Direct from the grasslands on the back of a lamb

To provide diners good food, the restaurant transports beef and lamb from its Inner Mongolia daily, but sources vegetables from Beijing.[Photo provided to China Daily]

In Arong Town Hot Pot there are nine different lamb dishes made from different parts of a lamb, and are just as people wish the best lamb can be.

All the lamb meat used in the restaurant is from lambs no older than four months, which are brought up on sheep milk only.

In addition, the 333-square-kilometer pasture the restaurant chain has grows a special grass, Leymus chinensis, which locals call jian cao and is of high feeding value for sheep and cows.

The lamb meat in the restaurant has no undesirable smell. Instead, it has a hint of sweet, milky flavor, and each of the nine lamb dishes has a distinct flavor and texture.

My favorite was the lamb neck, one of the restaurant's signature dishes.

The middle part of the neck, usually only 10 cm long, is chopped into 1 cm pieces.

Once boiled it will curl up into a round shape. It has a pungent lamb flavor, and the meat is very chewy, while the marrow is very tender.

I also liked the high-calcium lamb, thus named because each piece of the meat has a line of cartilage, and is very tender and delicious. Each lamb has only about 750 grams of such meat.

All the other lamb dishes are very tasty in their own way, having various intensities of lamb flavor and mild differences in texture.