A more cynical 'bucket list': 10 things you probably will have done before you leave China

My earlier list of things to do before you leave Beijing was mostly rather jolly and upbeat, wasn't it? Most out of keeping with my usual year-end curmudgeonliness and depression!

This selection might seem more in character.

10 more-or-less obligatory expat rites of passage

Spend several months in full-time Chinese studies, culminating in an immersion experience and a failed attempt to pass the HSK

Discover that you can learn all the Chinese you will ever need from taxi drivers

Start dating a Chinese girlfriend/boyfriend, and find yourself railroaded into marriage in under a year

Invest in a bar or restaurant

Have your bar or restaurant stolen out from under you by your Chinese business partner

Divorce your Chinese spouse (who was probably your errant business partner, or one of their relatives)

Open a t-shirt shop (as being the only kind of business small enough for you to have a chance of being able to set it up without a Chinese partner/spouse)

Forget almost all the Chinese you ever knew, apart from the swear words (which provide most of your t-shirt slogans)

Make enough money to retire back in your homeland, but then find that revaluation of the renminbi has taken 30% off the value of your savings (and/or that the bank has frozen your account because, as a foreigner, you have no truly valid form of ID in China)

Get yourself arrested on your last night in China for some minor drunken indiscretion such as spitting in public or urinating in public, and spend another big chunk of your savings bribing the police to release you

Howdy, pardner!

Blue Cowbie - a very palatable local brew with which I quenched my thirst down in Zhenyuan - on my trip to Guizhou province last month. The logo is a crude rendition of John Wayne. 

Ah, Chinese advertising!

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.

Chinese hotel bars

I stayed in five different hotels during my recent three-week jaunt around China, and hung out in the lobbies of a couple more. I thought this experience might furnish a post or two about the experience of getting a drink - or trying to - in a Chinese hotel.

But, um, not really, no. Most Chinese hotels don't have a bar at all - or nothing that really passes muster as one. In the lower-tier cities, at any rate, even Western hotel chains are geared pretty much exclusively towards the Chinese business traveller. Thus, the facilities they provide will almost always include a karaoke lounge (often a synonym for 'brothel'), often a teahouse (ditto), and occasionally a spa (ditto). But no bar, as such. Western drinking culture still hasn't really caught on that much here, certainly not out in the sticks.

The Ramada Plaza in Guiyang, for example, has only a coffee shop (and a spectacularly awful one, at that); no bar.

The Crown Plaza in Kaili, however, does have what purports to be a bar. I didn't see anyone using it in the three days I was there - apart from a couple of Chinese guests who favoured it as a smoking lounge, but didn't appear to make any purchases. When I asked the two staff behind the counter for a menu, they gawped at me in amazement. As well they might - there weren't enough options to warrant having a menu. A few soft drinks, and a solitary beer (Pearl River from Guangzhou - fairly tasteless, and absurdly overpriced). No spirits - not even Chinese baijiu. I don't think this counts as a bar; more like a convenience store with a handful of armchairs.

In only one of the hotels I visited on this trip was I actually able to get a beer. It was a huge and severely underused place out in the wilds of Guizhou. I suspect it aims for the conference and wedding banquet trade, but doesn't market itself very effectively and is completely deserted most of the time. Its karaoke facilities took up most of the second floor, but they were - mercifully - not in use; and the reception area for this, apart from a vague musty smell, was a not unpromising bar. Well, it had a bar, for one thing, a wood-topped counter at a nice height for leaning; that's a good start! And it was dimly lit, quite cosy. There was even a member of staff on duty who was aware that it was his job to sell drinks to people - although he might not often have been called upon to do so. Once again, there were no spirits. But there were two types of beer on offer, and they weren't outrageously expensive. Unfortunately, there were none in the fridge, so the barman had to take one from a pyramid display on the glass shelving behind him. He hadn't served a drink in so long that he had forgotten where the bottle-opener was kept; so - after a long, futile search - I persuaded him to accept a loan of mine. And when I finally tasted the beer, I discovered - of course! - that it must have been some years past its sell-by date and was absolutely vile.

But at least I had managed to buy a beer in a Chinese hotel. That is quite a challenge.

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 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."

Qixi, schmixi!

Qixi - a traditional Chinese festival which has evolved over the past decade or so into a "Chinese Valentine's Day" (and you can imagine how much I detest that idea!) - fell a couple of weeks ago this year. I had been thinking of writing something about it then, but I had no Internet access. In fact, I had been meaning to write something about it last year, but didn't get around to it because I was travelling a lot in August. So, this post is 13 months late. Ah, well.

Last year, "Lovers' Day" came around rather earlier, near the start of August. Its date is set by the Chinese lunar calendar - the easily memorable 7:7, the seventh day of the seventh lunar month.

I happened to be down in Yunnan at that time, and had been happily unaware of the imminent tsunami of slush. But as I wandered around Kunming on a sultry summer's evening, it became very obvious what was looming. Almost every shop seemed to have converted from its usual business into being a florist's for the day. Either that or a teddy bear shop. Or a chocolate shop. Many places were covering all three options, with huge displays of teddy bears, boxes of chocolates, and flowers outside. Many were also touting heart-shaped helium balloons. On more than one occasion, someone had thought it cute to suspend a teddy bear from a bunch of balloons with a string knotted around its throat. To me this seemed macabre, like some coded gangland threat - and a sinister omen for the night of "romance" ahead.

Bars and cafés were all hoping for a bumper night. Many had forests of pink helium-filled balloons outside, sometimes even fashioned into heart-shaped arches, to advertise their festive spirit.

But their hopes, it seemed, were being disappointed. Every single one I passed was completely deserted. The bar touts mooched dejectedly outside on the sidewalks, fretting that their labours all afternoon in erecting balloon arches had been wasted.

