I started off with a bowl of fragrant, savoury soup, the golden broth gleaming with oil and rich with a mix of fish, green onion, wild garlic and noodles. After that came several types of dumplings, meltingly soft spiced goat with field rice and a hot plum sauce, and a dish I hadn’t had before that Ru Merit said was known locally as pig-leaves: absurdly thin slices of grilled pork marinated with a mix of honey, wine and sesame, layered between equally thin cuts of apple, pear and roast peppers coated with goat’s cheese, all held together with tiny skewers. They were utterly divine, so much so
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