Food

Din Tai Fung is a restaurant with locations throughout the world. It had been on my list for awhile to try their xiao long bao (soup dumplings) and their shaved ice. It’s a little nicer, so we left the kids home and enjoyed a date night out. We went to the location in Beijing closer to us, at the Xidan stop (lines 1 and 4). It’s in the basement of one of the malls there.

 

green beans with pork

 Their mascot is adorable.

 Dessert. It actually looks kind of gross (and strawberries were out of season so we went with mango) but this is a delicious, creamy, shaved ice concoction. So good. And that bowl is HUGE!

An older Chinese sister in our branch invited a bunch of us over for lunch to say goodbye to me and another sister who was moving with her family to Shanghai. She made delicious homemade jiaozi and this Zongzi (below). Zongzi is sort of an acquired taste. But the homeade jiaozi was yummy.

I found a place to by these bubble egg waffles in China (we discovered them in Hong Kong), and they sell a bubble waffle maker on amazon.com (US)!!! Yay!

 B and I went to a convert (Canadian Chinese woman named June) on the other side of town, so we decided to wait and eat while we were over there near all the yummy restaurants. We had some tuk tuk issues (driver yelling at us that we weren’t paying what he asked when he agreed upon Y10 and then dropped us off and started yelling that we owed him Y10 per person, B yelled back). And the restaurant we wanted to go to was closed. So we walked down Chaoyang Park Rd. and found this French/Vietnamese Bistro place. It was pretty good.

  Fried bananas

 Pad Thai

 Egg roll… I forgot to take a pic.

Veggie spring rolls

 

For my birthday, we went to a place called Al Safir, a Middle Eastern restaurant up by the US Embassy, because we heard they had great falafel and chicken shawarma. It may have given us food poisoning (we both had desperate need of the bathrooms at the Pearl Market shortly after eating here), but it was delicious. And I believe B went back again after I returned to the US and didn’t get sick on his second vist.