Most people hate having tourists walk into their shots of majestic monuments and wondrous natural sceneries. I’m not too particular myself – with the fog and drizzle as bad as it was at the Mutianyu Great Wall that July weekend, tourists were the only things there were to take. They hammed it up pretty well, replete with looks of genuine bemusement and fatigue-induced confusion.
“Which way to walk, da?”
Asian dad valiantly rallying his little troopers for a charge up the ramps.
Visibility was awful, on the day of Beijing’s worst rainstorm in 61 years
My friend Juan, an upstart Chilean conquistador.
Some other shots I took from an early visit to China in 2010
“Daddy are we there yet?”
We’d like to tell you about a special place called Kagen. It’s the place where Gloria made her only exception to her general dislike for Hot Pot/Steamboat. At Kagen, they have taken this longstanding method of communal eating and updated it a little.
For starters, Kagen’s soup stocks are things of beauty. Each of the 6 soups is balanced to complement your dipping ingredients in their own special way. If you’re having a meat-dominated hotpot, go for the chicken and mushroom or the miso stock. Those are our favourites.
Diners also get a customizable dipping sauce. A sauce-mobile will be wheeled up for you to choose from a range of 4 sauces and 8 condiments. Once again, depending on what you’re having with your hotpot, the waitress will recommend different combinations for your meats or seafood. The regular sesame paste is your sauce for all occasions, and the aptly named seafood paste (a kind of XO-dipping sauce familiar to Singaporeans and Malaysians) goes well with (whatd’yaknow!) seafood. The sweet-and-sourish yuzu fruit vinegar was a surprise package, and also Gloria’s favourite. Best served with a healthy tablespoonful of coriander and fried garlic.
Lastly, Kagen’s really good for lazy eaters. Hotpot is a very hands-on, involved activity, and sometimes it’s nice to be able to enjoy the food without the toil. There was always a helper handy to put stuff into the pot for us, giving Gloria and I more time to talk and catch up on life.
Temple Restaurant Beijing is a showcase of two cities. The first is the old city, of a 600-year old temple that retains vestiges of its former architectural elegance, and of the bustling hutongs that surround its walled compound, a loud (and fragrant) reminder that lao Beijing is very much alive in a modernizing capital; The second is the new Beijing, of modern European cuisine served in a minimalist, grey-walled annex by a snappily suited Swiss intern from the Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne. 
The carpaccio was accompanied with a nifty a soya jelly cube to complement the meat’s rawness. The white asparagus with quail eggs was pleasant, but the flavours were somewhat open-ended.
As for the mains, the red snapper was competently grilled. As a matter of personal preference I didn’t agree with the remoulade that it was bedded on. The risotto came hot and moist, but too al-dente for our liking.
The caramel tart ended the set in triumphant fashion. My only grouse was the misrepresentation of the “snow-egg” dessert. No matter how you bandy it about, half-cooked meringue just doesn’t taste that good. Our personal preferences aside, TRB provides possibly the best value lunch set in Beijing right now.
We strive to be as objective as we can about our food, so we really do mean it when we say that Hatsune in Beijing is possibly our favourite restaurant in the world right now. We first dined at Hatsune in 2010, when we visited Beijing enroute to the Shanghai Expo, and going back this time round was a bit like making a pilgrimage to Japanese-fusion Mecca.
To describe it simply, Hatsune is a Japanese-fusion restaurant that serves new and gastronomically exciting rolls. They have the usual selection of Japanese-y food like sashimi, tempura, and donburi sets to give off the impression that you really are eating in a Japanese restaurant. When we talk about the rolls however, it behooves us to reject the traditional frame of reference of assessing Japanese food and move towards a new rubric. Japanese cuisine is conservative, perfectionist and traditional; Hatsune rolls are creative, decadent and use far too much mayonnaise for your dietician’s liking. They still taste pretty darn good, and have become our world-standard of how similar rolls should taste.
Gastrographic 