I have mixed feelings about this place.

It’s a restaurant where everything you eat is grown in-house, including vegetables, livestock and seafood. The Cantonese-style cooking is superb and you can be sure your food is fresh.

The restaurant is situated in the farm itself, so you can take a tour and see for yourself the vegetables, the animals, the fish… before they are removed to be cooked.

I think it’s read as Hui Li (or Li Hui. I don’t know). That’s the name of the farm-restaurant, or whatever you call it. It’s situated in Tangxia (a very small town in Dongguan, China).

It’s not that you get to pick what you want to eat and they slaughter it on the spot for you. I think the owner allowed us to wander about to visit the animals because he knows Isaiah, our friend who brought us there. (But maybe he allows people to walk around anyway because he seems the friendly, easy-going sort.)

It’s just that it’s a little weird seeing the live counterparts of the animals that you know you’ll be eating later. I feel a bit guilty, even, although I’m not about to get all noble and swear off meat forever.

I still enjoy eating meat. I just don’t really want to pay them visits and grow attached to them just before I eat them, you know?

This goose was playing with a hanging hose. It was rather cute.

I think we had a goose dish at dinner.

We didn’t order chicken.

We saw a bunch of black chickens that had really funky hairstyles. The Goonfather thinks this one looks like Unker Kell:

Running chicken:

We also saw two rabbits along the way.

We rationalised that, since there were only two rabbits in the whole place, they must be pets rather than food.

The pigs were quite smelly. And scary. Because they oinked a lot. And they were enclosed in a rather dark shed.

But they weren’t as smelly as the elephants we visited at the zoo two days later.

These are little black pigs (or something). We ate them. Not them in this picture, specifically, but probably one of their brothers who had already been slaughtered.

Normal pigs:

You don’t see the animals if you just walk into the restaurant and hang around there. (The animals are deeper into the compound.) What you see will be the eating areas, lots of greenery, and tranquil, still waters.

And the food.

Goose:

Vegetables:

Bean curd:

Pork:

Fish:

Since it’s Cantonese-style, nothing is spicy and everything is less salty than the usual Chinese fare we ate most of our trip (mainly Hunan-style and Sichuan-style). But it’s still tasty. You feel a bit healthier eating here.

But I guess I still prefer the spicy food. There’s a Hunan restaurant Isaiah brought us to in Changping which was great but they didn’t allow me to take photos so I can’t share them. But I did take pictures at another Hunan restaurant so I’ll share those another day!