The Froog Bar Awards - 2012

This is it, my sixth (and final) annual review of the best and worst of Beijing's bar scene.

I suppose I'm not really very well placed to comment on the scene in detail this time around, since I've been away from Beijing for at least a third of this year, and didn't go out very much while I was here. However, my respect for tradition compels me to maintain the custom of a year-end 'review' post that I inaugurated in 2007.


As in previous years, my aim here is to provoke (and sometimes, godammit, yes, to offend) as well as to enlighten, so please feel free to pitch in - and bitch in - down below in the comments if you have anything to add in regard to any of these opinions. I hope a few people at least will find this post (although burying it a few days back from the ostensible closedown date of the blog on December 21st minimises its visibility, I know), and find it useful, or at any rate interestingly provocative.

Best Live Music Venue

Winner:  VA Bar
This place has grown on me over the last year or two. They impressed from the get-go with with their regular and eclectic lineup of shows, but compromised their appeal with inept/surly service and rather high prices. Prices have now been lowered, the attitude has improved, and the sound system remains about the best in town. Just about all of the best gigs I've been to in the last 18 months have been at VA Bar (although it now seems to be making a move to rebrand itself as Vanguard Livehouse).

Runners-up: Hot Cat Club, 2 Kolegas
I love the grunginess of Hot Cat, and its throwback-to-the-good-old-days prices. I don't love its erratic scheduling and non-existent advertising. Much as I want to like this venue, I suppose I've only gone three or four times this year; and only when specifically invited by a friend, rather than looking in on spec, or because I've seen an interesting lineup advertised. I'm impressed by the remodelling at 2 Kolegas, greatly improving their toilet facilities and their beer fridge capacity; but, unfortunately, as Beijing's taxi service has declined towards unusability, the place is just too darned far away to entice me very often any more. Similarly with the old What bar, I'm very fond of it - but it's just a bit too much of a hike for me to go all that often. Old local favourites Jianghu and Jiangjinjiu were both rumoured to be closing this year, but have both survived; alas, they are both now too well-known for their own good, and uncomfortably packed out for most shows. How I miss their early days, when they were a music-lovers' 'secret'! I suppose my most conspicuous omission here is Temple which, while I find it a welcome addition to the scene, is not a place that I've been able to warm to. The sound system, the prices, the clientele, the general vibe - it's all just a little bit off, somehow. [As I noted last year I always seem to overlook East Shore Jazz Cafe in this section, because I don't go that often, and it only does jazz; but it is very good. And I am going to make a point of getting in several visits before I depart Beijing.]

Worst Live Music Venue

Winner:  Yugong Yishan

Runner-up:  MAO Live House

MAO is actually the best venue in town in terms of the regularity of its shows and the quality of the sound system. It just does nothing to make itself attractive to customers - the air-conditioning and the bar remain huge shortcomings there. Yugong Yishan continues to SUCK, for all of the reasons that I catalogued here. I can't recall if I've been there at all this year; I am doing my best to boycott it.

Best Gig of the Year

Winner:  The intimate Beijing Beatles gig at tiny Nanluoguxiang bar 12 Square Metres in March
Limited advertising and inclement weather threatened to scupper the event, but after anxious delays and an awkwardly slow start, these adverse circumstances actually helped to make it into a rather magical evening.

Runner-up: Tulegur at Jianghu (a couple of times)
The artist formerly known as Gangzi has decided to start going by his real name (which could prove a mite confusing for people who bought his previous releases), but he continues to be in a different class from just about anyone else around: a superb musician, a great voice - spell-binding.

Worst Gig of the Year

Winner:  Day One of the IndieChina anniversary show at Mako Live at the beginning of September

I'd never heard of IndieChina, but apparently it's a Chinese website that has built itself into quite an important fan forum over the past 7 or 8 years, mainly focusing on 'post-rock' - not a genre I have a lot of time for. However, their two-day celebration down in Shuangjing was one of the biggest events of the year, and the Friday lineup included some well spoken-of - and non-post-rock - bands. I'd only just got back to Beijing after nearly four months away, so I was quite excited about the potential of this one. Unfortunately, just about everything about the show sucked. The venue was uncomfortably over-full, and got very hot, as they didn't seem to want to crank the air-conditioning up. They ran out of cold beers within minutes of the start. And even Omnipotent Youth Society, one of my favourite Chinese bands, failed to thrill on this occasion - largely because of a lousy sound balance that wasn't giving enough prominence to their trademark interjections of soaring trumpet. This was particularly disappointing because enduring the three bands on ahead of them had been nothing less than painful. Openers The Dyne were a drums-and-guitar duo who played formless, self-indulgent instrumentals while staring fixedly at each other and completely ignoring the audience; they managed a few half-interesting moments - probably by accident - in the midst of 25 minutes of utter tedium. Glow Curve, well spoken of by some, were perhaps hampered by the bad sound setup, but appeared barely capable of playing their instruments. Low Wormwood, much lauded of late, and supposedly one of the most popular rock bands in China, appear to have attained that status by playing schmaltzy, derivative, crowd-pleasing folk-rock pap (I thought I remembered having seen them play a few times out at 13 Club in Wudaokou several years ago, but if that was them, they were a completely different band then, much edgier and more experimental). They started with what sounded like a Chinese cover of REM's Everybody Hurts, followed that up with another bland and oddly familiar piece (guitar solo ripped off note-for-note from The Edge!), and then did the obligatory ska number. When they then went into a maudlin slow ballad, my friends and I left in search of chuanr and cheap beers outside for the rest of their set (and I was happy to notice that significant numbers of the young Chinese punters did too; this was predominantly a rock crowd, not your FM Lite types). Those cheap beers were the only consolation of the night.