Still, it was early in the evening. Perhaps things would pick up later, after sundown. I decided to distance myself from all the balloon-festooned venues, and retired to one of the few restaurants that appeared to be having no truck with this nonsense.

I was upstairs, reading a book, not paying very much attention to my surroundings. I was vaguely aware that the sun had gone down, and that there had been a rising amount of foot traffic on the street outside. Then I was roused from my reverie by a sudden ROAR from down the street. It sounded like the growl of an angry mob, and my first thought was that two groups of lads were about to have a rumble - perhaps provoked by an argument over a young lady. But then I realised that the noise was not outside on the street, but inside a nearby bar. In fact, there were similar noises coming from almost every bar. Now that I started listening, I realised that there were sounds of agitation coming from downstairs in my own venue - so I went down to investigate.

I had quite forgotten, but the Italian Super Cup - the showpiece opening game of the Italian football season, between the winners of the previous year's league and cup titles - was being played in Beijing that day, between the two Milan giants, AC and Internazionale. The game was live on TV, and of course everyone was watching it.

So much for Qixi! I suppose it is possible that young couples might have arranged to go out together after the game. But that seemed unlikely: the crowds of football watchers were almost exclusively male, and after an evening of exciting bonding with their guy pals - and consuming rather more beer than the limited Asian alcohol capacity can cope with - the prospects for an intimate à deux with the girlfriend appeared severely unpromising.

I was strangely gratified to find that for the young urban Chinese male football trumps "romance" so emphatically. That is as it should be.

A decade of change (Part III)

The last ten years have seen a lot of changes in Beijing, and in its bar scene. I've reflected on these transformations a number of times before (for example, in considering the evolution of my own drinking habits, in reminiscing about the SARS summer, in categorizing the various expat 'types', and in satirizing the life-cycle of the 'hidden gem' bar). However, having just gone through my China Meltdown Moment and quit the country, possibly for good, this seems like an apt time for one last review of the major nightlife phenomena I witnessed during my time in The Jing.

This is the final part of a three-part series begun last Tuesday and Thursday.

The burgeoning of the music scene (and the bursting of the bubble?)

Back in the day.... we had Get Lucky bar (which was awful), Nameless Highland (which was rather good, but remote and difficult to find), River Bar (which was a bit small), and What Bar (which was - is - tiny). That was about it for live music venues. All except What had succumbed to the chai by the mid-Noughties. Yugong Yishan forerunner Loupe Chante was great, but lasted barely a year from its 2003 opening. But then, in fairly quick succession, we got the first Yugong Yishan appearing in the Gongti car park, 13 Club and the (recently demised) D-22 opening up almost side by side near Tsinghua University, and the Tango/Star Live club next to Ditan Park becoming the city's first purpose-built 'medium size' venue (early summer 2005; Yugong and Star might have been a bit earlier). The following year, music came to the hutongs, with Jiangjinjiu opening on Bell Tower Square and Jianghu off Nanluoguxiang; perhaps the greatest of all Beijing's cosy, divey music bars, 2 Kolegas, first opened its doors that year too, and the city's best music venue (at least for its sound) Mao Live House came shortly afterwards.

Unfortunately, this brief flowering of the scene got squelched by the approach of the Beijing Olympics: all music festivals in the capital, and very nearly all outdoor performances of any kind, were blocked for nearly two years; foreign acts found it hard to get visas and permits; music bars suffered a lot of harassment about their licences. Not surprisingly, no-one else wanted to try and open a new music bar for a while. However, after three years or more of arrested development, 2010 saw another wave of expansion, with small venues like Zui Yuefang, VA Bar, Hot Cat Club, Tushuguan, and Gulou 121 suddenly appearing, as well as new mid-size event venues Mako Live and The One. And now we've got Temple and (D-22 offspring) XP as well, establishing the Gulou area as the centre of Beijing's music scene (despite rather than because of the proximity of the new Yugong Yishan, which has completely dominated the scene for visiting foreign acts for over 4 years now, but is - I'm sorry to say - a truly terrible venue).

Perhaps, though, as with the proliferation of music festivals in the last few years, Beijing's and China's rock scene isn't yet strong enough to warrant this many outlets: most of the newer openings have failed to establish themselves very convincingly. I worry that this profusion of venues may actually be counter-productive, tending to foster ennui as we see the same rosters of bands appearing again and again all over the city.

The sudden escalation of cover charges (almost completely unknown 7 years ago, and rarely more than 30rmb until about 4 years ago, but now rarely less than 50rmb and often 80rmb or 100rmb) is also harming attendances (many of the visiting foreign acts at Yugong are now failing to attract any Chinese punters - not because they haven't heard of the acts, but because they can't afford the tickets); and I'm not convinced that it's for the good of the bands either (anything that diminishes attendance is ultimately bad for the bands; they ought to be cannier about making money for themselves off merchandise sales, rather than demanding a  percentage of the door take).

The slow development of a service ethic
Back in the early Noughties The Den was the only bar that had a consistently good level of service and English-language skills among its waitresses (though less so with its barmen or doormen). In most of the other foreigner-targeted bars, many of the staff spoke no English at all, few spoke more than a handful of stumbling phrases, and service standards were... pretty wayward. Amazingly, The Den is still leading the field 10 or 12 years on, but the rest of the scene has been catching up, particularly in the last 5 years: you can expect a functional level of English from almost all customer-facing staff in Western bars and restaurants now. The service standards, though, are still decidedly iffy. Staff training may have improved, staff motivation (and, hopefully, remuneration) may have improved; the available talent pool has expanded enormously (an awful lot of college graduates are now willing to start off in low-level F&B jobs; but the migrant workers with little education who study English for hours in their spare time to get a better job are the ones who really impress me); but a service ethic is still largely absent, I fear. It takes a very long time to develop that kind of culture.

