TRAVEL: Getting a taste of Beijing’s hutongs
The problem is obvious: Beijing is full of delicious food, representing thousands of years of culinary history. Beijing is also an immense city of some 21 million people, and most visitors are not up to the task of finding the good restaurants among the subpar ones.
My first visit to mainland China is a short one of just seven days, and I want to be able to come away feeling like I’ve tasted some real Chinese food, the stuff that the locals eat. Enter Lost Plate, a small tour company that dives straight into the dense alley neighborhoods (hutongs) of the old city and visits hole-in-thewall restaurants that visitors generally can’t find.
“Would you like a beer?” our guide Ernestina asks, offering me a can of Yanjing beer in a custom koozie. It’s only about 43 degrees out, but I accept happily. My fiancé and I have just emerged from one of the many exits of the Yonghegong metro station in the northeast of the city, where Ernestina easily spotted us among the waves of locals.
Night has fallen by the time the six of us who are taking the tour, plus Ernestina, have assembled. We walk away from the unlit sloping roofs of the Tibetan Buddhist Lama Temple, where two red, motorized tuk-tuks and their drivers are waiting for us. My fiancé and I slide onto a tiny bench seat, face-to-face and kneeto-knee with Gene and Kath from California. We all wriggle down under the thick blanket and try not to slop our beers as the tuk-tuk lurches to life and we zoom toward the first restaurant of the night.
Six sets of chopsticks hover over six steaming dishes. “Mix it well until the noodles are coated,” Ernestina instructs. My plate becomes a blur as I mix the hot dried noodles, a breakfast dish from Hubei province brought to us by a woman whose head barely clears the counter between our low, wooden table and the tiny kitchen behind her. The restaurant itself is also very small, with only a dozen places.
The noodles are delicious and made entirely with sesame oil, which gives it a rich, smooth texture that a cheaper mix of peanut and sesame oils would not provide. Our chef moved to Beijing only a few years ago — from Wuhan in Hubei province — but her restaurant, with its addictive noodles, already has a loyal following.
We’ve been told to expect plenty of regional dishes like this tonight, but Ernestina made a point of mentioning that there would be no rice — presumably because most Westerners associate Chinese food so strongly with it. Historically, Beijingers have never eaten much rice, and the food we ate in the tour reflected that.
“We’ll leave in two minutes!” Ernestina says, looking at her watch. Our chef waves goodbye as we hustle back outside into the cold air. The tuk-tuk train moves on. We chat and laugh as we zigzag through the mostly unlit alleyways that make up the hutongs.
Sticking to these dense alleys is key to the success of Lost Plate tours. When the founder of the company, Ruixi Hu, moved to the capital from Chengdu, she discovered that find-
ing good food was hard. Over time, she was able to ferret out the culinary gems that she knew were hiding just around the corner, known to locals but invisible to outsiders.
Armed with these valuable addresses, Ruixi and her American husband, Brian Bergey, founded Lost Plate in 2014 and have expanded to four cities, including Shanghai, Cheng-du and Xian.
Restaurant Two announces itself with a small chalkboard hanging from a tree, which I’m told says “Mongolian barbecue.” Plates with slices of eggplant, onion, bell pepper, lamb and pork belly are arranged next to the huge hot plate in the center of our table.
In reality, other than the lamb we’re frying, Mongolian barbecue has little to do with Mongolian cuisine, but it has undoubtedly been embraced by the Chinese. The first Mongolian barbecue restaurants, as we know them today, were opened in Taipei in the early 1950s before spreading back over to the mainland.
The large, deep-fried meat buns we have at Restaurant Three were supposedly a last-minute addition to a great 64plate banquet for Empress Ci Xi during the Qing dynasty. As large as a man’s fist, my pie has a thick, crunchy outer shell of fried dough filled with tender, slow-cooked beef, scallions and the restaurant’s secret mix of spices.
Suddenly, a young, travel-worn American man stumbles into the room. We watch in fascination as he orders food in rudimentary Mandarin and slides into an empty spot. “How on Earth did he find this place?” we all wonder. Even if I knew where I was at this point, I wouldn’t tell you. For the Lost Plate tours to work, the restaurants have to stay local, and we have been asked to keep tonight’s itinerary to ourselves.