Best Bar Food

Winners:  Frost, Flamme

Runners-up: Luga's, The Den, The Irish Volunteer, Plan B

2010 winner Sand Pebbles may finally be getting its act together again, I think; although service out of the kitchen is still slow, and the place has got a little too popular for its own good, it has seemed to be much improved on my last couple of visits - restoring it to the status of being about the best place in town for Mexican food (though I'm peeved they seem to have taken my favourite chicken dish off the menu). However, this revival has come too late - or I have discovered it too late (sorry, Ray) - for it to get back into a prize slot this year. I've dumped First Floor from a runners-up spot as well, because it's really a bit too expensive (other than on half-price Mondays), and the service continues to be terrible. The significant new arrival on the scene this year has been Frost, Jeff Powell's tiny bar on Xingfu Ercun. The burger is about the best in town (though I've heard some people gripe that it's a little on the small side), the side salad is more than generous, and the yellow pepper relish is superb. I'm less enthused about the hotdogs; the homemade brats are large and tasty, but tend to be a bit gristly, and to use a non-edible skin. There must be a fear that the Chinese staff are unlikely to be able to maintain the quality of service, now that Jeff is once again moving on to grander things. And the bar itself lacks charm: it's too pokey, and the drinks are too expensive for a hole-in-the-wall. Hanging out on the tables outside was an attractive option on warm evenings in early summer, but I imagine it's going to be dead for the next 4 or 5 months. The burgers down at new Shuangjing opening Plan B are pretty damned good - and good value - too. Otherwise, no change from last year.

Best Place To Drink While Eating

Winners:  Home Plate BBQ

Runner-up:  Traktirr, Biteapitta, 4 Corners

Last year's winner Fodder Factory has, I'm told, relocated to less cosy premises, and bumped its prices up quite a bit - alas, alas. Ah well, it was always too far away to be more than a once or twice a year special adventure, anyway. I'm pleased to see that the original Traktirr has reopened (a much warmer vibe than its larger sister around the corner on Guijie, Traktirr Pushkin), and it easily takes the prize as my favourite Russian joint - as White Knights, sadly, continues to get stroppier and stroppier staff and stingier and stingier portions. Biteapitta is losing its place in my heart as well: the falafel - long a favourite of mine - has become ridiculously salty. It clings on to its place here because there are still plenty of things on the menu I like, and the draught beer is about the cheapest you can find in Sanlitun. I've heard some very good things about 4 Corners, the revamp of the old Orange Tree bistro, but I haven't got around to checking it out myself yet.


Best Place To Go For A Cocktail

Winner:  Flamme

Runners-up:  Mai, MaoMaoChong, Más

Flamme, for me, continues to be head-and-shoulders above the competition, thanks to Paul Mathew's superb recipes - although the loss of both Coco and Sophie from behind the bar there this year has been a blow. Mai and MaoMaoChong continue to be very welcome enhancements to my neighbourhood. And newcomer Más has some interesting original mixes too - although they don't taste very strong, and the place is severely lacking in ambience.


Best Place For Sitting Outside

Winner:  Home Plate BBQ

Runner-Up:  Alba

No change from last year.

Worst Bar

Winner: The Stumble Inn
No changes in this category, either. Food, prices, and service at the Stumble all continue to provoke regular complaints. And it's upstairs in a mall. I refuse to set foot in the place.

Runner-up: Drei Kronen
How does this overpriced Bavarian theme-park keep going?????

Additional Runner-up: BeerMania
In the old days, it was unassuming, it had no delusions of grandeur. The original space was at least cosy, projected a sort of ramshackle charm. The new, vastly expanded venue has the ambience of a college cafeteria. The beer list is irrationally long, and overpriced - and, of course, none of the staff knows how much anything costs!


Worst New Bar

Winner: The Red House

I would have thought it was pretty much impossible to screw up a 'dive bar' - but this franchise extension into the city centre by the popular Wudaokou grot-hole is just dismal.

Least Surprising Closure

Winner: Danger Doyle's

The only surprise was that it had managed to limp on for - what? - nearly three years.

Most Sadly Missed Departures of the Year

Winner:  Mike and Lauren at 12 Square Metres
Their tenure as managers at my favourite bar was only planned to be temporary anyway, but they were abruptly, prematurely driven out by the absurd 'anti-foreigner crackdown' in Beijing this summer.


Runner-up:  Chad Lager - ousted from Fubar  
(at which he was really the only reason for visiting)
I have a feeling he'll be back next year in some new venture...



Party of the Year

Winner:  My leaving party in May
I feel a bit guilty about nominating a small private event, but I just didn't go to any major public events this year. And this was everything a leaving party should be - including barely making it home, crashing out on the sofa instead of in my bed, and struggling to get my packing done in time for my flight. My friends and I ended up in Amilal until nearly 4am, after consuming many, many, many shot-glass servings of mengjiu at a leg o' lamb restaurant in the hutongs.

Most Promising New Bar

Winner:  Plan B
Its tiny space, haphazard decor, and obscure location limit its prospects, but it's made the most of its meagre resources, establishing itself as a friendly and characterful little hangout for those lucky enough to live nearby - and it's an appealing enough oddity to entice us Gulou boys outside the Third Ringroad every once in a while.

Runners-up:  None - lots of new openings this year, but none of them quite cut the mustard for me.


Barperson of the Year

Winner:  Jane at Nearby The Tree
The only bartender in town who still gives me liver-wreckingly generous free pours. (I actually had to ask her to leave some room for the ice the other day!) She laid on a very nice spread for a friend's wake in September as well.

Bar of the Year

Winner:  Modernista
I don't love Modernista, myself. It's got a bit too much of a European vibe for me, the service isn't great, and it's an unfortunate size - just big enough to make you feel self-conscious if there aren't many people in, but too small to cope with the kind of crowds that it regularly attracts, rarely if ever attaining that happy medium of being buzzy but not cramped. But there's the thing - it is regularly drawing large numbers of people; far more, I would think, than any of the other recent openings (and it might well have claimed the prize as best newcomer too, since it only opened towards the end of November last year). And it's built up this following because the owners have made sterling efforts to create and publicise a packed programme of events. Whether it's swing dance classes, film shows, or mah jong evenings, there's almost always something going on at Modernista. Other bars could learn a lesson from that. And they deserve a lot of credit for their achievement.

