Beijing Boyce

Victory vodka
For one Beijing pub poet
Write your haiku now

There are two days left to enter The Haiku Challenge. Send your poems (maximum: three) about Beijing’s nightlife scene to beijingboyce@yahoo.com by noon on Wednesday. Author of the best haiku gets three bottles of 42 Below vodka as well as a RMB 500 gift certificate to Song. Oh, and the glory! Three runner-up authors get a bottle of vodka each.

You don’t need to be Japanese, have an English literature degree, or be a published poet to enter, although you need the math skill to count to seventeen (the number of syllables in a standard haiku). Check details about the contest and the judges.

When the new Saddle opens in Nali Studios, expect different eats both from the original and from the owners’ current establishment, The Rickshaw.

Last Saturday, I found myself sitting in The Rickshaw near one of those owners, Nick Ma, the man behind the new menu, and he let me in on a taste test of potential menu items, including the seven-layer nachos, vegetarian burritos, a type of burrito topped with loads of melted cheese (we had one stuffed with slow-cooked beef and one with pork), and deep-fried apple-filled wraps with chocolate and whipped cream. We ate several variations of each, thanks to chef Sabrina, and they were tasty indeed. Some fine-tuning is to come, but this gives you an idea of the menu’s direction.

The Saddle will also see a much different drinks lineup:

• Beer made on the premises
• Fifty kinds of margaritas
• Mucho tequila. As reported earlier, Chad Lager says, “I guarantee you that the new Saddle will have the best selection of tequila in all of China.”

That’s a lot going on, given I associate Saddle and The Rickshaw with simplicity — good eats, a limited but sufficient beverage menu, and a homey atmosphere. The strength of Saddle and The Rickshaw were to provide something that local eaters and drinkers actually want, as to opposed to so many establishments who try to bring in some concept from another place and to “raise the bar”, so to speak. It’s the difference between serving the market and trying to create it. Let’s hope the new Saddle keeps on that less well-worn path – the food suggests it is.

More on the place to come…