Beijing Boyce

Last week, I reported that Centro, Suzie Wong’s, Face and China Doll received the most TBJ bar and club awards nominations and that I’d soon list all the categories and nominees. Well, that would now be rather redundant, given the survey is online.

These awards always give me headaches. Take the category of bar / club of the year. Here are the nominees:

Bar Blu
China Doll
D-22
The Den
Q Bar
The Rickshaw
Stone Boat Cafe
Suzie Wong’s
Vics

My favorite place right now is Rickshaw - I like the staff, the wings and burritos, the happy hour, and hanging out on the second floor deck. But then I think: this place has only been open for two months, can it be the bar of the year? Up the street is Q Bar, which, when not too busy, has represented a nice retreat for cocktails for 12 months and has a nice deck. Even so, if I place personal preferences aside, it’s hard to ignore Suzie Wong’s: it’s not my pint of Qingdao, but this place does reinvest in its space, bring in quality staff, provide consistency and pack the house, thus actually getting better year after year. (This is no mean feat - look at last year’s winner, Browns, which failed to make the cut this time.) China Doll? A worthy example of a bar that has good music and appeals to locals and foreigners alike. Stone Boat? A getaway in the city center to chill out and hear excellent bands. And on and on… and that’s before considering the places I could pick with a write-in vote.

In any case, anyone who publicly yaps about the bar scene — that’d be me — ought to put up or shut up, so I’ll take a couple of aspirin and make my picks right after I finish a major project on June 30 and before the voting deadline of July 11.

Eleven days should be enough to decide…

I usually don’t write about work-related events I attend, unless they involve haggis. One exception is the Kentucky Trade Center’s one-year anniversary celebration last week. Five things that made it a good event:

The crowd was eclectic - how often do you find a U.S. Governor, Miss University China and the owner of Steaks and Eggs all within a few meters of one other? There were plenty of interesting food and beverage people, including from Hatsune, Papa John’s and Sequoia Cafe, along with the media, business and government types.

The speeches were short - well except for the guy who went on about Bourbon, but it was bearable, given that I was sipping…

Woodford Reserve. This is an excellent Bourbon, and if the Kentucky state slogan is “Unbridled Spirit”, then this event’s was “Unbridled Spirits”, because this hard-to-find alcohol was being served free-flow, as were a variety of cocktails, including Mint Juleps.

My Old Kentucky Home - There’s something nice about watching people sing their nation’s or state’s song. It always pushes up the mood a few notches.

The gift bag - It included not one but two bottles of Bourbon — Jim Beam and Early Times — and a silver-plated tumbler, Kentucky pin, and reprint of an early Kentucky Derby poster. Some lucky person will win them at our next staff raffle (while I end up with my usual prize of pictorial coasters from some third-tier city).

Note: After the party, I checked out the Hilton’s Zeta Bar and its Tonic Lounge with Frank and Jennifer Siegel. I think Zeta has one of the more interesting designs in the city and the martini I had was pretty good. Tonic seems more like a place I’d relax in if I were a guest of the hotel, though the place did have Samuel Adams beer.