There we have it. Any comments, queries, abuse??

Chinese hotel breakfasts

The poverty (almost total absence) of bar facilities in most hotels in China is by no means the greatest hardship visited upon the Western traveller.

No, the winner of that prize is surely the breakfasts.

Many hotels surreptitiously slip a wad of breakfast vouchers into your keycard holder and levy an additional charge - anything from 15 to 100 RMB per day - without telling you. Check. Complain. Refuse. Even 15 RMB is not worth it.

One of the problems is that Chinese cuisine doesn't seem to have much in the way of specialised breakfast foods: apart from zhou (a very runny rice congee, usually completely tasteless),  youtiao (fried dough-sticks that, alas, rather too often taste unpleasantly of the very old and contaminated oil they've been cooked in), and a few types of mantou (steamed buns: inoffensive, but stodgy and desperately bland), you just get the same old stuff you'd eat for lunch and dinner. I love noodles and dumplings - but I can't face them three times a day.

Another problem is that Chinese hotels will almost invariably try to offer a few token Western breakfast dishes (to pander to the fetish-with-the-foreign of their Chinese guests; most of them don't see a Western visitor from one month to the next), without having any real understanding of or sympathy for this genre. Chinese 'breakfast sausages' are peculiarly disgusting, and best reserved for possible emergency use in the poisoning of a dangerous dog.

The real problem, though, seems to lie in the perennial deficiencies of the Chinese service culture - and the associated lack of quality control or effective management supervision. Large-scale buffets are rarely much good, anywhere in the world. But in China, where the staff very often quite evidently don't give a flying fuck, they attain spectacular levels of AWFULNESS. And the breakfast service - where presumably the kitchen staff resent having to be at work so early in the morning and so do a particularly half-assed job - is the nadir. The hotplates and warming trays, of course, never function very well. But Chinese chefs on the breakfast shift seem to take a perverse pride in cooking everything at least half an hour before the service begins, just to make sure that even the early bird guests who arrive on the stroke of 7.30, or whatever, won't be able to find any food that's anything more than tepid.

To set the seal on the unpleasantness of this start to your day, you usually also encounter at least one of those mindfuck oddities of Chinese taste - like mystery fish (fried to the point of carbonization), or fruit salad presented with a selection of mayonnaises.

The only consolation I found on my recent travels (particularly valuable on the morning I was to run a marathon!) was that - presumably in response to this ubiquitous shortcoming of hotel catering - there's almost invariably a very good noodle shop almost next door to a Chinese hotel.

Exceptions prove the rule. At the hotel where I stayed in Shanghai last week, the breakfast was included in the basic room charge, and was really pretty good. The Western options were a particularly pleasant surprise (apart from the sausages, which were the standard-issue condom-filled-with-E-numbers): self-made toast (disappointingly pale; but at least it was good, plain bread, not the sickly sweet stuff you're commonly given in China), decent and very plentiful bacon, and eggs fried to order (though I couldn't persuade the server to add some cherry tomatoes to her pan, so I had to eat those uncooked). A nice experience to end my trip, except... well, the one fly-in-the-ointment on this occasion was that the dining room provided no cutlery. Bacon-and-egg-on-toast is really NOT a chopstick-friendly meal!

I suppose I should have got another slice of toast and made myself a doorstep breakfast sandwich. But bloody-minded pride demanded that I show off my chopstick prowess to the Chinese guests. It got messy.

Wimping out - AGAIN

Four years ago - and several times subsequently - I was tempted to try out a speed-dating event organised by the charming people at Fishbowl Events; but self-doubt and inertia got the better of me.

There's another one today. And this one I really was going to go to. Oh yes. My self-image is better than it's been for years, as I've dropped a ton of weight and got back into a regular running habit over the past two months. And I must admit that I am, alas, feeling desperately randy of late.

So, this time I was definitely going to give it a try.

Until I realised they were holding it at Switch. Oh, I'm sorry - SWITCH!, I should have said. Now, this place is fairly new, and I've never been there; but nothing I've heard about it persuades me to try it. The name is fucking STUPID! for a start. Exclamation mark - really?? Moreover, it's run by Culinary Capers, a catering company whose food I have found - at a couple of events they've catered, and at the most godawful Thanksgiving Dinner I've ever had - to be pretentiously over-elaborate and just not very good.

Still, I was really keen to try this speed-dating thing, so I thought I'd do some more research: and I discovered this online review (the only one it's yet garnered on the City Weekend website) which complains that the place is outrageously overpriced. I'll say! 62rmb for a Stella? WTF??!! That's at least 25% more than anyone else in town is charging (assuming that's the price for a 500ml glass, and not a piddling 330ml!), 35-50% more than most places, and more than 100% more than the keenest 'happy hour' price. OK, I gather they have a two-for-one 'happy hour' deal; but that doesn't count for much if their base prices are twice as high as they should be. The 35 or 40rmb we usually get charged these days is already way too fucking high (there's simply no way the price of anything in Beijing should be higher than it is back home in the UK); 62rmb is simply obscene.

And I gather the food is similiarly exorbitantly priced, without the quality to justify it. I'm afraid this is the kind of place that I MUST boycott on principle. I'll have to wait for December's round of speed-dating....

[Furthermore, of course, it SNOWED last night - so I fear the event is likely to fizzle anyway. It would be hard enough for me to hack just a few miles across town to Dongzhimen. I can't see people making the effort to come in all the way from Shunyi or Shuangjing or Wudaokou with the roads and sidewalks in this sort of condition.]

