What Earned This Kunming Eco-Restaurant a Lonely Planet Listing?
A prominent spot in the dining room is graced by the restaurant’s name in calligraphy, penned by the renowned Yunnanese poet Yu Jian. Each table corner features a small illustration explaining why pesticide use should be minimised and how to apply it responsibly.
A few years ago, this eco-restaurant was featured in the travel guide Lonely Planet, and for four years running, readers of GoKunming — southwest China’s largest English-language website — voted it Best Chinese Restaurant.
I. An Eco-Restaurant, and a Delight
While we stood at the doorway to order, the proprietress, Yang Lifen, noticed our two unfamiliar faces. “Nearly everyone who dines here is a regular,” she said. “All our vegetables are seasonal, grown by our own family without a drop of pesticide, and we don’t use chicken bouillon powder or MSG in the kitchen.” Once she had set aside what she was doing, she came over to introduce herself.
“Is your farm in Kunming?”
“It’s in Qujing, over a hundred kilometres from here.” We had only just finished ordering when the proprietress had already tied on her apron and disappeared into the kitchen.
Honestly, it’s hard to pin down exactly how extraordinary food made entirely from ecological ingredients really tastes — but it is genuinely fragrant. The simpler the cooking, the more a dish relies on the natural flavour of its ingredients, the more that quality shines through.
This past wild mushroom season, a friend from Nanning made a special trip to Kunming, and we went back to Tusheng Shiguan. She is just as particular about food as Peanut, and the first dish to arrive — stir-fried pickled vegetables with pork — earned her a stream of praise.
“Oh, this is so good — your pickled vegetables must be homemade, I can taste it. It’s nothing like commercially pickled ones at all.”
My reflex was to doubt such certainty. “How can you tell just by tasting?”
“Of course you can! With industrially made pickles, the sourness and aroma carry a sharp, manufactured edge. But with this plate, the sourness is remarkably gentle and the fragrance is so mellow and rounded.” As she spoke, I picked up a chopstickful and popped it into my mouth.
The chef emerged, drawn by the sound of the compliments. There hadn’t been many customers that day, and only the proprietress’s brother was working in the kitchen. Hearing our friend’s praise, he suddenly got animated, rummaged out an old photo album from the private dining room, and began showing us photographs from a trip he had taken with his sister to Zürich in 2017 for an international arts festival. During that trip, they visited local ecological farms and shared Yunnan cuisine with their international friends.
The year before that European exchange, Lifen had hosted Sandor Katz, a self-taught American fermentation enthusiast who came to Kunming on his own curiosity’s trail. That winter, Katz and his friends made a pilgrimage to Tusheng Shiguan, whipping up an East-meets-West feast using fermented foods and ecological ingredients — a perfect finale to his fermentation tour of the Yunnan–Guizhou–Sichuan region.
II. “From Farm to Table”
Lifen later joined PCD’s Yunnan office, where she came into contact with ecological agriculture and fellow farmers from across the region. Yang Lifen gradually persuaded her parents, who farmed back in Qujing, to grow vegetables using ecological methods.
After Lifen became pregnant, her parents began growing extra ecological vegetables and delivering them to Kunming on a weekly schedule. Whatever went uneaten, they shared with friends. Gradually, more and more friends wanted their vegetables, so Lifen’s parents set aside a dedicated plot and began sourcing free-range local chickens and eggs from remote villages.
In the beginning, neither of them had any thought of opening a restaurant. They simply sold ecological ingredients from their hometown to friends through group-buying arrangements. Several rounds went smoothly. In 2011, to meet the growing demand for wholesome ingredients, Tusheng Shiguan was formally established, funded by contributions from friends.
Once the restaurant opened, Lifen’s family took on nearly the entire vegetable supply to ensure every crop was grown without chemical fertilisers or pesticides. They swapped land with neighbours and secured nearly ten mu of farmland.
Of that, the vegetable garden covered roughly three or four mu. It followed the planting patterns of an older generation, maintaining a healthy degree of biodiversity. “For instance, we never grow only cabbages across the whole field. We always plant some garlic sprouts, spring onions and the like, and we put fruit trees in the leftover space.”
At the busiest, Lao Cui says, he drove home once a week. A Shandong man who grew up in the countryside, he finds the land the most comforting thing of all. “The farm’s ecosystem keeps getting better — even the bees are competing to build nests,” Lifen added.