The decline of the taxi service

The number of subway stations has gone up four- or five-fold... but there's still very little coverage across the city centre, and the service starts grinding to a halt around 10.30pm. The buses run an hour or so later at night than they used to, but that still means there's nothing after 11pm. Late-night public transport in this city is non-existent: revellers who've strayed too far from home are utterly dependent on the taxi fleet. This was not a problem at all when there were 80,000 taxis and only 20,000 expats (and hardly any local Chinese who wanted to use cabs late at night). Now the cab fleet has shrunk to about 65,000 (last unofficial estimate I heard), while the number of expats is probably close to or above 100,000 (and huge numbers of young Chinese are now using the new subway lines to venture in from the far suburbs for a night out at the weekends). On top of this, taxi rates have been frozen by the government for the last six years (largely in order to manipulate the official cost-of-living index), with the result that drivers are now struggling to make a living - and hence ill-tempered, misanthropic, and, at busy times, frequently inclined to turn down rides, go 'off meter' to demand exorbitant ad hoc fares, or simply vent their latent xenophobia by spurning (or attempting to run over) any foreigners who try to flag them down. In the past year or two, it has become extraordinarily difficult to get a taxi at peak periods (5pm-7pm or 11pm-1am), and it is often pretty nigh impossible (for a foreigner) to get a taxi from the Sanlitun area at almost any time of the day. I sympathise with the cabbies' plight: bumping up the fares by 20% or 30% (and perhaps introducing tipping??) would be a fair and reasonable solution to the problem.

Oh my, this is far cry from the good old days. Until a few years ago, I'd almost never had to wait more than 15 seconds for a cab, at any time of day, in any part of the city (though, admittedly, I was never trying to get out of the CBD in the rush hour). Recent arrivals find that impossible to credit, but I assure you it is quite true.

I fear the current situation will exacerbate the Balkanization of the Beijing nightlife scene. It's just becoming way too much mafan to travel across town for a night out, with severe uncertainties about how you might get back. People are starting to restrict themselves to bars they can walk home from.

Fragmentation

Several new bar/restaurant areas have grown up across the city during the past 10 years: in Wudaokou, for the student crowd; in the Lido area, catering to the wealthier expats who live in the north-east, or venture in from Shunyi at the weekends on shopping expeditions; in Shuangjing, suddenly a favoured ghetto for the less well-off expat; in the heart of the city around Nanluoguxiang and Houhai (and now rapidly expanding north through the Gulou area and eastwards along the Fangjia and Wudaoying hutongs). People still talk about 'Sanlitun' as the city's nightlife centre, but it's shrunk to the single cramped thoroughfare of 'Back Street' - Sanlitun Houjie and the Tongli Building. And that's overrun with raucous youngsters, and starting to get a very bad reputation for fights and street crime. The Beijing bar scene today is much broader than that; as a whole, it is arguably much classier than it was 10 years ago, and certainly a lot more expensive; it's also become far more differentiated and geographically spread out. There has never again been - and probably never will be - a great mixing pot like the old Sanlitun South Street, which could bring together the entire expat population into one narrow space (if not all into exactly the same bars), regardless of age, income, or nationality. I rather miss that sometimes. But not as much as I miss a 10-kuai gin & tonic.

A decade of change (Part II)

The last ten years have seen a lot of changes in Beijing, and in its bar scene. I've reflected on these transformations a number of times before (for example, in considering the evolution of my own drinking habits, in reminiscing about the SARS summer, in categorizing the various expat 'types', and in satirizing the life-cycle of the 'hidden gem' bar). However, having just gone through my China Meltdown Moment and quit the country, possibly for good, this seems like an apt time for one last review of the major nightlife phenomena I witnessed during my time in The Jing.

This is the second part of a series I began on Tuesday. The final part will appear next Tuesday.

The loss of 'Off-Sanlitun' and 'Sanlitun South Street'... and 'The Car Park'

The area off to the west of the main Sanlitun trip - now occupied by malls like The Village and Nali Patio and 3.3 - used to be a rabbit-warren of dingy 1960s apartment buildings. In amongst its dusty backstreets there were a few worthwhile bars and restaurants - like the original incarnation of Le Petit Gourmand (one of the venues to host The Bookworm's lending library and speaker meetings, before it acquired a space of its own back in 2005) and a short-lived lounge bar called Cloud Nine. That all got bulldozed around about 2004. At much the same time, the same fate befell the main - only! - enclave of foreigner-friendly bars of those days (on nearby Dongdaqiao Xiejie, invariably referred to as Sanlitun Nanjie). The best of its bars - Nashville, Huxley's, Hidden Tree, Durty Nellie's, Black Sun and Reef - would find new homes elsewhere, but all in different parts of the city. There has never again been such a concentration of worthwhile bars in a small area.

Well, for a couple of years one new foreigner hotspot sprang up in a mysteriously unused car park across the street from the North Gate of the Workers' Stadium, but that was just four bars: the wonderfully skanky Bus Bar (an unofficial drugs supermarket) relocated from outside The Den, the first incarnation of the Yugong Yishan music club (much smaller, but incomparably better than the current one), Huxley's most successful dive bar, Nanjie (managed by Xiao Ming, now of Revolution), and the Red Ball football club. That marvellous little node of sleazerie got chai'd to make way for yet another pointless mall in 2007 (a project that took nearly 4 years to complete, and is still largely empty of tenants).

The keynote of this past decade in Beijing has been the rapid turnover of businesses; whether due to redevelopment projects, harassment by the authorities, rent-gouging landlords, or treacherous business partners... worthwhile bars and restaurants usually get swept away within a year or three.
(I think The Den is the ONLY 10-year survivor that's still holding on in its original location.)

