The Lijiang list
5 restaurants worth the reservation. Scored for Food, Ambience, and Value; tagged by occasion.
Price tiers: $ under 300 local · $$ 300–800 · $$$ 800–2,000 · $$$$ 2,000+ per person
Amandayan's hilltop Chinese flagship — Yunnan ingredients treated with Cantonese fine-dining technique, served in private pavilions with the Old Town's rooftops stretched out below and Jade Dragon Snow Mountain beyond. The single most atmospheric dining room in Lijiang.
Banyan Tree Lijiang's open-courtyard Yunnan flagship — contemporary treatments of Naxi ingredients, a wine cellar built into a Qing-era stone pavilion, and an al-fresco terrace that is the best summer dining in the valley.
The Old Town's best expression of traditional Naxi cuisine — a converted courtyard home on Sifang Square, with a menu covering the full Naxi canon and live Dongba-music performances on weekend evenings.
The neighbourhood Naxi kitchen every Lijiang local points to — a single-family-run operation on a quiet Old Town lane, with a handwritten menu, ten tables, and cooking that tracks what the family ate the night before.
The foreigner-run Western-menu retreat on Xinyi Street — burgers, wood-fired pizza, and a surprisingly deep craft-beer list, in a converted courtyard home that has been Lijiang's expat meeting point for a decade.
Best for every occasion
The single standout for each of the four occasions that matter most in Lijiang.
The Old Town's best expression of traditional Naxi cuisine — a converted courtyard home on Sifang Square, with a menu covering the full Naxi canon and live Dongba-music performances on weekend evenings.
Read the review →Amandayan's hilltop Chinese flagship — Yunnan ingredients treated with Cantonese fine-dining technique, served in private pavilions with the Old Town's rooftops stretched out below and Jade Dragon Snow Mountain beyond. The single most atmospheric dining room in Lijiang.
Read the review →Amandayan's hilltop Chinese flagship — Yunnan ingredients treated with Cantonese fine-dining technique, served in private pavilions with the Old Town's rooftops stretched out below and Jade Dragon Snow Mountain beyond. The single most atmospheric dining room in Lijiang.
Read the review →The Old Town's best expression of traditional Naxi cuisine — a converted courtyard home on Sifang Square, with a menu covering the full Naxi canon and live Dongba-music performances on weekend evenings.
Read the review →The full ranking
Our editorial ranking of the 5 most notable tables in Lijiang.
Man Yi Xuan at Amandayan
Amandayan's hilltop Chinese flagship — Yunnan ingredients treated with Cantonese fine-dining technique, served in private pavilions with the Old Town's rooftops stretched out below and Jade Dragon Snow Mountain beyond. The single most atmospheric dining room in Lijiang.
Bai Yun at Banyan Tree Lijiang
Banyan Tree Lijiang's open-courtyard Yunnan flagship — contemporary treatments of Naxi ingredients, a wine cellar built into a Qing-era stone pavilion, and an al-fresco terrace that is the best summer dining in the valley.
Master of Lijiang
The Old Town's best expression of traditional Naxi cuisine — a converted courtyard home on Sifang Square, with a menu covering the full Naxi canon and live Dongba-music performances on weekend evenings.
Ashun's Kitchen
The neighbourhood Naxi kitchen every Lijiang local points to — a single-family-run operation on a quiet Old Town lane, with a handwritten menu, ten tables, and cooking that tracks what the family ate the night before.
N's Kitchen
The foreigner-run Western-menu retreat on Xinyi Street — burgers, wood-fired pizza, and a surprisingly deep craft-beer list, in a converted courtyard home that has been Lijiang's expat meeting point for a decade.
The Lijiang dining guide
How Lijiang eats
Lijiang is a dining city shaped almost entirely by the overlap of three things: the Naxi ethnic-minority cuisine (distinctive within Yunnan Province), the UNESCO-protected Dayan Old Town that is the city's tourist centre, and a small but very high-end cluster of resort restaurants — Amandayan and Banyan Tree Lijiang in particular — that bring the Aman/Banyan Tree service standard to the 2,400-metre Yunnan plateau. The combination has produced a dining scene that operates at two very distinct price points with relatively little in the middle: the Old Town's tea houses and Naxi restaurants (CNY 50–150 per person) and the resort flagships (CNY 400–1,000 per person), with few restaurants occupying the mid-market space.
The Naxi cuisine itself is one of the more distinctive ethnic-minority food traditions in China. The cuisine draws on the cold-mountain agricultural base (mushrooms, wild vegetables, yak and horse meat, cured hams) and is marked by the use of local ingredients that rarely appear outside Yunnan — particularly the dried-flat breads called baba, the fermented tofu called jidou, the wild matsutake and morel mushrooms that are in season July–September, and a distinctive sweet-sour preparation of smoked river fish. The tea culture is also distinctive: Lijiang sits at the head of the Tea-Horse Road, and pu-erh tea is the regional staple, served with almost every meal.
Altitude (2,400 metres) is significant but less aggressive than Lhasa; most visitors require only a half-day of acclimatisation. The Old Town itself is fully pedestrianised — no cars enter — so dining there means walking, often through narrow cobbled lanes that are confusing even with GPS. Restaurants in Dayan Old Town cluster on the main lane streets (Sifang Square, Wuyi Street, Xinyi Street) and in the smaller lanes radiating from them. The resort restaurants are outside the Old Town (Amandayan is 20 minutes by taxi, on Lion Hill adjacent to the Old Town; Banyan Tree is further out at Shuhe Village).
Neighbourhoods to know
Dayan Old Town is the traditional dining centre — cobbled lanes, canal-side tea houses, Naxi restaurants — with Sifang Square at its heart. Lion Hill overlooks the Old Town and hosts Amandayan. Shuhe Village, 6 km northwest, is the smaller and quieter old-town alternative and hosts Banyan Tree Lijiang. The Xinhua Street area, between the Old Town and the modern city, has the chain restaurants and the tourist-market dining halls.
Reservations and practicalities
Resort restaurants require reservations 2–3 days ahead; Old Town restaurants accept walk-ins. Dayan Old Town requires a CNY 50 maintenance fee ticket that is checked at entry points. Most restaurants accept WeChat Pay and Alipay; credit cards are accepted only at resort restaurants.
For a broader view of the region, see our full cities index and our editorial scoring methodology. The Dining Journal covers long-form guides to each of the seven occasions our directory is built around.