World Foodie Guide

This is the tenth in a series of Postcards from the recent Hong Kong, Macau and Beijing traveleating trip. Rather than writing up each food experience in separate posts, which would have taken me up to Christmas, I thought it would be more fun to outline the trip in diary form, to include travel and sightseeing tips as well as food recommendations.

Day 11 highlights:

• Tuanjiehu market
• Panjiayuan Antique Market
• lunch at Hakka restaurant Kejia Yuan
• 798 Art Zone
• dinner at Noodle Bar

Tuanjiehu market:

Accompanied by our friend who drove us around everywhere and acted as our guide and chief haggler, we had a great Sunday out. Y is Swiss but has lived in Beijing for about fifteen years, so she’s an expert in everything. First stop was Tuanjiehu market. We all used to live in the lovely neighbourhood of Tuanjiehu, in Chaoyang District (yes, everything seems to be located in Chaoyang District), and the market opened daily at the crack of dawn right beneath our apartment windows.

You can find everything from fresh fruit and vegetables to clothes and shoes at this popular local market. Locals like to buy their food fresh, hence the importance of a daily market. We ended the nostalgic market tour with a delicious breakfast of freshly made hot baozi (buns) that had just come out of the steamer. There was only one meat option, the rest being vegetarian (including Chinese chives, carrot with preserved vegetables and Chinese cabbage with spicy preserved vegetables). I think we paid RMB5 for nine of them! (click here for more photos of Tuanjiehu market, a photo essay of ordinary Beijing life on a Sunday morning).

Panjiayuan Antique Market:

Panjiayuan market was next. I used to love visiting Panjiayuan at the weekends, when it was a proper ‘dirt market’, with all the wares laid out on the ground, as well as open stalls all around, selling all manner of curios and memorabilia (though whether the label ‘antique’ is entirely accurate, I don’t know…) It was an excellent place for sourcing presents and objects with which to decorate the home. I bought my beloved chicken alarm clock on one of my many trips there…

Now it’s all smartened up, with permanent shops all around the perimeter and the covered central section consisting of hundreds of little stalls. You can still find anything here, from ‘antiques’, factory-produced revolutionary kitsch to old photos and jade. There’s also a huge book section, selling Chinese books and magazines. And this is where you’ll find copies of modern artworks by current ‘hot’ Chinese artists.

Tourists like Panjiayuan, but locals and expats also come here. It’s chaotic and crowded, but so much fun, and really worth the experience. Of course there’s a different price for everyone, it just depends on how good one is at haggling. I’m hopeless and always have been, so Y did it al. We ended up with eight jade pieces to use as buttons (RMB100), a huge stack of old projector ‘education’ slides (RMB50) and a working 1950s deco-style wooden clock (RMB30).

Lunch at Hakka restaurant Kejia Yuan:

This wasn’t on the original list of Beijing restaurants to visit, but it’s a regular haunt of our friends, so I was delighted to be taken here. I don’t usually do spontaneous, but was very glad to have made the exception! Called Kejia Yuan (literally Hakka Restaurant), it’s located at 2 Tuanjiehu Beilu, just round the corner from Tuanjiehu Metro station. Small and rustic with simple wooden furniture, it reminded me of the first restaurant I was taken to in Beijing in 1996, and which subsequently became one of my favourites (although I never got round to trying the deep-fried scorpion).

The menu is in Chinese only, but it does have plenty of photos of each dish, and Y knew what to order. The whole fish (RMB48) (unfortunately I don’t know what type of fish it was) came wrapped in the foil in which it had been cooking, in a rich sauce with plenty of coriander and deliciously fresh. This seemed to be a popular dish, as other diners were also having it. Having had sanbei chicken at Bellagio two nights ago, I had to have the sanbei ya – duck (RMB32). I have to do more research on sanbei (which literally means ‘three cups’, but having tried the chicken and now the duck, I’m hooked on sanbei anything. I’ll have to try and recreate this at home.

The fried crispy bean curd (RMB20) was heavenly – I usually don’t like fried bean curd, particularly when the insides have been sucked dry, but here the tofu remained silky smooth. And it came with gigantic dried chillies. The fried asparagus peas (RMB26) turned out to be dragon beans which we also had at Bellagio, also called ‘four-sided beans’, according to our waitress. Lunch for three came to RMB136 (£13). Highly recommended!

798 Art Zone:

After stopping off at Beijing Wholesale Books Market to buy some Chinese children’s books and learning aids for the husband, who had developed a sudden desire to learn Mandarin, Y drove us to the next place on the itinerary. 798 Art Zone is the well-known thriving artists’ community located in an old 1950s factory complex that has become a necessary stop-off for Beijing visitors, as well as half the population of Beijing who think spending time perusing modern art on a Sunday afternoon is a trendy pasttime.