The failure of central planning

The city government has from time to time attempted to create replacement 'bar zones'.... perhaps with the idea that these designated new entertainment destinations would be "out of harm's way". Yuan Dynasty Bar Street, Lady Street, Lucky Street - how we laughed! Actually, Lady Street - just over the road from the new US Embassy - wasn't all that bad; but it was always obvious it would get redeveloped into something grander as soon as the Embassy was complete.

The long march upmarket

Once upon a time, there was apparently only one Japanese whisky bar in town (somewhere near Sanyuanqiao; the memory fades), but almost no-one (non-Japanese) knew where it was, or even what it was called. Then came Ichikura, which at least got its name known but was even harder to find. But now there are four or five of these places, maybe even more; and more seem to be opening all the time. Since the Japanese have a fondness for elaborate cocktails as well as for neat whisky, I suspect Ichikura and its ilk may have helped pave the way for the appearance of proper cocktail bars in Beijing, another big trend of the last half-dozen years (you used not to be able to get a 'fancy' cocktail anywhere other than in a handful of the swankier Western hotel bars; and they were fiendishly expensive and not usually very good). Most of the credit (or blame), though, should probably go to George Zhou and Echo Sun, who created the capital's first affordable cocktail joints in First Café and Midnight... although, alas, they would soon move on to create the more commercially viable but much less appealing Q Bar - overpriced, overrated, and very overcrowded. Affordable cocktail bars are now popping up in the hutongs (Mai, MaoMaoChong - we love you), but Sanlitun and the CBD have been taken over by the wallet-busting pretension of places like Apothecary and Xiu.

The increase in the last few years in the number of importers and distributors of beers, wines, and spirits has also been something of a mixed blessing. Variety is all very well up to a point, but the plethora of different drinks on offer in many places now simply baffles the comprehension and makes your choice almost impossible. Moreover, most of these newer distributors are fairly small operators, with no economies of scale to offer, even on their bigger selling items. It's nice that foreign draught beers like Guinness and Stella (and, if you must, Vedett and Hoegaarden - although I can't stand them myself) are becoming more widely available; but they are painfully, prohibitively expensive for most of us to drink as anything other than an occasional treat. Ditto most of the several hundreds of different brands of bottled beer that you can now find in the capital. I would far rather have just five or six affordable beers to choose from than 150 bank-breakers.

The emergence of locally brewed craft beers from Great Leap and Slow Boat in the past year or so is potentially a major watershed as well. However, I'm afraid I'm not sold on the quality of the beer so far (too much novelty fruit-flavour crap rather than real ale), nor am I all that sanguine about these breweries' prospects for survival and expansion beyond the short term. I suspect this exciting moment in the evolution of the Beijing bar scene might prove to have been just a short-lived watershed in pretentiously marketed, overrated, overpriced beers. If these guys produced an unfussy brown ale or a properly hoppy bitter for 25 kuai a pint, they'd win me over. But that doesn't look likely to happen.

As all these fancy-dan almost-like-a-bar-back-home-but-much-more-expensive places have gradually become the new norm, the kind of barebones drinking dens - no-nonsense dive bars - that I much prefer have been disappearing. I find it very sad.

A decade of change (Part I)

The last ten years have seen a lot of changes in Beijing, and in its bar scene. I've reflected on these transformations a number of times before (for example, in considering the evolution of my own drinking habits, in reminiscing about the SARS summer, in categorizing the various expat 'types', and in satirizing the life-cycle of the 'hidden gem' bar). However, having just gone through my China Meltdown Moment and quit the country, possibly for good, this seems like an apt time for one last review of the major nightlife phenomena I witnessed during my time in The Jing.


This had ended up being rather long, so I'll divide it into a three part series; the further instalments will be posted this Thursday and next Tuesday.

A new city rises

It seems incredible now, but even the Wangfujing shopping street - long the city's tourism hub! - was only created in the late '90s. Most of the city's modernization programmes didn't kick in until after it had won the  Olympic bid in 2001. When I arrived in 2002, the 5th Ringroad and the Line 13 elevated commuter railway were still under construction; development was in places a bit patchy even between the 3rd and 4th Ringroads, and - except in the university district to the north-west - there was scarcely anything yet built outside the 4th Ring, it was still open countryside; Gui Jie was nearing the end of a major road-widening project, and the original Russian Market in Yabaolu (a semi-open air affair in corrugated steel hangars) was just about to be demolished to make way for the risibly named Aliens Street mini-mall. Most of the mega-malls and grandiose office buildings that now define central Beijing have only been completed in the last few years; hardly any of them date back further than 2006.

The scouring of the hutongs

While much of the new architecture is undoubtedly impressive, I can't help feeling that most of it was thrown up without any real plan or purpose - other than to satisfy the greed of fly-by-night property developers and corrupt government officials. The wholesale destruction of great swathes of the old city - the labyrinth of narrow lanes and ramshackle single-storey houses that are the heart and history of this place - to make way for all these (still massively underused) new buildings has been has been one of the saddest stories of Beijing in the Noughties. Balanced development, planned development, reconstruction that shows some respect for community spirit and historical heritage - this has been almost unknown in Beijing.

Commercialization, even worse than the bulldozer

The few hutong districts that remain are being remorselessly colonized by insanely optimistic entrepreneurs who seem to think that the city can't possibly have too many coffee shops or quirky boutiques. Nanluoguxiang led the way, the process starting round about 2004 and accelerating dramatically in the last year or two before the Olympics. What was once a quaint little alleyway lined with traditional shops and cheap restaurants has become a seething tourist trap that targets only Chinese punters rather than foreigners. Sadly, the whole of the Gulou area is now starting to go the same way.

