Jottings from the Granite Studio

This week was Valentine’s Day, and no matter what you think of market-driven holidays, it does provide a good occasion to take your wife out for a quiet dinner in an otherwise hectic week. Wanting to avoid the overpriced and crowded Valentine’s Day “specials” at the Chaoyang restaurants, we decided to go local: Dongcheng style, baby.

Our first choice was Yueming Lou, an old-style Beijing restaurant in a hutong behind Houhai. We’ve eaten there before, but this day the act of taking reservations proved too complex for the staff. Not wanting to leave anything to chance, I hung up and called over to Dali, a courtyard-style Yunnan restaurant off of Gulou Dongdajie, also tucked in a hutong, this one not far from Mao Livehouse. What a great place. Nice decor, a set menu that was both ample and delicious, and perfect ambience…not too Sino-kitsch, but just enough of the old courtyard feel to add the perfect touch to the dinner. The wood burning stoves (granted, it’s not the best insulated place) warmed us up just fine and added a nice romantic glow to our dinner. Even better? 100 RMB per person set price, and solid value for that coin.

After dinner we strolled down to the honky tonk that is Houhai and met some friends at another of our favorite haunts, East Shore Live Jazz Cafe, for a Thursday evening set by house saxophonist Li Yue.

Last night, Froog, the Artist, and I went to Yugong Yishan to catch Jamie Welton’s latest act, Bad Mamasan, a tribute to 70s and early-80s heavy metal. YJ sat this one out, figuring that she had little need to get a fix of Motorhead, AC/DC, and Ozzy covers on a Friday. It was a good show, Jamie sings and plays with a nice mixture of reverence and camp, both entirely suitable to the material. After the show, we walked up a couple of streets to Room 101, which is slowly taking on the status of “The Local” for this neck of Dongcheng.

All good times.