Glen and I went to Beijing for spring break this year. It was perhaps a little foolish to go so far for only a bit over a week, but United Airlines has a non-stop Washington to Beijing flight, and I was able to book with miles, which made it seem reasonable. The jet-lag is on the other side of the ledger, but one doesn't really know about that until after the trip.
Neither of us had been to mainland China before. I have been through Hong Kong a couple of times, but that is really different. I was impressed, though, with how relatively easy it is for a Westerner to visit Beijing. Clearly they are set up for us. It was very easy to get around in the excellent subway, and many signs and other resources are provided in English.
I was a little derelict as far as food and restaurant research goes, so we pretty much made it up as we went along. There were some hits and some misses. One of our favorite dinners was at a place in the Gui Jie (Ghost Street), where they do the Sichuan hot pot. The idea is that you have a bubbling pot of broth in which you cook your dinner yourself, using the meats, vegetables, and noodles that are available. This restaurant offers the option of having both the super-spicy broth and a chicken broth in the same pot, separated by a divider. Wanting to hedge our bets, we opted for this, and both were really tasty, as were the tahini and garlic-oil dipping sauces.
After visiting Prince Gong's mansion one morning, we stopped for lunch at Chengdu, a restaurant in Lotus Lane that had the most beautifully presented food. We had a salad made of chicken braised in xiaoxing wine, served with pomegranate seeds on a bed of crushed ice, some pork spare ribs that were glazed in a plum-lemon sauce, and lotus root cooked with a variety of mushrooms. Everything was gorgeous, and the restaurant offered nice views overlooking Houhai Lake, not far from the Forbidden City. This was clearly a hopping part of town, with lots of bars, restaurants, and clubs, even reggae!
One thing that really struck me was how much the Beijingers seemed to enjoy their food. In just about every restaurant we went, every table was covered with more dishes than the diners could hope to finish, though they made a valiant attempt. The era of state-run restaurants must have been miserable! After struggling with the menu at one restaurant, we told the waitress just to bring all of the dishes that the neighboring table had ordered. It was delicious, but there was no way we could finish it all.
One thing we didn't really experience much of was street food. It seemed that there was never anything that looked very good when we were hungry. I did have the candied hawthorne apples that you see everywhere a couple of times, and Glen braved a kefir-like drink in a little brown ceramic crock that just about every food stall seemed to offer, but neither of us had deep-fried scorpions or pork intestines or any of the other things that you see. I guess that will be on the next trip.
The most interesting food experience we had actually involved a home-cooked meal. While shopping, we popped into a little shop that was full of Yixing teapots, which are made of a special porous clay. After drinking much tea, and receiving a demonstration of the Chinese tea ceremony, and the purchase of two teapots, the proprietor invited us to share the lunch that her uncle had prepared. I'm not entirely sure what we ate, but it was a fun experience, and I wasn't really all that enthusiastic about trying the donkey meat restaurant that was around the corner.
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