The expat population grows... ever younger and more American

When I first came here, I'd guess the 'Western' expat population was only a few tens of thousands; and most of them were Shunyi-ites who'd rarely venture into the city. The number of foreigners you might ever actually meet was only a few thousands, and those who frequented the bar areas might only have been in the hundreds. It was a very cosy little community back then: you did have the sense that you basically knew everyone, at least by sight. Americans seemed relatively under-represented; Canadians and Kiwis and Aussies and Brits (and the French, funnily enough) appeared to be far more numerous, and were certainly far more conspicuous on the bar scene. Numbers studying Mandarin were far lower, and a good many of them were mature students. But most of the folks you'd meet out in bars were professionals of one sort or another; a lot of them might be English teachers, and fairly fresh out of university, but they were 'grown-ups'. There's probably been a ten-fold growth in the number of Mandarin students since the early Noughties, and, in particular, a huge increase in American high school and college students coming here just in the last three or four years. This has transformed the Wudaokou and Sanlitun scenes, and (for a middle-aged fuddy-duddy like me) not in a good way.

Inflation takes off, the slow dying out of the budget scene

Bars in Beijing have always tended to be a bit overpriced, compared to the generally low cost of living here. But back in the early Noughties prices were tethered to some extent by the thriving budget sector at the bottom end of the market: few places charged more than 10rmb for a Tsingtao, and almost none dared to ask for more than 15rmb, because there were so many places selling it for 5rmb (although at this price it was often of dubious provenance) - alongside 10 or 15rmb mixed drinks. Ah, those were the days! Spiralling rents caused by the property boom, a larger and more affluent customer base, and a sudden surge in the general level of inflation (it started getting bad back in 2007, and took a huge leap after the government's spendthrift stimulus programmes to ward off recession in 2009; supermarket prices have doubled in the last 10 years; restaurant prices have gone up by almost that much in only 5 or 6 years - with the majority of that increase happening just in the last 3 years) have led to a steady rise in bar prices, to the point where most Beijing bars are now no cheaper than their counterparts in the US or the UK. It's still not as upmarket as Shanghai, but it has been closing the gap rapidly. I don't regard that as a good thing, either.

Does Nanluoguxiang have a future?

I think not.

Most of the bars and restaurants down there have now been forced out by insanely greedy landlords, and it seems inevitable that the few decent survivors - Reef, Salud, 12 Square Metres - will suffer the same fate sooner or later.

It has become unviable to run anything other than an upmarket restaurant or a poncey boutique on that strip now. 

Well, such, at least, is the perception of Chinese entrepreneurs. I think they are mistaken. Nanluoguxiang is too small and narrow, and too remote from the main commercial hubs of the city to function effectively as a tourist magnet/upmarket shopping district. Most visitors to the street are not free-spending out-of-towners or the affluent upper middle class; they are young Beijingers who think it's a cool place to go promenading with their boyfriend/girlfriend or their mates. It's strictly about hanging out and window-shopping; hardly anybody actually buys anything from the fancy shops. The only people making money on that street are the blanket vendors and the snack-food stalls. (But they only make money because the quaint boutiques attract so many window-shoppers. Canny businessmen would run one or two small boutiques as a loss-making promotion [convenient for avoiding paying any tax!], while surreptitiously pulling in big bucks from an unassuming little snack shop. But I doubt if anybody operating down there is at all canny. The boutique owners obstinately soldier on, convinced that they will start making money one day. The snack food vendors make the most of the current bonanza, oblivious of how fragile their trade is, how dependent it is on the presence of all those shops that are making no money.)

The popularity of the area has quickly become counter-productive. The sheer volume of foot traffic clogs the street, often renders it almost impassable, and so makes it much less attractive. The Chinese seem to be much more tolerant of suffocating crowds, but Westerners are increasingly approaching their destination bar or restaurant down one of the side streets - or giving up on Nanluoguxiang altogether. When the new subway station opens at the south end of the street (supposedly at the end of the year, but the work is running well behind schedule) the crowds will get even worse - to the point, I would imagine, where the street will be completely killed for Western punters, and even some of the Chinese will start getting discouraged.

My advice to anybody with a bar or restaurant - or a shop or anything - on NLGX would be to get out NOW, because in a year or two almost every warm day is going to be like the craziest days (such as the 'street festival' days) we've seen in the past, with the crowds so thick that it's almost impossible to move.

That will make it even harder for businesses down there to make any money. But landlords will see only the numbers of people passing, not the actual level of custom, and will crank their rents up even higher. And there will be a catastrophic collapse of the economy. In three years, most of the sites on NLGX will be empty, and there'll be tumbleweed rolling down the nearly deserted street.

If landlords refuse to yield to common sense (likely in Beijing!)... well, the street might perhaps start to entice in the big-money foreign chains like Starbucks, McDonald's and The Disney Store. I think this has always been the dream of the local government's 'planners'. But without a strong community of shops, and some flavour of traditional Chinese culture, where will the custom come from? I can't see people visiting the area just for Starbucks and Disney.

A more hopeful scenario would be that landlords slash their rents to more realistic levels, and we gradually return to the vibrant mix of diverse bars, restaurants, and shops that we used to have on that street a few years ago when its splurge of development first got going. But I'm not sanguine about that happening.

It's a horribly fascinating socio-economic experiment, a microcosm of China's economy as a whole. Nanluoguxiang is a bubble fuelled by delusion and greed; and it's now facing imminent crisis and collapse. How will it come through this crisis, what will we see afterwards? 

[I wouldn't like to speculate! But I'm glad I'm now watching it from a safe distance away.]

Memories of the SARS summer

I feel a little guilty about saying this because, yes, it was a terrible trauma for the city of Beijing, and for a number of other places - for the whole world, really. Some people died, many got in a major panic. (My brother was reluctant to have me come home to visit his family in the UK that summer because he was worried I might have become a symptomless carrier of the disease. That's how crazy things got in some places!)

