Beijing Restaurant Review

At Beijing Restaurant, we mostly ordered Beijing-style dim sum.  It was decent.  We had:

* Cucumber salad beijing style.  This wasn't what we expected.  This was chopped cucumbers tossed with cilantro and chopped garlic.  Some pieces of garlic were quite large.  The dish was okay/fine, nothing more.

* Jing dong meat pancake.  Much like a good quality green onion pancake (with four or so layers) but containing a slice of pork, this was the best dish of the night, judging by the fact that it disappeared first.

* House special pie.  Although outwardly appearing similar to the pancake, the pie simply had two thin layers of dough, not multiple layers, and the inside was over-stuffed with chopped chives and a bit of ground pork.  Decent, though a bit hard to eat because the filling kept falling out.  The leftovers, by the way, were surprisingly greasy.  I suppose it's admirable the pancake and the pie could have so much oil (and flavor) yet not taste oily when fresh.

* Three flavor dumplings.  Decent/good (at least when warm), which means they're relatively average dumplings.  I know they contained pork; I don't recall what the other two flavors were.

* House special eggplant.  A good (i.e., above average) rendition of an eggplant-with-basil dish, this one having the additional distinction of containing large shrimp, sliced chicken, and sliced bell peppers.  Thick sauce.

The restaurant gave us a free dessert of red bean mixed with a bit of dried fruit and nuts in a fried (tofu? glutinous rice flour?) skin.  Served hot.  Although we didn't discuss it much, I think our reactions depended on whether we liked Chinese-style sweet things and whether we liked red bean paste.  I like both and think this is one of the better Chinese desserts I've had, and one of the few served hot.  I believe the menu calls this dish fried sweet cake beijing style.

Our fortune cookies were remarkably appropriate to each person.

The total was $11/person including tax and tip.

Original Announcement

Today we'll go to Beijing Restaurant (i.e., "dumplings, pancakes, turnover-like 'pies,' hand-pulled noodles, pan-fried and steamed baozi (buns), and lots of Beijing-style meat dishes").

Comments from Other Attendees

Other dishes that get multiple mentions: house special meatball (I believe these are steamed) and the soups with preserved vegetables (with fish or pork; often called ... in warm pot). -mark 

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