Paradise Restaurant’s Humble Yunnan Dishes Transport You Back to Warmer Weather

When the weather is cooling down, the rain is endless, and the skies are grey and gloomy, a flavorful and heartwarming meal is all we want. If you can't afford the snowbird migration down to southern China or Southeast Asia, maybe some dishes from those warmer regions can tide you over.

Paradise Restaurant, or 凤羽桃源 (fèng yǔ táoyuán), literally means a "hidden paradise." The name and the restaurant originated in Fengyu County, Dali Town, Yunnan, where traditional buildings and the architecture of the Bai ethnic group pepper the city. Nestled on the first floor of World City in the CBD, it's a popular spot during the lunch rush. During our visit, just after 12.15pm, it was packed.

Just by counting the number of the hungry dining groups filing into the small space, you can see that it's more popular than posh. The highlight of the dishes is the boiled sole (RMB 88, main image) which was large in portion, and could be described as the Yunnan equivalent of Sichuan’s fish in chili oil (水煮鱼, shuǐ zhǔ yú) – fish fillets floating in a bowl of oil, soy sauce, and chives, and covered with peppercorns, over a submerged bed of shredded konjac noodles and celtuce. The dish was spicy and heartwarming, bringing us out of our recent chilly, damp spirits.

We also tried the stir-fried jizong mushroom with oil (RMB 32), featuring the dry, chewy, spiced; and the scrambled eggs with jasmine flowers, which is a common home dish and was floral in flavor. They also offer Miao-style chicken, served in a bronze pot (RMB 88), rice noodles, sour and spicy fish, and pineapple sticky rice. The dishes from the land of perpetual spring definitely provided some warm respite from the oppressive grey of Beijing this week, though I’m not sure we could say we felt like we were in "paradise." But they give us enough strength to walk back out to the frigid outside world.

Paradise Restaurant
Daily 10am-10pm. 1/F, E Tower, World City, 9 Jinhui Lu, Chaoyang District (8590 7556)
凤羽桃源：朝阳区金汇路9号中骏世界城E座一层

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Photos: Tracy Wang, dianping