Yes, I say it guiltily, we all do, but I'm going to say it - the SARS summer was A BLAST. I'm sure most foreigners who were here at that time feel much the same: it was the best time we ever had in Beijing. This oppressive metropolis was never so cheap, never so uncrowded, never such FUN again.

Paradoxical as it may seem, I don't think it has ever again been so carefree. It was as if our anxieties about the Great Plague waiting to decimate Mankind drove all other more humdrum concerns from our minds.

I suspect it was the mass panic, rather than any of the haphazard public health initiatives of the Beijing government (I may do a fuller post over on Froogville in a couple of days about the more serious aspects of the SARS experience here), that choked the disease off, and perhaps saved Beijing. The news finally broke 'officially' that the outbreak in Beijing was much more serious than the authorities had initially admitted on the Sunday before the May Day holiday. [We all kind of knew before that. The rumour mill had been going crazy for a month or so. And, even in those days before serviceable Internet connection speeds and convenient VPNs, we had been getting dribs and drabs of news from the media overseas.]

Within a day or two, I would guess that almost everyone had gone home. Some of the students at the college where I was working (rightly fearing a possible quarantine on educational institutions, which eventually came at the end of the week) had already started running off a few days before that infamous Sunday press conference at which the Mayor of Beijing and the Minister of Health were summarily replaced. By the following Tuesday or Wednesday, nearly all of the students had gone. It was much the same in all of the offices where I had contacts: a couple of business teaching gigs I had going on were suddenly cancelled - indefinitely.

Everybody went home for the holiday a few days early. And many of them then stayed at home for the next two or three weeks, or more.

Traffic on the roads was light - although it didn't disappear altogether, because everyone became convinced that the crowds on public transport were sure to infect you. Passengers on the buses became fewer and fewer. Passengers on the subway were rare as hen's teeth: you could usually get a whole carriage, sometimes even a whole train, to yourself; and if there were anyone else sitting nearby, a quick tactical cough would send them scurrying into the next carriage for safety.

My college was, in effect, closed down for the last two months of the semester (although the staff didn't want to admit as much!); but an untypically xenophilic government edict had forbade employers to withold pay from foreign experts for working time lost due to the SARS crisis (maybe this applied to Chinese workers as well; though somehow I doubt it!).

The weather was exquisite: it had started getting sunny and warm in the second half of April (as it always seemed to, until 4 or 5 years ago when this accursed 'global warming' started deranging the former metronomic predictability of Beijing's seasons). The air quality was superb (many factories closed, far fewer cars on the roads). We had day after day of sumptuously blue skies. And even when it started getting really hot, it didn't seem uncomfortably so - because, uncannily, there was no humidity. [I didn't notice at the time, but I wonder if even the municipal maintenance crews who water all our bloody trees so extravagantly during the summer had also been given - or treated themselves to - a couple of weeks off. I'm sure that's where most of the damned humidity comes from; The Jing usually starts to become insufferable by late May or early June, but that year we continued to enjoy clear skies and dry air well into June, a run of perhaps 8 weeks or so of utterly idyllic weather with scarcely a single interruption.]

So, I suddenly found myself with a couple of months of completely free time, in a city I had just begun to know and love, and with the astonishing bonus of no crowds and no pollution and ecstatically beautiful weather.

The bar scene was a bit subdued, of course. The majority of expats had fled back to their own countries for a while, and some of those who stayed were as nervous as their Chinese brethren of venturing outside and risking encounters with people. I heard a handful of diehards at the old Goose & Duck (over by Chaoyang Park West Gate in those days) mounted a round-the-clock sit-in to encourage the owner to maintain his 24-hour opening policy. Most of the bars around Sanlitun and Gongti started offering extravagant special offers to try to entice in customers. This was one of the only times I've been talked into trying sleazy and teen-oriented North Gate nightclubs Vic's and Mix; my pal Big Frank assured me that the usual door charges had been waived, and that there was some kind of ridiculous drinks promotion - possibly even an all-you-can-drink - that would get us wasted for under 100 kuai. However, he soon discovered an even better deal at the nondescript Sanlitun Nanjie bar Tanewha, which was offering all-you-could-drink for 50 kuai. They had to reconsider that policy after Frank started taking some of his lady friends there on a regular basis. He was consorting with a gaggle of Russian 'working girls' at that time - and damn, could they drink! They'd demand a whole bottle of vodka each from the bewildered Tanewha barmen in return for their 50-note ... and then, three hours or so later, another one... each. They didn't have much 'work' at this time either, so it was just party, party, party.

Yes, there were a few WILD nights over Sanlitun way during that strange, demented May. But I've never been an eastside man. Back then, we all used to hang out around Houhai most of the time. Not in bars! There weren't any back then (No Name Bar and Buddha Bar, on either side of Yinding bridge, had been the pioneers; and one or two others had opened up nearby over the preceding winter, but failed to make any impact). Curiously enough, it was SARS that gave the area its big push. After three or four weeks of fearful seclusion, as the numbers of new cases began to tail off, people summoned up the courage to start setting foot outdoors again, but... there was a prevalent superstition that confined spaces were the kiss of death; Chinese punters would only consider eating or drinking outside during the closing weeks of the emergency. It was complete nonsense, of course: contamination of plates and glassware and the like was the real transmission risk, and that applied just as much or more in the slew of pavement café-style bars that suddenly started opening up around the Houhai lakes.

And that was what destroyed Houhai. The trend continued after the SARS terror had waned, gathered pace again the next summer and the next. Before long, Houhai was nothing but bars - and particularly nasty, garish, overpriced bars, at that: the kind of place that really appeals only to Chinese tourists (and not even to them, much of the time!).

