Change, the new constant
I confess I was a bit taken aback to hear that Temple Restaurant Beijing, often lauded as the best restaurant in the capital, was abandoning the more laid-back format of its elegant spinoff, TRB-Bites. The company has reshaped the child more in the image of the father, to deliver the same fine-dining experience, the same menu and the same superb wine list at both locations.
Bites is now TRB-Forbidden City, with same great view of the imperial palace’s east gate.
“So far so good,” ever-dapper general manager Ignace Lecleir says of the new space, which reopened just this week and already has TRB’s polished look and feel. “But as always, anything new takes a bit of time to iron out the wrinkles.”
This team is pretty handy with an iron, though. The snappy conversion took a mere four days. On one wall, a line of impossibly large white lilies are curvaceous enough to be painted by Goya. Another wall backs an imposing floor-to-ceiling wine showcase. Table settings are more serene, servers more buttoned-down, and managers move through the dining room with the comfortable assurance of swans.
“The deciding factor for us,” says Lecleir of the concept change, “was Chinese New Year”. The original TRB closed for the holiday, and the team kept Bites open throughout. “We were flooded with reservation requests at Temple anyway,” he says, and most of those people wanted the more formal 600year-old adapted temple for the occasion, not the more casual Bites.
“Casual fine dining is a huge trend in the US and in Europe,” Lecleir notes. “But we realized that there is still demand here for more fine dining options.”
Meanwhile, he says, the restaurant group plans to develop a new casual and contemporary cafe concept in the later half of this year — elsewhere — once the ironing is finished at the Forbidden City.
Stay tuned.
95 Donghuamen at east gate of Forbidden City, Dongcheng district. 0106401-6676.