Studios, shops (even Plastered has a branch here), restaurants and cafés are now all based here, and exhibitions and events are regularly held in the space. It seems though that the poorer artists have had to make way for the more well-known ones with financial backing, and these are now based in nearby villages like Caochangdi, which we didn’t have time to visit. But I did want to see 798 for myself because it didn’t exist when I lived in Beijing.

I ended up taking a lot of photos (click here to see all the set of photos from 798 Art Zone), even though I’m not a big fan of modern Chinese art. My favourite section was a black and white photographic display of mostly Chinese children in everyday situations. Incidentally, most of the artworks at 798 can be found as cheap copies at Panjiayuan (surprise surprise).

Dinner at Noodle Bar:

In my restaurant shortlist, I listed various Beijing duck eateries. When there weren’t that many options back in the 90s, I used to eat at Quanjude, and remember it as being pretty delicious. Now, though, the recommendations for good duck are Li Qun, Da Dong and the latest, Duck de Chine. Our friends thought this would be the best choice, so we decided to try it out with them. However, the restaurant wasn’t particularly welcoming and we got tired of waiting for them to open up. Instead, we ate at Noodle Bar next door. Thank you, Duck de Chine! Otherwise we wouldn’t have found such a gem, and it was perfect for our friends’ kids, who loved watching the chef making hand-pulled noodles in front of us.

It’s a tiny place, with seating around a wooden counter for just 12 people. The design is minimalist and quite reminiscent of (dare I say it!) a Japanese eaterie. We were lucky to find seats together for six (a couple who were just about finishing shuffled over for us), but people who arrived after us had to sit outside in the courtyard with no view of the fascinating noodle-making process.

The bilingual menu is also tiny, with just five options – hand-pulled noodles with no MSG with a choice of brisket (RMB32), tendon (RMB36), tripe (RMB36), a combination of all three (RMB42) and last but not least, laohan vegetarian noodles made with a mushroom broth (RMB32). In addition, there are six ’small plates’ to choose from.

Each diner is handed a copy of the menu on a small clipboard, with tickboxes to check. The waiter collects the clipboards, the choices are processed and the noodle chef and server prepare your food in front of you. I actually have hundreds of photos of the chef making hand-pulled noodles (having set the camera on ‘burst’ mode), so I could put them together to make a short film. Having watched various chefs make hand-pulled noodles, I still haven’t managed to figure out how it’s done, so having my photos to hand, I can study them more carefully.

The noodles were excellent – I chose brisket, with thin noodles. Everyone else ordered the thick noodles, as these are more ‘traditional’, but mine were just as good (and easier to eat with chopsticks!). The ’small plates’ were superb too – preserved egg with tofu was my absolute favourite, vinegar peanuts & spinach, and choi sum. Dinner for six cost RMB372 (about £32.50).

Noodle Bar is a wonderful little place with friendly staff, and plenty of exciting visual entertainment. If you’re with children, all the better! A bowl of noodles is admittedly more expensive than at a typical Beijing eaterie (RMB 8 seems to be about average), but the portions are large, the quality of food high and of course you’re paying for the decor and location.

‘Last month I went to Noodle Bar. It is a small place with only 10 spaces indoors and 2 tables outdoors. The decor is like a Japanese noodle place but it serves Chinese noodles instead . At Noodle Bar, people can watch the cooks pull noodles, it is very cool. When you go you will find that there are only 4 kinds of noodle broths to choose from and a small selection of appetizers. I ordered thin brisket noodles, they were mouthwatering. My dad ordered the thin tripe noodles, to be truthful they did not look that great. My mom and the guests ordered the vegetarian noodles which would have been great without the mushrooms. We ordered the tofu and the spinach, both were delicious.

On a scale from one to ten I would give Noodle Bar a nine because I had to go down three flights of stairs just to get to their bathroom. I would highly recommend this place for families and to take out of town guests’.

Click here to see the rest of the Noodle Bar photos.

N.B You’ll find all the China Postcards under Restaurant Reviews – China, and the entire set of food photos on Flickr.

CONTACT DETAILS:

Panjiayuan Antique Market
Dongsanhuan Nanlu
Chongwen District
Beijing
Tel: +86 (0)10 6775 2405
Opening hours: Mon-Fri 08:30 – 18:00, Sat-Sun 04:30 – 18:30

Kejia Yuan
2 Tuanjiehu Beilu
Chaoyang District
Beijing
Tel: +86 (0)10 6582 5010
Opening hours daily 11:00-22:00

Factory 798
Dashanzi art district
4 Jiuxianqiao Lu
Chaoyang District
Beijing

Noodle Bar
Nineteen Forty Nine – The Hidden City
behind Pacific Century Place
Gongti Beilu
Chaoyang District
Beijing
Tel: +86 (0)10 6501 1949

Helen Yuet Ling Pang @ World Foodie Guide

Tags: 798 Art Zone, Beijing, China, dining out, food, Hakka restaurant, Noodle Bar, Panjiayuan, restaurant review, restaurants, travel, traveleating, vegetarian