Last weekend, I attended the soft opening of a new restaurant in Shenzhen’s Bao’an District, Zhenwei Snail Rice Noodle臻味里螺蛳粉 zhenweili luosifen (深圳市宝安区创业二路70号). As its name suggests, the restaurant specialises in Guangxi cuisine, particularly the luosifen 螺蛳粉 snail rice noodle soup of the river city of Liuzhou.
I had long wanted to try luosifen, without having had any idea of what it actually was. I had somehow got the idea that the noodles themselves were made with snail, much as, say, spinach fettuccine incorporates spinach into the pasta dough. In retrospect, I can see how ridiculous this assumption was. Or at least how difficult it would be to mix snails into noodle dough rather than to simply add snails to soup.
Zhenwei Snail Rice Noodle’s owner Wen Min, who has a background in electronics and security solutions in the hotel sector, explained to me that the restaurant’s soups are based on a broth created over the course of ten days using pork bones, chicken, spices, and numerous other ingredients. This food is at once a labour of love and part of the growing trend for urbanites in China’s dynamic coastal cities to turn to the country’s interior provinces for culinary inspiration.
Zhenwei Snail Rice Noodle’s version of luosifen adds small river snails (in their shells) at the end of the cooking process, just before serving. Some other makers include snails in the broth itself, resulting in a more richly snaily soup. The reason for leaving the snails out until the end is, I suspect, to permit the delicious and meticulously crafted broth to form the base of the restaurant’s entire range of soups, so that it is not dependent solely on selling luosifen. The snail noodle soup I was served was topped with pickled bamboo, peanuts, chopped perilla, fried tofu skin, quail egg, pickled chilli, and spring onions. On the side, we were served thin slices of chilled fried pork belly, duck and chicken feet, an elegant and lacy nest of deep-fried egg, and an impossibly tender heap of deep-fried pork (soaked into softness following the frying).
Until recently, luosifen was simply a regional delicacy in and around Liuzhou. The reason I knew about luosifen was that the soup’s expanding national popularity had become one of those rare stories about Chinese culture (rather than Chinese politics or economy) that had gained some attention in English-language media (for example, these articles from Sixth Tone and NPR). Now available from street vendors, restaurants like Zhenwei Snail Rice Noodle, and in instant noodle packs from shops, luosifen has become an established part of the Chinese food scene. This has occurred in a manner that says a lot about China’s development in the 2010s and 2020s.
Accounts of the rise of luosifen typically emphasise the role of social media, how posts of people eating this pungent soup went viral and sparked demand outside Liuzhou. This process was both facilitated by and facilitated the start of mass-manufactured instant luosifen packs. Instant snail rice noodle may not be the most adventurous or romantic dish, but the commercial impulse to tap into the internet’s love of people eating ‘extreme’ food proved canny. The spread of luosifen in fact resembles Changsha-style stinky tofu’s earlier success in expanding outside its home city and across the country, due in no small part to the Hey Hey Black chain’s deployment of viral marketing tactics, attentiveness to branding, and standardisation.
Yet these culinary success stories should not simply be seen as examples of how individual businesses have pushed local specialties into the national mainstream. They also say something about the efforts of today’s urban consumers to deepen their connections with a wider and more diverse vision of Chinese culture. Instant snail rice noodle packages and standardised chain Changsha stinky tofu may appear difficult to reconcile with a desire to seek out ‘authentic’ local or rural experiences. However, the wish to eat—and be seen to eat—smelly, spicy, and otherwise striking food does gesture toward non-conformism and a rejection of a commercialism that targets the widest possible market. This is the case even when, in this social media-saturated country, the authentic experiences being sought out are often precisely those same authentic experiences that so many others have had and have posted about online.
Products like luosifen gain popularity in part because not everyone enjoys them. However, the desire to consume authentic regional culture may transcend the desire to be culturally challenged. The luosifen I tasted in at Zhenwei Snail Rice Noodle in Shenzhen was delicious but was not particularly spicy, smelly, pungent, or challenging. The snails had been added at the end, the pickles were sparkly rather than intimidating, and the final result was a product that looked more intense than it tasted—as perhaps it needs to be, in order to form the centrepiece of a wider non-snail broth-oriented menu that is capable of attracting a sufficiently large number of diners to support Shenzhen rental prices. (It is also entirely possible that the particular bowl of soup I was served was constructed to be suitable for my foreign tastebuds.)
What is clear in any case is that China’s complex and multifaceted internet ecosystem—social media, online shopping, mass media, and more—has been contributing to changing perceptions of the role of regional cultures within the national culture. It has also opened up space for reimagining what Chinese culture is and can be, a space that has been eagerly filled by both producers and consumers.