Beijing Boyce

The World of Suzie Wong is an enduring late-night stop, a mainstay on the bar itinerary for visiting friends, and a place where the moral fabric of society is constantly put to the test by young Europeans in heat. The recently opened Suzie’s Café, on the first floor, simply doesn’t live up to its sibling club, lounge, and deck upstairs. While layout and decor are OK, the food, service, and prices leave something to desire.

The club sandwich (RMB40), with ham, chicken, fried egg, tomato, cucumber, etc came lukewarm, with dry white bread (apparently the only option), and long after my friend’s meal arrived. Given that the lunch crowd totaled five, the culprit would seem to be slow production.

The staff is friendly but intense and with a tendency to ask irrelevant questions. Here’s a sample:

Waiter (immediately after I entered): Would you like something to eat or drink?

Me (sitting at a table for four): Just a moment, I’m waiting for a friend.

Waiter : OK - table for one or two?

Me: Huh? Um, for one - my friend can sit on my lap. (Of course, I made up this last part.)

I don’t mean to be mean, and perhaps the staff is new and simply honing its English skills, but excessive attention can be annoying.

The highlight of the visit: the tasty cappuccino (RMB30), which features the Suzie Wong logo on its surface.

Even so, RMB70 for a coffee and a sub-par sandwich is expensive enough for inebriated club-goers to pay, but far too much for lunch in a city that offers plenty of great noon-day specials with lower prices and better food. (So is a soft drink at RMB30.) Suzie’s Cafe might do well to create a better-value lunch menu and draw in traffic from the street and the apartments next door.

To end on a positive note, the coffee makes Suzie’s a decent place to grab a seat near the window and chat with friends or do online work for a few hours.

Home of the city’s biggest drink umbrellas (photo: China Doll)

China Doll, slated to open in the 3.3 building on June 19, seems determined to “sex up” the club scene (see photo below). A bigger issue for me: Will the place have good drinks?

I met bar manager Bob Louison on Monday and he guided me through a detailed spreadsheet of 17 cocktails. From fruity deck drinks and twists on martinis to intriguing blends of mango syrup and basil or hazelnut syrup and pear, the beverages -  bar staff willing - should be interesting to say the least. The menu includes 30 classic cocktails (martinis, gin tonic, and the link), more than a dozen shooters, and eight mocktails. (Expect also an extensive wine list, drawing on 10 distributors, and a beer list typical of most clubs, i.e. a handful of typical brands).

Louison, who says fresh fruit features in many cocktails, has been training his bartenders for a month at Tango. The goal: for each to be able to make any drink on the menu in 30 seconds. And he wants the bartenders to develop their own styles. “As soon as you get into China Doll and see the bartenders, you should want to keep looking at them, at the way they stand, pour, make drinks, smile,” he says.

Louison’s own love is dealing with individual customers. “When a customer asks for a drink, you have to think about whether it should be strong or sweet, the time of day, whether the customer has eaten or not, the mood, and so on,” he says. “I try to find the right drink for the right person.”

I’ve met few people as intense about cocktails as Louison – George Zhou at Q Bar comes to mind – and he spent an hour explaining how the flavors work in each drink, why a particular alcohol is used, and so on, thus boosting my cocktail IQ.

You can try his drinks as of June 19, when China Doll opens its spacious premises (save for the deck, which will likely open in August).

Expect thorough security checks at the new China Doll (photo: China Doll).