Speaking of Nanyang food, have you smelled the tangy fragrance of coffee, cake or citronella? Tasting Nanyang food is a must for the visitors to come to Hainan.

Reportedly, there is a jingle in Southeast Asia:“Coffee is to Hainan, as rice noodle is to Chaozhou and noodle is to Fujian.”Since the 1940s, the returned overseas Chinese from southeast Asian has not only brought the tradition of drinking coffee and the craft of making coffee, but also produced the well-known Xinglong Coffee.

Mellow xinglong coffee. (Photo by Su Xiaojie /Hainan Daily.)

Almost every corner in Xinglong brims with the lovely fragrance of coffee, in which many local people wake up in the morning. Xinglong people use to call coffee “gobi”. At the cafes in Xinglong, waiters or waitresses will serve you with Xinglong “gobi”, with which you can enjoy a relaxing afternoon. In order to match the concentration and bitterness of Xinglong coffee, condensed milk tends to be a more ideal accompaniment than the ordinary milk or milk powder. The sweetness of the condensed milk with the bitterness of Xinglong coffee can contribute to the flavor of chocolate.

As for the authentic Indonesian foods, Isana Indonesian Restaurant in Xinglong is a great choice. The owner is an Indonesian lady, who makes the unique sauce personally for every dish served to the table, including curry briskets, satay beef skewer, Indonesian shrimp cake, acid beans frowsty fish, Indonesian fried rice, etc.. Among them, the curry brisket is the specialty of the restaurant. The brisket is cooked with curry, cut into pieces, and then stewed with coconut milk, which is full of flavors of curry and coconut milk.

Satay beef skewer. (Photo/Internet)

 Indonesian fried rice. (Photo/Internet)

At the Indonesian village in Qionghai city, there goes a saying: “No feast is without cakes.”Every festival, every household has diverse cakes. Lady Chen Liangding at the village served the visitors with the shell cake, chrysanthemum cake, pumpkin cake, durian cake, pineapple cake and star cake she made, with a pot of coffee, and said in Indonesian: “This is made from the coffee beans I personally planted, hope you enjoy it.”

The Indonesian cake of coconut juice and coffee. (Photo by Qin Yan/hinews.cn)

Thousand-layer cake. (Photo by Qin Yan/hinews.cn)