The Rule of Custom

Last Saturday evening, I found myself (as so often lately!) on my own for dinner, and so decided to try somewhere new. And this led to me to waive one (or possibly two) of the most basic rules of venue choice: 

a bar or restaurant with no customers in it is almost certainly no bloody good.

The corollary rule is that  if there's a place you've never got around to trying in years, there's probably a good reason for that.

On Saturday, with the streets thronged by premature Halloweeners, I was driven to trying a little Muslim restaurant on Gulou Dongdajie that had no customers in it at the time, and that I don't think I'd been in before. (Given that I've lived around this part of Beijing for a decade now, there aren't many long-established restaurants that I've never tried; most I've been into at least a handful of times, and the better ones some dozens of times.)

And it was indeed stupendously awful. The spicy green beans were undercooked, and so stringy as to be almost inedible. And not very spicy. And, despite being undercooked, they were not delivered to my table until several minutes after I'd received and eaten (or tried to eat) everything else. The egg fried rice was horrendously overcooked; very thin on egg, but doused in soy sauce which made it far too salty and gave it an unappealing brown colour; and I suspected it had probably been recycled numerous times. The beer was warm. The chuanr was OK, but a small stick for 3rmb.

5 young Chinese lads entered shortly after me (perhaps enticed in by the glamorous presence of a foreigner?). They still hadn't received any of their food when I left 20 or so minutes later, and were starting to look disconsolate and impatient.

Food service had perhaps been held up by the fact that the chuanr cook out front had dragged one of the indoor kitchen staff out into the street to have a protracted screaming row with him.

Ah, China.

The King of Condiments

The food I made for my b'day party on Saturday may have been of variable quality, but I defy anyone to carp at the range of toppings I made available for their burger customizing.

We had lettuce, onions, and tomatoes, of course, and dill pickle and jalapeno rings. And mayonnaise, ketchup, HP Sauce, A1 Steak Sauce, barbecue sauce, Korean sweet chilli paste, brown mustard and dijon mustard, and salt and pepper. We also had a sweet pickle relish (another Heinz product, but jazzed up with some additional onion and garlic), a spicy tomato relish of my own devising, a yellow radish paste (made with the ginger & turmeric daikon radish pickle from the cooking class I went to a couple of weeks back), and some 'proper ketchup' - a puree of sundried tomatoes and garlic (a sop to my foodie friend The Bengali, who declares regular ketchup to be "the devil's work").

Of course, I still have most of this stuff left. I may have to eat nothing but burgers and hotdogs for the next three months to use it all up.

The colours of autumn

Last week, I went to a cooking class at The Hutong, to get an introduction to the East Asian approach to pickle making.

This is the result of my labours: jars of Szechuan-style pickled vegetables (three kinds of radish and a smattering of other veggies - string beans, carrots, celery, cabbage, spring onions - flavoured with a generous handful of fresh Szechuan peppercorns and some wickedly hot pre-pickled baby chilli peppers) and batons of daikon radish in a brine suffused with ginger and turmeric and another wickedly hot pepper (a sweet'n'spicy combination, apparently a southern Chinese speciality). And we also made LOTS of Korean-style spicy cabbage - which will probably take me two or three months to eat, and is stinking my fridge out in the meantime. No matter: I love my kimchi.

These two pickle jars are unexpectedly pretty. I'm almost reluctant to empty them. I'm supposed to leave the radishes etc. to steep in their pickling brine for a bit, but they'll be ready for eating soon; and I imagine - pickle nut that I am (something else I can probably attribute to my German grandmother's influence) - that they will disappear very quickly.

[Well, except that I am perturbed by all the air bubbles collecting on top of the Szechuan vegetables. I suspect this is evidence of some unwanted fermentation going on, which might well have spoiled them. Bother!]

"The Carp"

Gosh, I thought I'd written about this place long ago, but... it seems not. I think I must have alluded to it here and there, in comments if not in posts, but I haven't yet given it a post of its own.

"The Carp" was the nickname my buddy Big Frank gave to the restaurant on Jiugulou Dajie where he and I and Tony The Chairman ('The Three Amigos') would most often eat during our first year in Beijing.

It was larger than most restaurants on the street (in fact, one of the only two-storey buildings, although the upper floor was given over to something else, not connected to the restaurant space at all as far as we could tell) and, being towards the north end of the street, just off the Second Ringroad, it was a popular haunt for resting cab drivers (it could be quite terrifying to watch the way some of them would quaff beer and baijiu in the early hours of the morning, before going back on duty). It was slightly up itself, in that it was about the only restaurant on the street then charging 3rmb rather than 2 for the standard big bottle of Yanjing beer; but we soon managed to haggle them down on that, as we were becoming such regular customers. (We'd always get complimentary pickled peanuts as well.)

The main thing that won us over in our early days was that it was the only place on the street with an "English menu". I was the only one of our trio who could speak any Chinese at all (and not very much), and none of us could read much more than 面 and 肉 (mian and rou: noodles and meat). Picture menus, almost ubiquitous since the Olympics here, were at this time a real rarity. So, the "English menu" was potentially a godsend, something that might save us from having to make do with the same handful of dishes night after night.

In practice, though, the "English menu" at this place was very little help at all. It was just a scrap of paper, crudely handwritten in biro, which included only a dozen or so of their most popular dishes. And some of these, it seemed, were not in fact within the chef's repertoire. It became a ritual for us to always try ordering the 'Chicken in garlic and ginger' first; it invariably provoked a mumbled meiyou ("We don't have that."). It seemed inconceivable that a restaurant would not have the three commonest ingredients in China, or that any Chinese chef would be unable to knock up such a simple dish, but.... well, this is China. The "English menu" was evidently not quite the same as the Chinese menu; and if it wasn't on the Chinese menu, no-one was going to put themselves out even slightly to try to make it for us.