But during the SARS summer, this was an irksome but still easily overlooked innovation. The great place to drink by Houhai - or, rather, Qianhai, the lower lake - in that year (and on into the next one, too) was the terrace out the back of the big department store at the top of Dianmenwai. It has long since been redeveloped into a cluster of hideous nightclubs, but back in the early Noughties, it was just a large, open - unclaimed? - space that was taken over for the summer months by an assortment of snack vendors. Big bottles of Yanjing usually cost an exorbitant 3 or 4 kuai, rather than the then more usual 2 kuai, but they were usually cold (we had to train up the two young girls who tended the fridge, educate them in the matter of the preferences and the capacity of laowai drinkers). When I first arrived in Beijing, it seemed that almost no-one - Chinese or foreigners - knew of the spot. Most of the custom came from workers from the department store taking their lunch or dinner breaks. I like to think that my teaching colleagues and I helped to introduce the place to a wider audience. Alas, those good times, those cheap good times would not last for long.

There was one even better spot, though, especially for an evening session. On the north-east corner of Houhai, there were three or four little Muslim restaurants, hole-in-the-wall chuanr joints, shoulder to shoulder (it was hard to tell where each one began and ended, but fortunately they were fairly easy-going about sharing their cramped space with each other). I spent most evenings in May and early June in that year of SARS sitting at a plastic table on the sidewalk in front of one of those restaurants, eating chuanr and pickled peanuts, sucking back cold beers... and smiling pityingly at the glitzy lights and raucous music that were just beginning to disfigure the far end of the lake. We were a safe distance away: it seemed like "a dull rumour of some other war."

The following summer this marvellous cluster of Muslim places was chai'd... to make way for the first of a succession of ostentatiously pointless 'art bars', none of which has lasted more than a year or two.

The Beijing experience in a nutshell: it was fantastic when I first came here (especially when 80% of the population was afraid to go outdoors), but it has got progressively worse with every passing year since.

I've been thinking for ages that I should write something about these very resonant early experiences of Beijing, against the fraught background of SARS in 2003; but the Olympics distracted me on the five-year anniversary, and it looks now as if I won't be here any longer for the ten-year one next year. These thoughts have been bubbling up again especially strongly because the weather has been just gorgeous for most of the past two weeks: blue skies and tolerable heat always recall the SARS summer for me, and probably always will, even after I've left this place behind.

O brave new world!

I went over to Tianjin this week (for the first time in ages), and discovered - in the big mall over the road from the Olympic football stadium - this, the Swiss Club, which advertises such intriguing delights as "Swiss red wine". Who knew such wonders existed? (Odd how Switzerland seems to be following me around in recent years!)

Given the general tackiness of its appearance, and its grandiose pretensions to being a 'Club', I rather doubt if any actual Swiss people are involved in this venture. In fact, I found myself irresistibly reminded of Swiss Toni: "Running a bar in China is like making love to a beautiful woman..."

HBH 279

Pretty girls warble;

Weird instruments disappoint.

Not worth the money.

I nipped in to Jianghu last night to catch the last of a series of concerts by the Dong Chorus, a small choir of performers (three girls, three boys) from the Dong ethnic group of southern China who've been playing a number of shows around Beijing over the past couple of weeks.

I baulked slightly at the 80rmb door fee being demanded, but thought I'd bite the bullet because I'd heard good things about this group. Unfortunately, ennui set in very quickly, and I could barely survive 30 minutes of it. The girls were extremely pretty; that was probably all that made the show survivable for more than 10 minutes. The ethnic costumes were... well, very "ethnic". And the local instruments the guys occasionally played... well, I was curious to see what they'd sound like, but they weren't much used. I commented to a friend via SMS that they had a very rough-and-ready finish to them, looked in fact "like a shoddy junior school craft project"; I went on, "A balsa wood lap fiddle, how good is that going to sound?? Hm, not very!"

The problem, I think, is the commoditization of ethnic culture in China. You see this kind of thing all the time: on TV shows, in advertisements, in 'local colour' performances staged every hour, on the hour, for tourists passing through one of the ethnic enclaves, in 'variety' extravaganzas at your local theatre several times a year (I've been to a fair few, the obligatory hospitality that 'foreign experts' here are subjected to by state employers), and at dinner shows in slightly upmarket regional restaurants. The government sponsors a lot of this for propaganda purposes, to demonstrate how well integrated China's diverse ethnic communities are, and what an adornment to the national culture their quaint folk customs are. So, much of the time the costumes and the instruments are cheap, tacky, mass-produced copies. The songs and dances may be inauthentic too, syrupy arrangements with modern instruments pandering to the 'elevator music' taste of the mass market here and bawdy lyrics bowdlerised. Quite often, you don't even have genuine members of the minority group in question, but regular Han Chinese performers impersonating them.

The Dong Chorus may be the real deal. But I couldn't help thinking that I'd seen it all before, that I probably could have seen the same kind of thing at the Guizhou Provincial Restaurant and - for 80 kuai! - got a nice supper along with it.

How not to do it - opening a bar

A couple of weeks ago, I was tipped off about a new bar opening in my neighbourhood - so, I thought I'd go and give it a try.

There are many, many bad and pointless Chinese bars opening up all over the place - particularly in my neighbourhood! - all the time; most of them I never get around to checking out; and most of them don't endure for very long. Therefore, I am somewhat perversely glad that, for once, I went to the trouble of scoping this place out... because it superbly epitomises so much of what is STUPID about most Chinese bar owners in Beijing, it is a text book on how not to.

