Beijing Boyce

Last week, I posted about the less than stellar service experienced by two bloggers at separate five-star hotels in China - one in Shanghai and one in Beijing.

One wrote about a tasting for a wedding meal. The hotel did a re-tasting and you would think everything went peachy keen the second time around. Not so, says p3wong, who has more than her fair share of experience in Beijing’s food and beverage sector. In her most recent post, The 2nd Tasting, she writes:

Overall, as much as the entire team tried.. in all honesty, I was still disappointed with the results. I’m actually not a picky eater, and so, if I felt the meal was mediocre, I think there’s a lot to be said about the food quality of this “top notch” hotel.

… What I found absolutely UNACCEPTABLE though was… WHY the food came out cold, as the Sous Chef later explains to us. The kitchen we were told, was on the other side of the banquet hall. Since we were doing our tasting in one of the breakout rooms on the other side of the hall, the food had to travel some distance to where we were dining. With THREE foreign chefs working the kitchen that night, NOBODY realized until just before dessert that all the dishes travelling about 200 meters or so from the kitchen to the breakout room would get COLD??

See the full post.

I have been making the rounds with my laptop the past few months in search of spots that offer decent food, drink and online access. Here is part two of my wrap-up on winter wireless places. (Previous write-up: The Stone Boat.)

Le Petit Gourmand

The good

• Plenty of parking options, including a high table with stools and cozy booths (with outlets). Most of the seating is dining style and there is a covered terrace
• An atmosphere that is part library (thousands of books), den (the soft lighting) and restaurant (tables decked with cutlery, napkins, and so on)
• Decent food, including pasta at RMB 30 to RMB 45, complete with a basket of bread. The guy behind me had sole. “I’m from Normandy and we eat this fish all the time,” said he. “This is good”
• Regular coffee at RMB 15 kuai, Cappuccino at RMB 20, and several Belgian beers
• Decent bathroom facilities
• The location makes it easy to pop into the gourmet shop in the 3.3. building (at the back, in the basement) and grab groceries on the way home
• Friendly staff, though they struggle with service at times.

The bad

• The music is repetitive (one night, I heard 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s going on?” more than a half-dozen times in two hours, another night the same songs were repeated numerous times) and the noise (on one visit, a staff member’s phone loudly rang over a dozen times to Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me”; suggestion: adjust phone to vibrate)
• If a food special is advertised, and the staff recommends it to you, it’s a bummer when they return a few minutes later and say, “We don’t have that today”

The wireless

• A pretty good signal: with reasonably priced coffee, lots of books to peruse, and comfy seating, this is a place that I park for a few hours.

Next up: The Rickshaw