The waitresses invariably countered with the opening gambit of trying to interest us in the most expensive dish on the menu (an almost ubiquitous tactic in Chinese restaurants at that time; but it seems to me to be becoming much less common now). The most expensive dish on a Chinese menu (unless you're in one of those stupid-expensive Hong Kong places that features abalone and shark's fin) is almost always some basic kind of fish. In this case, the biro scrawl said bluntly 'Carp'. It was at least 5 or 6 times as expensive as any other dish, and none of us were particularly big fans of fish anyway, so we always declined. But repeated failure did not discourage the staff from trying, again and again, to persuade us to give it a try.

We were frequently introduced to the carp in person, as were other Chinese diners. Many Chinese restaurants that offer fish dishes keep the fish in an aquarium by the entrance, so that diners can select the particular fish they'd like to eat. This rather grimy, low-rent establishment had only one fish dish, and, I suspect, only the one fish - which was kept out the back in the kitchen, in a plastic bucket. To try to interest diners in eating it, it was periodically brought out into the dining room and carried up to a table, writhing in the waitress' arms. Well, I say 'brought'; in fact, it was usually thrown. One of the young chefs would remove it from its bucket and lob it lustily through the tiny serving hatch into the arms of a waitress. On the return journey, the chefs seemed to like to make a game of catching it directly into its bucket - as we judged by the sploosh usually emanating from the kitchen just after it disappeared from our sight through the hatch; occasionally, of course, we would hear instead the wet thud of a fish missing the bucket and landing on the floor.

This was great sport for the staff, but not a lot of fun for the fish - and hence a source of considerable moral discomfort for the Amigos. We often debated buying the carp dish, just so that we could liberate the poor creature from its long captivity (since NO-ONE was ever seen to order the carp dish, we assumed that the same fish might have survived for months, despite the cramped confines of its bucket home and the nightly trauma of being flung through the serving hatch three or four times in each direction) and return it to 'the wild' in nearby Houhai lake. I'm sorry to say we never got around to doing so.

Anyway, that was how "The Carp" got its name from us. We were, inadvertently, following something of a Chinese tradition: many small restaurants - in Beijing, at least - are too unimaginative to give themselves a unique monicker, and simply name themselves after a 'signature dish'. "The Carp", we eventually discovered from a Chinese punter some months later, was in fact called The Small Lobster Place (I suppose it must have been this: 小龙虾, xiao longxia, a type of crayfish or langoustine; this appeared to be a seasonal speciality, something we never witnessed in our first six months of almost nightly attendance).

"Don't go looking for it. It's not there any more."

Oh, Fate, you tease!

Just when I am not drinking (beer, for a month) and not really eating very much either (possibly a long-term regime, since I find my weight is not falling nearly as quickly as I'd hoped), there's a new opening in my 'hood that appears to be exactly what I have been wishing for all these many years (when I was eating and drinking without restraint!): somewhere in the Gulou area that does decent Western snack food to take away, and at very reasonable prices.

It appears to be run by a couple of Chinese guys who speak very little English, and probably found their menu online somewhere; but from what I've seen so far, they are making the food quite well. Their burgers are all either 38 or 42rmb, which makes them cheaper than just about anywhere else in town these days, barely half the price of places like Let's Burger and Blue Frog, with which they compare not too badly (the toppings aren't as generous, and the side of fries is positively niggardly; but the meat and the bun are pretty darned good). They have a limited but enticing selection of soups, salads and sandwiches as well; and a bowl of chilli, which I think I'll be trying next time.

Ah, but the real draw is the drinks: fresh fruit smoothies or homemade lemonade by the pitcher for only about 15 or 18rmb (my memory lets me down on matters of detail, now that I am not reinforcing it regularly with alcohol); canned soft drinks are only 8rmb; stubbies of Tsingtao are only 10 or 12rmb. Ah, but who would drink crappy old Tsingtao anyway? They have an interesting range of imported beers at the cheapest prices to be found anywhere in town: only a few items on their beer list are as much as 25 or 30 rmb; bottles of Sam Adams or Saranac Ale are only 20rmb, and they're practically giving Stella away at 16rmb.

Honestly, IF I were drinking beer now, I would be hitting this place up almost every night.

The trouble is, they've got very little room for people to eat in, much less to hang around drinking. They've adapted a narrow little shop space, probably barely 25 sq m in total, and nearly two-thirds of that taken up by the galley and serving counter.

Also, I imagine they'll realise before too long that they've made a mistake with their pricing (Gulou hipsters will pay 15 or 20% more for the food, and probably at least 50% more for the drinks) and put everything up.

Until then, I think I'm going to try to keep this place MY SECRET for a while.

Something new

Hanging out at roadside barbecue stalls has always been one of my favourite things to do in Beijing, or anywhere in China. But, wherever you go, it's always a nearly identical experience. I'd long ago given up hoping for any novelty from a chuanr joint.

But I was dining at such a place a few nights ago with some friends down in the Shuangjing district of south-east Beijing when we found that the food choices on offer were decidedly non-standard.

With a Chinese-only menu challenging our limited collective powers of character-recognition, we plumped for xia (shrimp), qiezi (aubergine), mantou (bread), and "small roast bird".

And it was a revelatory experience. I passed on the shrimp myself, since things of the sea disagree with me, but my companions assured me it was excellent. The aubergines were roasted whole, giving them a smokey, charcoal-y savour, and were dressed with an unusual, pleasantly garlicky sauce - not the bog-standard sweet'n'spicy yuxiang you usually get. And the birds, though tiny, were quite delicious, with a crisp, very salty skin and a slightly gamey flesh - like dark turkey meat. We speculated that they were quails, although I seem to remember that quail I've eaten in England years ago was slightly larger and rather different in taste. It could be "quail with Chinese characteristics", I suppose, a distinctive local variety; I note that the dictionary contains a number of different words for quails or "quail-like birds". I'm pretty sure the menu just said "small bird"; so, I suppose it might just have been whatever they happen to have been able to catch recently. Anyway, I'll be back to try that again - should probably order two or three each next time, to make a more substantial snack.