Things that are probably better to avoid:

Setting up off the strip

Sure, some places - good places (like MaoMaoChong or Amilal or El Nido) - can establish themselves as 'destination bars', somewhere that's worth a small excursion off the more regularly beaten track. And more true 'neighbourbood bars', 'locals' serving the population who live in the immediate vicinity (like The Brick) rather than the general after-work drinking crowd, would be a welcome addition to the Beijing scene. But, in general, there's a reason why bars and restaurants cluster together around Sanlitun and Gongti and Nanluoguxiang and Houhai and Wudaoying and Wudaokou. Most 'lone wolves' die of starvation. Hence, the bar that inspired me to write this is immediately setting itself a bit of a challenge by opening up on Gulou Dongdajie (a street of shops and restaurants, not bars), mid-way between the Houhai and Nanluoguxiang bar enclaves (nearby, but perhaps not quite near enough).

Impossible to find/No name outside

The 'speakeasy' craze has tried to make a virtue of obscurity, elevating being unadvertised, unlabelled, hard-to-find into a quirky marketing gimmick. I don't like the idea much myself, but I can see that it might sometimes work - with a very special kind of bar (a trendy, upmarket cocktail bar). With most bars, it is simply commercial suicide: if you don't put a sign out front, you are never going to have any business. Guess what my new bar forgot to do?

Being upstairs, in a mall

Of course, I long ago identified this as one of the defining characteristics of a bad bar. If there is one thing that's arguably even worse, it's being upstairs in a mini industrial estate. Oh, and set back off the main street. At least this place is in quite a bustling area, a very central location in the city. And it's upstairs from a highly visible motorcycle-and-sidecar dealership, which makes it fairly easy to find once you know the secret.

Unclear or naff or multiple names

The bar in question is ostensibly called Zhou in Chinese. Apparently, that's the zhou that means 'axle', not the one that means 'porridge' (nor any of the other 100-odd zhou words; it's a troublesomely multifarious syllable - although I think this is the only one, or the only common one, with a rising second tone). However, the posters that flank the door proclaim instead iBeer - very hip and modern; and I'm sure Apple won't mind. Ah, but the business cards announce that the 'English name' is Eje Beer Club. The owner tells me that 'eje' is the Spanish for zhou, i.e., for 'axle'; so, at least there's some consistency there. Unfortunately, his Spanish is about as good as my Chinese, so I am unable to reach an understanding of why he has chosen to call his bar this... in Chinese and Spanish, but not in English. [One is reminded of the worst bar on Nanluoguxiang, which has long suffered the handicap of having not one but two of the most ridiculous names to be found in this city: LogIn Pub and Wiggly Jiggly's. And also of the little Moroccan restaurant opposite the April Gourmet supermarket on Xingfu Ercun, which has signs outside identifying it as Argana and Escobar and Casablanca; not naff names, but too many of them - this confusion of identity no doubt explains why it has never developed the kind of following that its prime location and tasty food deserve.]

Inconsistent theme or lack of branding

It was also unclear to me why such a very Asian bar (think Japanese or Korean: bright, garish, would-be space-agey, with lots of chrome and shiny plastic and mirrors) would give itself a Spanish name. And then specialise in Belgian beer. While playing (at least while I was there) exclusively reggae music. This is a bit too much of a cultural mélange: customers don't understand what you're trying to give them here.

Horrible decor

I already mentioned the gleaming plastic and the overuse of mirrors, didn't I? There are also some 'homemade' booth seats along the wall with the windows, which are too cramped for anyone - other than, perhaps, very diminutive Asian girls - to actually sit in, and are absolutely rock hard. The centre of the room is filled with small, high, round, gleamingly plasticky tables - most of which have but a single stool placed next to them. So, this is a "beer club" for the solitary drinker?? You'll probably need to wear ski goggles as well, since the lighting sears the eyeballs.

An unwelcoming attitude

It's good to get your mates in to support you in your early days, and to give the impression - however slight and unconvincing - that the place is attracting customers. It's not such a good idea to have these few guys always completely hog what little counter space you have at the bar.  And chain smoke, in a small, poorly ventilated room. (I suppose I should be grateful at least that they weren't playing dice. Although it seemed likely that dice, or cards, or some kind of drinking game would break out shortly.)

Lack of facilities

These days, your own loo - preferably a Western-style sit-upon - is pretty much de rigueur for a bar, or at any rate for one that aspires to be even slightly upmarket. As is a wi-fi beacon (despite half-hearted attempts by the authorites to outlaw wi-fi last summer). And at least one member of staff who can muster a couple of dozen words of English. Zhou may address these deficits in time - but I wouldn't bet on it.

Too near to rivals

Zhou may be just a bit too far away from Houhai or Nanluoguxiang to pick up much random foot traffic (er, if anyone knew it was there anyway...), but it is right next door to two other recent-ish bar openings, Temple and Jam. Temple is a large, divey bar, with Chinese/European ownership, focused on beer and simple cocktails, and putting on a lot of live music; Jam is cleaner, brighter, more upmarket, more Asian in flavour, with a "Japanese/Italian" theme (I kid you not!) and an emphasis on food and fancy cocktails. As it happens, I don't particularly like either of these places; but at least they have a fairly clear idea of what they want to do, and they do it way better than Zhou. I cannot conceive of anyone choosing to go to Zhou rather than to one of these two neighbours.

Falling between two stools

It's particularly unfortunate that Zhou is in many ways so reminiscent of its local rivals. Its emphasis on imported beers, and its attempt to keep prices reasonable (about the one good thing I have to say for it; I think it's probably got the cheapest bottle of Duvel in town at the moment - I just don't like Duvel, unfortunately) would seem to pitch it more in the 'dive bar' category, where it can't hold a candle to Temple (or El Nido). However, its decor and ambience (insofar as it has one) seem to be aspiring more to something Asian-friendly and slightly swish.... like Jam. It is not so much falling between two stools as taking careful aim and diving between them...

Perhaps it can attract enough Chinese - and Japanese and Korean - beer enthusiasts to keep it afloat. But, without some radical changes, it is never going to build any Western custom.