Chinabites

Posted: Jul. 22, 2008

After a soul-crushing morning of data entry, one of my current roommates was feeling adventuresome and decided to go try the Xinjiang Government’s official restaurant in Beijing.  I, of course, could not refuse to tag along.  I was starving as I had only had Nestle™ “shark food” crispy chocolate wafer snacks for breakfast.

We knew it was going to be an adventure when our taxi driver and another passenger vehicle actually tried to slam their cars into each other during a traffic dispute.  Slam into each other like Ben-Hur style.  We spent the rest of the ride chatting about the relative merits of keeping one’s cool.

After exiting the cab on a corner in the middle of San Li He road near Xizhimen, we walked up the street to find the Xinjiang Islamic Restaurant, passing a large Dong Lai Shun chain hotpot place and some other Xinjiang restaurants.  We walked into the elaborate and exquisitely decorated Xinjiang Hotel, asked for directions, and discovered that it was actually in the backyard of the hotel.  We found the main entrance with little trouble after that.

The main dining hall was an expansive open room on the second floor absolutely packed with small tables.  The effect was strikingly similar to that of a Chinese college cafeteria.  The menu was a coffee table tome full of pictures and we decided that we’d play it safe with some kebabs and get adventuresome with some chinese broccoli in soy milk.

The meal was competent Xinjiang fare, with the highlights being the massive kebabs on willow sticks and the ding ding noodles.  I would say that seeing as this is the restaurant run by the Xinjiang Autonomous Regional Government, the food was only decent, not great.  In my experience the food at the restaurant run by the Urumqi municipal governement (the captial of Xinjiang) is much better, as is the ambiance.  We’ll have to do a chinabites run down of that restaurant in the very near future.