This chap seems confident these were quails; 

and they do look pretty much the same as what we ate

The real highlight of the meal, though, was the bread - a style none of us had ever encountered before (and two of my friends were seasoned tour leaders, guys who've been everywhere in China). It was Twinky-sized, had a crisp, glazed crust, and a fluffy centre - similar to, but lighter and less buttery than a croissant. It had a spiral or circular construction reminiscent of a croissant too. A Chinese croissant? Whatever next?! Damn, they were GOOD! I will be on the lookout for more of those. [I couldn't turn up any pictures of this type of bread online, despite a good long look for some.]

An entirely suitable 'Role Model'

Talking of dear old Keith Floyd the other week reminded me of another of my TV heroes, Les Hiddins - the 'Bush Tucker Man'. Hiddins is a former Australian Army officer who saw service in Vietnam, and is an expert on wilderness survival. Starting from the late 1980s, he made three series of the show Bush Tucker Man for Australian TV, demonstrating how the Aboriginal peoples live off the land in the Outback. I think the programmes didn't show up on British TV until the early or mid-90s, but I became a big fan, and would love to watch them again. They were breathtakingly photographed; and Les was a TV natural: unassuming and down-to-earth yet completely authoritative, and plainly loving the austere environments he was navigating.

Most of the other 'role models' I've celebrated on here were distinguished by their heavy drinking as well as other nobler and more creative qualities. I have no idea if Les is much of a drinker (although, being an Aussie, he's almost certainly fond of the odd beer now and again), but he is manifestly a thoroughly good bloke. And I just discovered that it was his birthday a few days ago: he turned 66 on Monday. Happy Birthday, Les!

Quite a lot of his show is uploaded to YouTube now - here's a sample of an early episode.

More on Les can be found here and here; and on 'bush tucker' here and here.

Another nail in my heart

The Carpenter's Arms, on Nelson Street, at the bottom of the Jericho area of north-west Oxford, was my 'local' in the early '90s when I returned to my student stomping grounds to work for a couple of years. A little later, my oldest drinking buddy The Bookseller lived for a year in a nice basement flat on Walton Crescent, almost directly opposite this little gem of a pub, which extended my close acquaintance with it for a little while longer.

The ambience wasn't marvellous: it felt too much like the living room of a private home, with plush beige carpet throughout (most of the pubs in that area had indeed originally been private residences, many having been converted into commercial premises in the mid-1800s as a result of the Beerhouse Act). But it had a friendly landlord and landlady, a mixed crowd of regulars (partly thanks to having the Oxford Synagogue next door), some decent bar snacks, and a very well-kept pint of Guinness. It also had three other conspicuous attractions: a good dartboard (I don't play much; but I like a game occasionally, and having a decent quality board that won't spit your darts back out on to the floor half the time is a major incentive to take your arrows out with you more regularly), an excellent jukebox (including a lot of The Kinks: Sunny Afternoon, Lola, and Apeman were particular favourites in there for a while), and..... an Aunt Sally court (the BEST pub game ever: like an aerial version of skittles in which you have a single wooden 'dolly' mounted on top of a post as the target, and you hurl great billets of wood at it from some yards away; most miss and thwack into a sheet of canvas or plastic stretched behind the target to catch them; it is very satisfyingly physical - and a great fun competition for anyone to join in, because it's very simple but almost no-one is really that good at it).

Back in those days, the place also had its resident eccentric, a rather sketchy character of indeterminate age (though a little nearer to 60 than to 40, I would guess) called Dave, who, despite appearing half-cut most of the time, was a formidable opponent in any kind of pub game. I was reluctant to take him on at cribbage or dominoes, having seen him trash others of the regulars at these uncomplicated games. But he mentored me for a while at Aunt Sally. And he taught me a very good betting trick at darts.

Another unexpected delight of the place was that most weekends I would find my old friend Mohammed in there. I was a little taken aback when I first bumped into him there, surprised to find that, although a 'good Muslim', he was fond of a pint of Guinness. I was also impressed that he still recognised me, quite a few years on from when I'd last seen him. Mohammed had been one of the first guys to open up a kebab van in Oxford (nowadays, there are a dozen or more such mobile food stalls around the city centre; when I started there as a student there were only four, and only one or two of them sold kebabs, the others being burger or baked spud places; but there was a veritable 'kebab explosion' during the mid-80s, with new vans appearing every term). He was also one of the best (my college made him an honorary member of its Junior Common Room in gratitude for his contribution to keeping the student body well fed); and even after he gave up his own van after half a dozen years or so, he'd still occasionally reappear on a new van somewhere, sharing his experience with a young friend or relative to help them start up (the benefits of his input did not always persist for long, but you could guarantee that any van on which he had been sighted would have excellent salad and a properly fiery chilli sauce for a month or two afterwards).

So, although I was only hanging out there for around 18 months (and, most especially, during the month or two that my old college pal Richard - the one who seduced me into coming to China! - stayed with me during a break from China one summer), I have a host of fond memories of that pub. And I had been looking forward to popping back there on this visit - just one drink, for old times' sake. Alas, it was not to be. The place has closed down, and been converted back into a pair of terraced houses. According to The Lost Pubs Project, this may have happened at some time in the later '90s - though I'm pretty sure I recall it still being there in 2000. Well, whatever, it's gone now; and I have a lump in my throat.

A day later, I noticed the Horse & Jockey on Woodstock Road was gone too; closed in 2002, apparently. I have fewer regrets about that: it was a large and fairly charmless pub, never a favourite or regular haunt of mine - although I did drop in occasionally during my student days, since it was the last pub heading north out of the city on this road, and was a convenient stop-off if visiting friends at the adjacent St Anne's or St Anthony's colleges.

