Notes on Eating in Beijing

There are a few oddities for westerners when dining at a Chinese restaurant. At nicer restaurants, between one and four identically dressed girls will be waiting at the front of the restaurant to open the door and usher you to your table. One menu is provided for the table, and the waiter stands there waiting for you to read the menu and order. At really fancy restaurants, orders are taken on a PDA. At normal restaurants, they are written on a carbon copy billpad, and one copy is left at your table. As dishes come out, the waiter will cross them out on the copy. Water is rarely served with a meal, even if you ask for it. If you do get it, it usually arrives hot and in a 4oz glass. Napkins are available at the table about 50% of the time, or one small one will be brought along with the food. If you need anything, don’t bother waiting for the waiter to come by and ask how things are going (never happens). Rather, you wave your arms and yell “Fu Yuan!” at the nearest one. When you are ready to go, you do the same thing and yell “Mai Dan!” You inspect the bill closely, pay it, then immediately leave. Tipping is unheard of.

Food in Beijing is OK. Not great. Microsoft provides meal cards (600RMB/month), so on weekdays I usually eat with coworkers in the restaurants in the basement of our office building. There is a Chinese restaurant (not bad), a Japanese restaurant (also not bad, but coworkers never want to go there), a “western” restaurant (terrible), and a cafeteria serving Chinese food (pretty bad). So more often than not we end up eating at the Chinese restaurant.

For dinner, I usually have some kind of western food since I’m already eating Chinese food a lot. I’ll usually eat somewhere in the SanLiTun area, which has a lot of expats and the restaurants to feed them. The costs are fairly high; most meals end up being about 70RMB (10USD). There is a fine variety, and the quality is respectable. Some nicer places (>100RMB) have some really good food, not just relative to Beijing. I am somewhat constrained in where and what I can eat by the availability of English or picture menus. Although I speak survival level Mandarin, I cannot read Chinese characters. Surprisingly, most good Chinese restaurant menus are picture menus.

Western restaurants are similar, but not the same as the real thing. One consequence of eating so much Chinese food is the embarrassing fact that anything that tastes like home is great. Which means that I eat at McDonald’s (in Chinese, “Mai Dang Lao”) once a week, which is about 5-10 times the frequency as when I lived in the US. And I’ll be damned if McDonald’s doesn’t have the best damn coffee in China. Before I left I swore to myself I wouldn’t eat at McDonald’s. But I have caved. I love it. I love McDonald’s now. Once a week, I experience a piece of heaven in those 10 chicken nuggets, large fries and a coke.

This is not unique to me. Some Americans at the office have organized a daily (yes, daily) delivery from McDonald’s to the office for lunch. Orders must be placed the night before because McDonald’s serves so many desperate Americans this way that they need to know well in advance to satisfy the demand.

I just hope I can stay to only going once a week.