印巷小馆 @ Lucky Street (好运街), Beijing

Located at Lucky Street, Chaoyang Gongyuan Road. Its address: 朝阳区朝阳公园路好运街1-8号(近三元桥). Pretty far from the hotel and we transferred a couple of MRT lines and walked quite a bit before even reaching this area.

Lucky Street is a stretch of road that has plenty of restaurants. Many cuisines such as Japanese, Western, Italian, Chinese etc can be found here.

restaurant's facade

Senior manager suggested this restaurant as he has been here before. Our group of 7 pax waited for about 5 mins before being shown to a tiny room at second floor. Many diners there that night, almost full house.

up to the private dining rooms

inside the room

paintings on the wall

 menu

Manager did all the ordering while we sat back and relaxed. As usual, jugs of plum juice to start off the meal. Almost all restaurants will tweak the recipe and it'll taste different from place to place.

homemade plum juice (suan mei tang 酸梅汤) - light brown coloured

pork with kelp

stewed beef

stir-fried lotus roots with gingko

Usual order consist of pork, beef and lotus roots. This time round, we're having fish.

deep fried fish, served with herbed salt

with bones

The herbed salt that came with fish tasted the same as those use to flavour the Xinjiang mutton skewers. Let's just say that pork, beef and chicken remained as safer bets (in terms of likeability) as compared to fish.

rice (米饭)

In Beijing, rice is served with a more than generous serving. The spicy tofu dish goes well with the white rice. Well, the beef and the pork too. As usual, we asked for reduced salt and oil kind of cooking.

sweet and spicy tofu

Ordered the shop specialty to try. A huge square of bread with its insides carved out to contain curry chicken. Took one bite of the curry and it was a no-go for me thereafter. The rest didn't seem to mind and commented that the bread was nice. Personally, the biggest turn-off was the very sweet tasting curry. It was just weird. Really.

curry chicken bread

The service staff carries a device that they can key in the ordered items and it gets sent to the kitchen immediately upon confirmation of the order. Hence, we got our food like within 10 minutes after we're done ordering.Wow.

But the bad thing about being seated in a private dining room, was that one gotta holler real loud to get the attention of the service staff. The term to use when addressing the service staff is '服务员' (fu wu yuan).