Beijing Blowout
With the Olympics as catalyst, hotels and restaurants are opening at blitz pace in this pulsating Chinese city.
Fred Ferretti & Eileen Yin-Fei Lo reports.
Beijing has changed its face, remarkably, and the tastes of its tables, inevitably, not only for the current summer Olympic Games but times to come. Many hundreds of restaurants, more than can be reliably counted, luxe and otherwise, open daily, it seems, to cater to a local population of 16 million with newly acquired incomes and appetites alongside an ever growing influx of tourists.
Sleek yet massive granite and glass-sheathed hotels and commercial towers continue to rise, though there is now a temporary pause, thanks to a Chinese governmental decree that for the Olympics period there would be no construction cranes visible to mar the esthetic of the Beijing skyline. None are to be seen.
The newest of the many hotels to open is the Park Hyatt Beijing, on Chang'an Avenue, the city's wide central boulevard. The hotel occupies 13 floors of the central skyscraper of Yintai Center, a three-tower complex. It's the tallest building in Beijing, and its restaurant, China Grill, occupies the 63rd to 66th floors, making it the city's highest. Add to this mix the new Westin Beijing, opening in July in the fashionable Chaoyang district; a Traders Upper East Hotel, close to Olympic Park; a Sheraton; and an adjoining Aloft Beijing in a business complex in the western Haidian district. A Four Seasons and other hotels will follow after the games are over, at which point construction cranes will sprout anew.
Among Beijing's estimated 20,000 restaurants is an eclectic blend of what's being called "modern Chinese" food and cooking other than Chinese. Overseeing these new places are well-known chefs, Western and Asian, lured to Beijing by the dual attractions of culinary freedom and a tolerance for unfettered experimentation.
From the West has come Daniel Boulud (Daniel, New York City), who will open Maison Boulud à Pékin, an urban extension of his New York French flagship, with its attractive fusion of traditional and modern Gallic cooking, set into a corner of what was once the United States embassy compound, just south of the Forbidden City. Boulud's former sous chef at Daniel, Brian Reimer, is supervising its kitchen. The compound, around a central green park, also includes Shiro Matsu, a Japanese restaurant created by David Yeo, whose Aqua Restaurant Group has several important restaurants and clubs in Hong Kong; Teatro, an Italian trattoria; Tian Di Yi Jia, a Chinese restaurant with a room for private dining only and a live-jazz lounge recalling the days between the two world wars; and Liaison, a private club.
At the same time Brian McKenna arrived with extensive cooking experience at several Michelin-starred restaurants in Europe, including some time spent with the revered Basque Juan Mari Arzak and a passion for molecular cookery. Experimenting with sous-vide and the "cold griddle" (a cold plate that flash freezes), the only one in China, McKenna has made the new Blu Lobster, in the Shangri-La Hotel's new Valley Wing, a Beijing must-do. From his kitchen comes a 42 ingredient salad tossed with hazelnut mayonnaise and Chardonnay jelly and topped with an egg simmered for 24 hours; scallops seared on his cold griddle; and oysters dressed with a passion fruit foam (oh, yes, that ubiquitous conceit has made it to Beijing).
From Spain, Catalan chef Jordi Valles is making heads turn and stomachs happy in the new Mare Nostrum, in Chaoyang off Beijing's Central Park, with a boned chicken stuffed with prunes and pine nuts and veal cheeks stewed with pumpkins. And in the Whampoa Club, also in Chaoyang, chef Jereme Leung, celebrated in Hong Kong and Shanghai, turns out his new Chinese dishes—for example, bean curd skins rolled around foie gras terrine and hair-thin noodles sprinkled with brightly colored vegetables and sauced with Sichuan peppercorns. The ceiling of his dining room—which looks like the bottom of a gigantic goldfish bowl—heightens the drama.
Among other restaurant standouts are Le Pré Lenôtre (an amusing amalgam of Gaston Lenôtre's surname and the name of the restaurant he became famous for reviving, Le Pré Catelan), near the central World Trade Center; Jaan, a plush classic French restaurant opened in the old Beijing Hotel, recently refurbished by the Raffles International hotel chain; Salt, offering Beijing set menus of what can best be called modern Western cooking: modest fusion excursions such as passion fruit vinaigrette and raspberry-sauced pork loin; and Comptoir de France, in Chaoyang, with perhaps the best breads and pastries in Beijing. Also in Chaoyang is Face, a striking complex of three contiguous restaurants appointed with Asian antiques: Jia, a Chinese restaurant featuring Qing dynasty furniture; Lan Na Thai, embellished with wood carvings collected from Thailand; and Hazara, decorated with tall carved pillars from India.
