But no matter what color appearance they are, they all have the taste of "old Changsha".

③. Stir-fried pork with chili pepper: This dish is considered the most delicious dish in Hunan cuisine. According to Changsha people, this is the local "lei chili pepper".

In Baisha Laowei, this dish is called "Zhangshu Gang Chili Fried Pork".

Zhangshu Town is a small town in Xiangyin County, Yueyang City, Hunan Province. This town is rich in a "geographical indication of agricultural products" specialty product approved by the Ministry of Agriculture: Zhangshu Port pepper.

This kind of pepper has thick flesh and can be adjusted to any taste. The spiciness is much stronger than other kinds of peppers, and the aftertaste is sweet and crisp.

The dishes made with Zhangshu Gang pepper are fragrant and spicy. For people who can’t eat spicy food, they can’t bear to eat spicy food and can’t help but love and hate it. ④. Marijuana ball: This one tastes like sweet crispy rice.

The old Changsha snack is a big hollow ball. I watched the fryer use a pair of chopsticks and a simple large round colander to make it bigger and bigger in the hot oil like a magic trick.

Changsha food is very interesting.

Some of them are for "eating taste", some are for "eating environment", and some are for "eating fun", and this cannabis ball is used to check in, take pictures and post short videos (haha)? ⑤, in Baisha Laowei

, I also got to know an old Changsha snack I had never seen before: sugar dumplings.

I heard from local friends in Changsha that stinky tofu, rice noodles, sugar oil cakes and these sugar dumplings are all the flavors that I grew up with.

It looks a bit like twists, but the texture is much softer.

Probably because of the complicated production process, nowadays it is mostly found in "regular" Hunan restaurants. There are not many sugar dumplings sold in street stalls and snack bars.

3 Special Tea In Baisha Laowei, there is another "specialty" worth mentioning: tea brewed with water from Baisha Ancient Well.

Tea leaves are just ordinary tea leaves, but this water is "thousand-year spring water".

The exact year when Baisha Ancient Well was dug is unknown. People only know that from the first time they saw the well, its spring water has been gurgling out without interruption.

In winter, the well water is "warm" and will emit the slightest trace of steam.

People found the earliest records about it in the history books of the Ming Dynasty, and when records began, it was already called "Gujing".

The Baisha Ancient Well in Changsha is similar to the Black Tiger Spring in Jinan: it is open to the public.

The old Changsha people who live nearby carry large containers to the well every day to fetch some water and take it home to drink.