Hotels and Food

First a word on our hotel. We’ve been staying at the Park Plaza Wangfujing. It came highly recommended on TripAdvisor.com (God’s internet age gift to independent travelers!) and we can see why. The facilities are modern, attractive and really comfortable. But the real highlight is the staff. They are they most service oriented staff I’ve found at any hotel south of the Four Seasons price point. And they all have enough English to make communication easy. One simple example of their service orientation occurred with our dinner reservation last night. Oddly, we were 20 minutes late getting down for our taxi to the restaurant. (I won’t disclose whose fault, but let just say it wasn’t the traveler with the Y chromosome.) When we got down to the concierge desk, they politely informed us that they had called ahead to our restaurant and pushed back our reservation half an hour.


And what a meal it was! I'm including these pictures for the foodies among you. Anyone who know Maureen and I realise that our trips tend to be built around food. That is not the case with this one, but we did manage to fit in an exceptional epicurean experience in last night. And consistent with our site seeing earlier in the day, it truly was a feast fit for an Emporer. We went to the Li Family Restaurant - a place I'd found mentioned on both the egullet .com and chowhound.com web sites. According to the story, the Li family patriarch was in charge of the secuity in the kitchen of the last Emperor. In that capacity he had to inspect all ingredients for all the dishes, and managed to learn the secrets behind the imperial cuisine. He noted it all down in a book that as the romantic story goes was destoryed during the cultural revolution. However, between his memory and what he had taught his kids, most of the recipes survived to be served to discerning customers at the family's very authentic restaurant burried deep in an obscure Beijing hutong. While the veracity of that story has been oft debated, the quality of the food has not.

A meal here is expensive by Chinese standards (set prices of RMB 220 and up), but the food was truly superb. Dinner included something in excess of 20 different dishes, some pictured above. Clockwise from the upper left there were sesame carrots, spiced boiled celery, bean paste with scallop, beijing cabbage in mustard sauce, deep fried lotus root, red bean paste, cured pork, and bean cakes dipped in the soya sauce that came next. Yum, yum, yum!

Followed by a devine deep fried scallops with seaweed










And then a little delicately flavoured coddled egg


And then many more large dishes, including this sweet and sour fish. Wow, what a meal. And what an experience! If you can stand the price point it is a truly fun and authentic expereince. But don't expect a fancy modern restaurant with high end finishes. We ate in a former living room I expect, down an alley way from anothe seating area. The table was formica, and an old family piano covered in chinz sat in the corner.

Apparently it is frequented by many tourists, but Maureen and I were the only caucasians there last night. Defintely make sure your hotel gives instructions to your taxi driver on how to get there, as it is in the middle of a confusing tangle of alley ways deep in a traditional hutong neighbourhood. All in all, it was a great meal, and an even better expereince.