As is true in most cities throughout Asia, in Beijing some of the best and newest restaurants are set within hotels. The aforementioned Blu Lobster in the Shangri-La and Jaan in Raffles are prime examples. In the new Westin Beijing, there is a Chinese restaurant, Sen5es, classically Cantonese, as are most other new Chinese restaurants; a steakhouse, Grange; and all manner of bars—Torch, Exchange, and Mix, a cigar bar.Following what appears to be a small trend, the new Traders' Chinese restaurant includes 13 private dining rooms over two floors. And in the Four Points by Sheraton, as Starwood Hotels chooses to call it, the new restaurants are Yong Yi, Cantonese, and Ecco, simply Italian. In keeping with the breezy, gadgetry-inspired, high-tech, casual style of its new brand of hotels, Starwood's Aloft Beijing's major restaurant is called ReFuel, but its Cantonese outpost, Cha Chan Ting, though named for the Hong Kong–style tea houses that typically serve fast food, is, we are assured, private dining far more than take-out.
Historic neighborhoods like Qianmen, south of the Forbidden City—for more than three centuries a residential core of the city known for its network of narrow alleys, high-walled private residences, and dead ends called hutongs—have been razed. Among the new occupants are a crowd of restaurants, large and small; jazz and modern music clubs; wine bars; coffee shops selling stir-fried black goat from Hunan, Ethiopian honeyed wine, draft beers of the world, and all manner of smoothies, soy milks, and espressos; not to mention several branches of a new phenomenon, Gustomenta, which has brought gelati and panini to Beijing. There's even a Hutong Pizza in the former Xicheng hutong.
Nearby, within what remains of the web of alleys, is the newly expanded Li Jia Cai, or, more familiarly, the Li Family Restaurant. This once small hutong restaurant in two adjoining tiny houses was founded by Li Shan-Li, whose father was a Qing dynasty palace guard commander. His son, Ivan Li, has transformed it into a full-blown restaurant with an antiques-laden foyer and many tables on which he serves his specialties: prawns and lotus root in red wine sauce, long-braised abalone, and potted pork ribs. Even expanded, this restaurant is a difficult ticket.
Perhaps the most striking of the city's rehabilitation projects is 1949 The Hidden City. Once a state-owned complex of machine-parts factories called the Beijing Machine and Electric Institute and quite close to the city's exclusive North Embassy area, 1949 The Hidden City now lies at the core of the Sanlitun district, a growing center of fashionable restaurants, private clubs, bars, and dine-and-view art galleries.
It's the creation of Chinese-American Paul Hsu, whose Asian empire extends from Hong Kong to Shanghai as well. He says that his 1949 The Hidden City development derives its name from the year Mao-Zedong climbed the Gate of Heavenly Peace and declared the founding of the People's Republic: "For the Chinese it's a good-luck name." A low-rise compound of eight buildings surrounding a grass courtyard, it serves as a perfect microcosm of today's chic Beijing. Anchoring the compound is Duck de Chine, an open-kitchen restaurant where both traditional Peking duck and French duck preparations take flight. Its front is the Bollinger Champagne Bar, and scattered about the compound are 1/5 Taverna, a Spanish restaurant; Noodle Bar with traditional hand-pulled noodles from Shanxi; Sugar Bar, a 10-coffee cafe; and Well Bar, a beer bar created out of the old factory well. For the gated community–minded there's even a private Club 49.
Scores of clubs exist in Beijing now, and more are on the way, small and mega, private and public, casual and plush, a great many of them in eastern Beijing's hip Sanlitun district and along the new Financial Street in the west of the city. On Financial Street can be found the Lan Club, designed by Philippe Starck and reminiscent of a small sheikdom, with overstuffed red velvet sofas, ornate gilded chairs, and tentings that overhang private dining rooms. At Block 8 they boast of having sold 6,000 bottles of Moët & Chandon in five months, and by all reports the proprietors of such clubs as the all-blue, strobe-lit Babyface, Coco Banana, Cargo Club, Bank Lounge, and China Doll in Sanlitun; Ruifu and Tango in Dong Cheng; and La Baie des Anges, a Houhai hutong club, are prospering.
There will be more and more of all of the above, for once the Olympics end, Beijing will resume changing its face and its tables.
