So the day we arrived into Beijing, it was snowing. Apparently the Chinese government decided that they needed to make it snow, and figured that making it snow on Sunday would be the least disruptive to businesses. So, they made it snow on Sunday. Since it's almost always a drought there it never snows, so I thought it'd be cool to post a couple pics of snow in Beijing.
Alley behind our hotel.
Forbidden City
You can't go to Beijing without trying Beijing Kao Ya (Peking Roast Duck). Although people can try this dish almost anywhere in the world, the one that you can get in Beijing is still that much better. The past couple times I've gone to Beijing, my favorite restaurant to try this dish has been Da Dong Beijing Roast Duck restaurant. I first heard about this restaurant through Fuschia Dunlop, she wrote an article about this restaurant in the Financial Times. It quickly became one of my favorites. I really enjoyed the different condiments that Da Dong gave that came with the dish. There was grated garlic that you use with the pink radish and of course there was the sweet hoisin sauce with spring onion and cucumbers. One thing that I had never seen anywhere else was that they served the duck skin with sugar - the sugar's supposed to cut through the fat.
After a while, I just stopped eating the pancakes and just kept on munching on the duck itself. However, not only was the roast duck good, they had a bunch of other delicious dishes.
Sichuan style shredded duck wing. It had a nice little "ma la" kick to it that makes your tongue tingle.
This was a braised eggplant dishes. It had delicious pieces of whole roast garlic which I could not stop eating. I'm a big fan of Da Dong, and every time I go to Beijing and try to frequent this restaurant.
I want to kick off this blog with one of my all time favorite foods, noodles! I was just traveling around Asia with some of my friends from high school and we visited one of my favorite noodle shops in the world, the Noodle Bar in Beijing.
It's basically a bar that seats 14 people or so, where you show up, sit down and treat yourself to nice hearty bowl of wheat noodles. I've always gotten the same thing when I'm there, I get this mixed noodle where they give you the a little bit of everything: brisket, tripe and tendon! It's amazing. What I really like about this restaurant, is that unlike a lot of other restaurants in China, they don't flood you with choices. In fact, they basically only have three types of soup noodles. There's a beef one, where you can select what cut of beef you want, there's usually a vegetarian option, and then there's a rotating monthly special. Though you don't have much of a choice, what they do, they do damn well! As an added flair, they'll freshly prepare each order of noodles and will "pull" each bowl to order. It's pretty fun watching the chef effortlessly prepare your noodles.
We arrived in Beijing when the government decided to send missiles into the atmosphere to make it snow! So it was freezing outside. There's nothing better than coming in from the cold and having a nice steaming bowl of delicious soup noodles. It just hits the spot.
Noodle Bar, gong ti bei lu, chao yang district, Beijing, (behind pacific century place)
北京朝阳区工体北路, 太平洋百货南门对面