Beyond that, they also had half a mu of fish pond and a fraction of a mu set aside for composting. This plot sat on the garden’s outer edge, acquired from a neighbour a few years back. It had once been paddy rice, but after converting it, they filled and raised the ground by over a metre to prevent flooding. They have been cropping it ever since, and after several years of improvement, the soil is rich and fertile.
The farm sends produce into town once or twice a week. Each shipment travels the intercity coach from Qujing to Kunming city centre, and restaurant staff collect it at the petrol station beside the bus station. “It’s dirt cheap — twenty or thirty yuan a trip,” Lao Cui recalled. For the years before they bought a car, he had to ride an electric scooter all the way there to pick up the vegetables.
III. A Small Shop’s Changes Amid a Shifting Landscape
The vibrant public-interest community in Kunming provided the soil from which Tusheng Shiguan’s early customer base grew.
Since the early 1980s, Yunnan has been among the first regions in China to host an active presence of international NGOs. As the provincial capital, Kunming became a natural hub where domestic and overseas public-interest organisations set up offices. Large numbers of professionals focused on social issues and aligned by similar values gathered here, and their presence drew early attention to Tusheng Shiguan. Even today, the restaurant remains a popular choice for group meals among local organisations concerned with public-interest work, ecological agriculture and related causes.
With friends spreading the word, the restaurant’s reputation steadily grew. By 2017, business reached its peak. Lao Cui recalls that on the busiest days, even the second-floor loft would be packed to the rafters. At full strength, the team exceeded ten people, most of them young workers from their hometown in Qujing.
Regulars had long since expanded beyond friends to include passers-by and workers from the nearby creative park. “You can’t run a business by relying on friends — they can’t come every day,” Lao Cui says. He believes most of their regulars now have been built up little by little through word of mouth.
In recent years, the dining room has grown much quieter, with footfall declining year on year, and this year worse than any before. The staff, who once numbered twelve at the peak, have been reduced to three. The kitchen is run by Yang Lifen and her brother. When Lifen is away, Lao Cui joins his brother-in-law at the stove, while only a middle-aged woman from Jiangsu works the floor in the front of house.
The downsizing began back in 2020. The kitchen changed too — they replaced hand labour with a dishwasher, moving away from the environmentally friendlier but more labour-intensive tea seed powder washing routine. “I think we should still make use of technology,” Lao Cui reflects.
His own role has shifted from the front of house to the kitchen, where he started by prepping ingredients and slowly learned to cook. With four years of kitchen experience behind him, Lao Cui has begun, belatedly, to reflect on the many problems they encountered in the early days. “None of us had ever worked in the restaurant trade before. We took a lot of wrong turns.”
The first was blindly inflating the headcount. Lao Cui believes that even during their best years, ten people was far more than they ever needed.
The young workers hired from their hometown in Qujing had high turnover, and the chefs they brought in proved difficult to manage. The busiest years were also the ones with the most complaints — the kitchen’s output simply wasn’t consistent. When chefs mishandled ingredients, it led to waste and avoidable losses, such as with the organic groundnut oil they cooked with.
This type of cooking oil is expensive, with a wholesale cost of nearly 200 yuan a barrel. Whenever the oil was nearly too low to pour, staff would simply discard the barrel. “But if you let it drain, you can still get quite a lot of oil out of it. We’ve said this over and over, and still can’t get it right.”
The somewhat out-of-the-way location, too, held business back to some extent.
In the early days, the couple had scouted locations across the city but passed on each one for different reasons. They later learned that a Western restaurant was up for transfer at a reasonable price, so they took the deal. “Back then, we were full of ambition. We believed good wine needs no bush, and never worried that this spot would hurt trade.” Now, with broader headwinds bearing down, the disadvantages of the location have become steadily more apparent.
Going forward, Tusheng Shiguan faces even greater uncertainty, yet it presses on.
In April, Lao Cui met a customer who had been dining there since middle school. Now at university elsewhere, she still makes a point of seeking the restaurant out during holidays. “I trust people’s palates. If the food you grew up on was clean and wholesome, you’ll still crave that natural flavour once you’re out in the world. I’ve met so many customers who care deeply about that.”
Fourteen years into this eco-restaurant’s journey, much has changed. What hasn’t is their Slow Food philosophy — “You take your time to eat, take your time to wait; we take our time to tend and to grow — everything follows the rhythms of nature.”
These are the words of Yang Lifen’s father, and they have hung above the restaurant’s entrance all along.
About Tusheng Shiguan
Unless otherwise stated, all images in this article
are provided by the author and Tusheng Shiguan.
Editor: Ze’en