Hide in plain sight

I hesitate to mention this, because I would hate to see the place 'spoiled', would like to keep it 'my secret'.

But nobody reads this, really, do they?

No. So, I'm fairly safe.

I've just made the acquaintance of the No. 8 Beer Garden.

I think it's been around for over a year now - perhaps one of the plethora of new bar enterprises that sprang up early last year in a flood of misguided optimism about the Olympics. I had noticed it a number of times as I walked past (although it's not terribly conspicuous, tucked away beside the north gate of the Workers' Stadium complex; not quite hidden, but very easy to miss!), but had not been strongly tempted to check it out - assuming that it would be a typical Chinese bar (and thus CRAP), and quite probably a hideously overpriced, tourist rip-off joint (like the horrendous Sanlitun strip nearby).

Well, it is very Chinese, and a bit CRAP (there doesn't appear to be a drinks list, for example; so you have to ponderously ask the price of each item in turn - while the owner often has to refer to the hand-scrawled notes on his stock-list to remind himself what he's charging); but the crapness is really surprisingly muted. It's a small, but rather pleasant and tastefully fitted out terrace, generously shaded by several trees; an improbable oasis of calm amid the city centre's bustle, remarkably insulated from the thunder of the traffic along Gongti Beilu just a few yards away outside.

And the prices are..... well...... uncertain..... but very reasonable. There's homebrew Gleckes in the standard wheat beer and stout incarnations, and also a rather bizarre green version (which is every bit as vile as it looks; but these things have to be tried once, don't they?) for 15 kuai.... or 20.... or 12, or something. Whatever it is, it's not a bad price. There's also quite a number of imported beers for a bit less than you usually have to pay for them in bars. And, best of all - big bottles (properly chilled) of Tsingtao (a bar owner friend recently told me that the big bottles stuff is manufactured near Beijing [I half suspect that it might be made under licence by the local brewer Yanjing, whose own big-bottle product is fairly indistinguishable from this], and is thus much better quality than the titchy bottles which get imported from some ridiculous distance away) for only 5 kuai. That's a serious bargain: about what you pay for it in most bog-standard restaurants these days (and proper bars never carry big bottles at all).

In the evening, they also have a little restaurant offering rou chuanr and other basic Chinese snack foods.

No. 8 Beer Garden, I think I love you. (Well, how can you resist that name? Such a throwback to the good old Communist days, when everything was numbered - No. 14 Middle School, No.6 Refrigerator Pump Factory, No. 2 Venereal Diseases Hospital, etc. Where are the capital's other seven 'beer gardens', I wonder?)

When I looked in on the place in the middle of the afternoon a few days ago, it was completely deserted - and the two young guys running the place were plainly discombobulated by the appearance of a customer. When I returned mid-evening on Friday..... it was again completely deserted, but for a group of middle-aged Chinese guys having supper. A sign brags that they stay open till 5am, and I imagine they may get quite a bit of late-night business from revellers on their way to or from the various nightclubs around Gongti. But it would appear that in the afternoon and the evening you can pretty much have the place to yourself.

If I were going to spend the summer in Beijing, I think I would be spending quite a lot of it here.

But I'm heading off to the States in a couple of days. So long, people. Catch you later.