Hulutou

This bowl's origin story starts in the Tang dynasty, with the seventh-century medicine king Sun Simiao and a gourd hung at a street stall. Everyone who visits Xi'an for three days eats yangrou paomo. The people who actually live here quietly queue for its porky sibling. Hulutou (葫芦头, húlútóu) — the name means "gourd head" — is Xi'an's other paomo: the same ritual of hand-torn flatbread drowned in broth, but built on pork large intestine in a soup boiled to milky white. The "gourd" is the shape a length of cleaned intestine curls into as it simmers, though locals prefer the legend: the Tang-dynasty "king of medicine" Sun Simiao (孙思邈, Sūn Sīmiǎo) supposedly taught a Chang'an street vendor how to tame the funk of stewed intestine with spices and left his medicine gourd hanging at the door as a signboard. Whatever the true origin, the bowl has been the Han-Chinese answer to the Muslim Quarter's paomo for well over a century — where yangrou paomo is halal, hulutou is cheerfully, defiantly not. The broth is the point: pork bones and intestine at a rolling boil for hours until the soup turns opaque and sweet, seasoned with white pepper rather than chili, so it eats rich rather than hot. Each serving gets slices of large intestine — clean, springy and faintly sweet at a good house, with no funk at all — and the canonical side order is bangbang rou (梆梆肉, bāngbāng ròu), a cold plate of smoked pork and intestine sliced by the liang. This is the locals'-locals dish of Xi'an: tourists cluster on Beiyuanmen for lamb; taxi drivers, retirees and off-duty chefs come here.