It seems we've lost something like half of the pubs we used to have in the UK 40 or 50 years ago, and, if the recent rates of attrition persist, we could have lost half of the 60,000 that remain in another decade or so. I hope this won't happen: the situation seems to be stabilising a bit now, after a few brutal years of closures precipitated by the smoking ban and the crash of the economy. But it is dispiriting, disorienting to find that so many of the landmarks of my student days in Oxford have now disappeared forever.

A culinary 'Unsuitable Role Model'

How time flies! It's nearly three years since the great Keith Floyd passed on, and I've been meaning to do an Unsuitable Role Models post in his honour ever since - and continually forgetting to get down to it.

Floyd was one of the great British eccentrics, an intermittently successful restaurateur who, in early middle age, fortuitously found his ideal milieu on television. Long before cooking became hip - essential, unavoidable - on our screens, he had one of the first really successful TV cookery shows in the UK, starting in the early or mid-80s (round about the time I started at university) and continuing for a decade or more. He amply conveyed his passion for food - and drink - but with a sincerity and an absence of pretension that few of his successors have been able to match.

He played up to his reputation of being an avid drinker, almost invariably having a glass of wine in hand when on camera and making it a running joke that he favoured recipes which called for a glass or two, so that he would have an excuse to glug the rest of the bottle himself while he cooked. On more than a few occasions, he appeared to become significantly stotious during the filming of a sequence - although he may have been play-acting just a bit.

The other distinctive feature of his shows was that he shunned the studio, choosing instead often rather challenging outdoor locations: half-way up a windswept Welsh mountain, a barbecue pit in the middle of the jungle, the galley of a storm-tossed trawler. And there didn't seem to be too much of the 'cheating' that we now regard as inevitable in such shows: the cooking was filmed in extended takes, and 'mistakes' were left in (his teasing monologues with his never-seen-or-heard cameramen ["Clive", "Richard"], constantly chivvying them to try to keep up with things in these hectic and demanding environments, was another of his endearing trademarks). It was seat-of-the-pants stuff, almost always a bit chaotic and occasionally threatening to spiral out of control; but the food always looked pretty damn good at the end of it all. For sheer bloody entertainment value, I don't think there's been a better cookery show before or since.

I hardly watched any TV in my late teens and early twenties, but Floyd was essential viewing for my generation. He was a terrific populariser of good eating, and he was the epitome of joie de vivre.

Here he is cooking up some beef...

And here making a fruity cocktail...

He had good taste in music, too. As the theme tune for his series on the BBC he chose The Stranglers' demented instrumental Waltzinblack.

When he died in September 2009, The Guardian rounded up a nice selection of tributes to the great man from today's celebrity chefs.

Enough already, eh?

The Nanaimo Bar is indeed a delicious confection. But it is extremely sweet, and not the kind of thing you would sensibly indulge in more than a handful of times a year... well, not more than a few times every month, anyway... and certainly not two or three times every bleedin' day.

It is, I feel, much the same with posts about Canada: one can have too much of a 'good thing'.

Ubiquitous bar blogger 'Beijing Boyce' came up with a fun idea for promoting Canadian food and drink around Beijing, and for enhancing/extending the celebration of this year's Canada Day (July 1st) with a mini-festival he calls Canada Grade Eh Week.

Unfortunately, he has gone completely overboard on this pet project, deluging us with a dozen or more posts and some thousands of words about it - virtually the entire output on his bar & restaurant review blog for the past 10 days. I don't think I'm the only one for whom Canada Ennui set in about a week ago... I rather fear that the effectiveness of the promotion - at least for the non-Canadians amongst us - may be undercut rather by this extravagant oversell.

I hope the event passes off well, and that the yummy Nanaimo Bar might afterwards become a permanent fixture in some of the capital's bakeries and cafés. But I also hope Mr B doesn't then devote another 5,000 words to telling us how well it all went.

A Happy Canada Day (and Grade Eh Week) to you all! Don't eat too many Nanaimo Bars!

A supplementary bon mot

"Loose and fiery is fun in a woman; less so in one's bowel movements."

The Bookbinder shared a pot of his chilli con carne with me at the weekend. He boasted that for this one he had put three whole Scotch Bonnet peppers into less than a pound of mince. The results were predictable: tasty, yes... but debilitating the next day. I rather wished that - as The Choirboy once wisely advised me - I had put a loo roll in the fridge in preparation.

Things I'm looking forward to about 'home': Junk Food Heaven!

Past experience suggests that I will be unlikely to get through 72 hours back in the land of my birth before once again succumbing to the unhealthy allure of the baton-of-fat that is the Greggs sausage roll.

However, thanks to this website, I have just discovered that there are even greater culinary delights awaiting me in my homeland these days. The 'Munchy Box', I gather, has become a favourite Friday night order in parts of Glasgow. I'm not sure that it's yet on offer anywhere else in the UK, or even in Scotland, but this looks as if it could be worth a trip up there. Doner kebab and chips and an Indian takeaway served in a pizza box - INSPIRED!!

Who says we Brits can't cook??!!

Mind you, I have long been thinking of opening up a Uyghur Restaurant in Britain...

Strange tastes

I see City Weekend has posted the result of the Back-Alley Chilli Cook-Off at Great Leap Brewing a few weeks back on its blog. The winner chosen by their panel of celebrity chefs was... New Yorker John Korkidis' 'Hainan Yellow' Duck Chilli.

A (not very revealing) glimpse of the winning chilli 

from City Weekend's website

As I mentioned in my earlier review of the event, this deserved credit as one of the most innovative efforts, one which attempted to "re-invent" chilli with local ingredients. For me, though, the bold ambition just didn't come off. I wouldn't say it was nasty, but it was fairly unappealing - very nearly dead last in my personal appraisal of the dishes on offer. The Hainan yellow chillis were its strongest point, bringing a complex and subtle blend of sweet & hot. The use of duck as the main meat content, however, didn't work at all for me: duck doesn't take well to stewing - it loses most of its flavour, and breaks down into long chewy fibres. The pale colour and stringy texture were pretty unattractive; and it just didn't have any essence of 'chilli-ness' about it, none of the other spices - garlic, cumin - that give the dish its characteristic flavour (John's recipe, posted at the end of the CW blog piece, suggests that he included some, but I wasn't tasting much of them!). And it didn't have an awful lot of heat about it, either. I like my chillis fairly robust on the HOT factor!

