Yangrou Paomo: The Bowl You Tear Yourself

World Travel 编辑部 · 2026-09-16 · 5 min read

Paomo is a northwestern dish, but Xi'an eats it by its own rules — and the most important rule is that you tear the bun yourself.

Origins and ingredients

The direct ancestor of lamb paomo can be traced to the Chongzhen era of the Ming, and to a Xi'an shop called Tianxilou that specialised in it.

The bun is a flatbread called tuo-tuo mo, baked from unleavened dough. The kitchen simmers lamb or beef with beef or lamb bones, Sichuan pepper, star anise, cardamom and cassia until tender, keeping the meat and rich broth ready.

The point of tearing

You tear the tuo-tuo mo into thumb-tip pieces yourself and hand them over, which gives a more varied texture; or you can ask for the pre-cut version, roughly cubic and even in bite.

The kitchen then brings rich broth to the boil in a wok with a little water, adds sliced cooked beef or lamb and wet vermicelli for a moment, tips in your torn bun and simmers one to two minutes with seasoning, finishing with hot lamb fat in the bowl. Eat it with sweet pickled garlic, chilli paste and coriander as you like. The finer you tear, the more broth the bread takes — which is why you do it yourself.

Four levels of broth

Traditionally the dish is graded by how much broth is left: separate, dry, one-mouthful, and city-under-siege. "Separate" brings bread and broth apart for you to combine, as with shuipen lamb; "dry" lets the bread absorb everything so no broth shows and a chopstick can stand in it; "one-mouthful" leaves a single spoonful after the bread is gone; and the wettest, "city under siege", is named for a broad moat of broth around the bread.

One clarification: paomo is a family, including beef paomo, shuipen lamb, quick-fried paomo, clear lamb soup, and hulutou paomo made with pork intestine.