Double cooked belly pork in royal fern,, hard to find but ohhh so good. Fried redbeans with mint, Yunnan ham & peas, Hu Pi La Jiao (so simple, but I can't get enough) and my absolute favourite: 花生炒肉 that I've never seen in a restaurant, but we make it at home sometimes. It's basically minced pork with peanuts and that mix of preserved garlic cloves in a chili brine-thing that you can buy at markets. That stuff is unbelievably good with white rice.

In good English tradition and further inspired by The World's End, may I recommend "The Famous Cock"?

I live in western Yunnan and the choice of Western food is, well, non-existent. I'll be staying in Kunming for 3 days and I'm just dying for some good pizza, burgers, pasta, Mexican, Indian or whatever. The listings and reviews seem rather confusing (half the reviews give no stars, the other half 5, what's that about??) so if anyone could recommend places to go I'd be much obliged. It doesn't really matter if they're at Zhengyi, Beichen, Wen Lin Jie or whatever. Thanks.

Yeah, yet not so simple when you live 800 kilometers from Kunming and they probably are gonna shaft your request to mail it back to you since that would be extra work. Much easier to ask someone to drive for 2 days back and forth. Thanks, it collaborates some of what I've been told at least.

I talked to them but they just said it need to be verified by the ministry of foreign affairs (the Chinese one), but it seems like a tedious and overly complicated affair to bring it around town 4-5 times and wait weeks. The foreign affairs office didn't even seem to know about this, so I'm wondering what other people have done here, where they went and such. I know nothing is ever simple here but ideally I would think that a birth certificate in Chinese and English ought to be enough.