I think this rather odd choice goes to show that chefs tend to overrate cheffy-ness. Chilli is one of the most down-home, basic comfort foods in the world. It doesn't need to be at all FANCY; it just needs to be hearty and spicy. It was little surprise that the popular vote went to the Santorum chilli, one of the simplest - and hottest - on offer.

John K's duck dish was certainly interesting, and I can imagine it working well as a thick stew (with a bit of rebalancing of the flavours, and the use of whole pieces of duck, sautéed separately and added to the mixture fairly late, to prevent it breaking up) - something akin to south-east Asian curries. It just wasn't a 'chilli'.

Blue Mondays*

I haven't been out on a Monday for ages.

I had been thinking that it was just because I'd become addicted to the Monday night lineup on the National Geographic Channel (lots of WWII documentaries, and that crazy guy who's trying to resurrect jousting as a professional sport).

I'd forgotten that it was because Monday nights suck. Everything is closed.

I'd been working over the weekend, so hadn't had a chance to go shopping for food. Suddenly finding the larder bare, I didn't fancy shopping and cooking on Monday evening, so went out in search of a place to dine and/or get a drink.

Now, I knew my best beloved 12 Square Metres has been dark on Mondays through the winter, but I thought they might be starting to open seven days a week again now that the weather's getting warmer. No such luck. And I know MaoMaoChong used to close on Mondays a while back, but I thought they'd switched to having Tuesdays as their night off. No - they're now closed on Tuesdays and Mondays.Saveurs de Corée? Closed. Suzuki Kitchen? Closed. Vineleaf?? Closed.

Even some of the Chinese restaurants in the 'hood appeared to be closed. And because at least half of all the foreigner-oriented places were having a night off, the ones that were open were heaved out (Sand Pebbles...).

Eventually I gave up, nipped into a supermarket for some bread and ham, made do with a sandwich when I got home.

I don't know what I'm going to do with myself now that the jousting series has finished...

[* Doesn't that remind us of a song? Indeed it does. But I think I'd better leave that for one of my 'Great Basslines' posts.]

Hmmm, chilli!

Hutong beer haven Great Leap Brewing launched its spring season on Saturday afternoon with a Chilli Cook-Off competition.

I love me a good chilli, so this was an irresistible temptation for me. (Also, having got up at 7am to finish a mammoth article on marketing theory for a "Friday deadline" that I'd only been told about on Thursday evening, I felt in need of a little treat.)

The various chillis in competition were all very different, quite easy to distinguish; and all were pretty tasty. I had thought at first that the tiny plastic 'tasting cups' we were using were a bit niggardly, likely to be unsatisfyingly small, but in fact they accommodated a surprisingly decent four or five mouthfuls... and after sampling the 9 or 10 different mixtures on offer, I was starting to feel reasonably full (although the cornbread and dumplings being offered by the guys down at the far end of the tasting line certainly helped with that).

The official results - chosen by a panel of well-known Beijing chefs - don't seem to have been posted yet. (Aha - they have now.) The clear winner for me was the one that styled itself Long March Mete (??!! I can't find any reference to that as a Spanish cooking term. Maybe its creator just meant Meat? Or Mate??): this had benefitted from a really long slow cooking process, emerging rich in both taste and texture, much darker and sludgier (a good thing, for me!) than any of the others. Second place was a tough call between Kevin's Chorizo & Chinese Hot Sausage recipe and the memorably (subconscious-manipulatingly) named 'You'll eat it, and you'll like it!', which, with plenty of tomatoes and red kidney beans and a very nicely balanced flavour, was the closest to what you typically get - or hope to get - in a bar or restaurant chilli. Kevin (one of the winners, we were told, in a major Chilli Cook-Off in Brooklyn last year) explained that his chilli had no actual peppers in it, but was flavoured purely with the spices that had leached out of the sausages he'd sliced into it. I find that hard to believe, but, if true, it had worked astonishingly well, producing a fine slow-build heat that didn't overwhelm but eventually proved to be, surprisingly, the fieriest of the lot. However, I also found a slight hint of sweetness in this one that didn't appeal to me so much, which, along with its austere abstinence from any vegetable content, relegated it to a very close third place.

Honourable mentions should also go to Chile (not just a country!) and the Santorum. Chile was made by a young Irish couple, who generously loaded their spicy stew with vegetables, including some big chunks of potato - which may offend purists, but I like the variety and the fillingness of it. Santorum had a really interesting blend of flavours, and was probably the second hottest, but it was a bit runny for my taste; and the roasted peppers in it may perhaps have been over-roasted a little, producing an aftertaste that was a bit more ashy than smoky.

There was also a guy with an inventive duck-based recipe - although that may perhaps have been taking the "Chinese characteristics" idea a little too far. He was using Hainan yellow peppers, which I'd never heard of, but did seem to have an excellent flavour. Unfortunately, duck evidently breaks down into long fibres when you stew it, which doesn't make for a particularly appealing appearance or texture.

Apologies to the other three or four competitors whose names I've forgotten. I enjoyed all the chillis, but I'm afraid I didn't keep tasting notes (and I did get very drunk later that evening...).

I hope we'll see a few more events like this here over the summer. But perhaps not quite so expensive next time... (Asking a 120 rmb door fee for an event with basically no overheads is really a bit of a cheek!)

And don't pussyfoot around with the HEAT next time. Bring on the Guatemalan Insanity Peppers! (Ooh, a possible band name, that?)