Luosifen (Photo : Travel China)
Luosifen, or river snail rice noodles, is a food rage in China. The dish of rice noodles boiled with pickled bamboo shoots, dried turnip, peanuts and fresh veggies in spiced river snail soup has gone a long way when it used to be sold only in roadside eateries at night markets.
To promote Liuzhou’s signature dish in the industrial city and overseas, employees of Luobawang Food Company in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region print daily over 2,000 order forms and distribute more than 20,000 packages of instant river snail rice noodles to other regions in China, reported Xinhua News Agency.
Yao Hanlin, general manager of Luobawang, said the company, which began operation in February 2015, was surprised by the popularity of Luosifen. To ensure that the company could manufacture 40,000 packages daily of instant river snail rice noodles, Luobawang constructed a new plant measuring more than 7,000 square meters at the end of 2015 and imported equipment.
While Luobawang is rising, the city’s traditional industries such as steel, are suffering from weak demand and excess capacity. As a result, Liuzhou’s GDP growth rate slowed down to 8 percent in 2015 from 9.8 percent average from 2011 through 2015.
However, Liuzhou’s service sector and tourism – which includes food – contributed 36 percent to the city’s GDP in 2015, up from 2010’s 28 percent share.
But the rice noodle’s rise was not accidental. It was the result of the city’s push for the small restaurants to open in larger Chinese cities outside Guangxi. Now, there are 5,000 Luosifen restaurants in Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai and in Canada and the U.S.
As a result of the growing popularity of the river snail rice noodles, the dish was featured in 2012 in the documentary “A Bite of China.” What Luobawang manufactures is the instant versions of the dish which lasts from 30 to 180 days.
This resulted in instant Luosifen makers growing to more than 50 from just one in 2015, while over 1,500 online stores sell the product. It is the best-selling instant rice noodles in Alabama’s e-commerce shopping sites.
To promote the dish, the Liuzhou Water Festival held in 2012 a "10,000 people eat Luosifen together" event featured by blogger Liuzhou Laowai. The spicy stock is made from local river snails and pig bones stewed for hours with black cardamom, fennel seed, dried tangerine peel, cassia bark, cloves, pepper, bay leaf, licorice root, sand ginger and star anise, wrote Full Noodle Frontity.
