Photos by Holly Li
A word of advice to visitors of Moon Lamb Restaurant: Focus on the lamb. Really, focus on it. You will be tempted by dumplings, tofu salads and green-and-yellow laminated papers advertising the health effects of corn drinks (“to drink corn is to drink healthiness,” they say). You will be tempted by piping-hot bowls of soups and stews. You will be tempted by sticky Yanjings, or, god forbid, baijiu. There’s a whole selection of them. You must not give in.
Do not heed the siren calls of these edible temptresses. They are nothing but meaningless sidepieces who will only get in the way of your main.
Your main is lamb.
The Great Kanye West once asked: How you stay faithful in a room full of hoes? The answer is lamb. Really, really good lamb. When your main dish is this wonderful – this hot – it’s not hard to stay loyal. What we’re really trying to say is: Moon Lamb Restaurant’s lamb is good.
Moon Lamb Restaurant is an unassuming Inner Mongolian joint in Hujialou. It serves plates of lamb ribs by the half-kilo (RMB88). That sounds like a lot, but you should probably go ahead and order that much. The ribs are worth your hypothetical weight gain. Soft, finely spiced meat falls off the bone. Suck the bone. You’ll look dumb, but just do it.
The night of our visit, there are so many drivers stopping by to pick up takeout orders that it seems as if all delivery men south of Sanlitun have formed a conga line that wriggles through the restaurant on its way to visit customers. Thus we conclude: The lamb is not only good. The lamb is also popular.
We make the mistake of ordering some things that aren’t lamb (hence the above warning). We eat wild nori dumplings (RMB15) and a cold tofu salad (RMB15). They are perfectly passable – good even. Then we eat lamb dumplings (RMB20), which are a marked step up from their nori counterparts. These are even better. And given the price, they’re great. They’re just not lamb. Well they are, just not the lamb.
Kanye West also once said: There’s a thousand yous, only one of me. There are a thousand cold tofu salads in this city. There is only one Moon Lamb Restaurant lamb. (We only save Kanye references for the very best dishes, by the way).
A note on the atmosphere at Moon Lamb Restaurant: it pretty much sucks. The decor is of the fluorescent-light-and-plastic-tablecloths variety. But that does not matter. Attractive trappings would only distract you from your life’s true purpose, which is to eat lamb, of the Inner Mongolian variety, from Moon Lamb Restaurant. To yank fleshy meat off the bone with your teeth. To fondle said meat with your tongue. To run your tongue’s tip along the rib bone’s slender shaft. To devour your plate of lamb ribs, rabidly and feverishly, and upon finishing, to voice your satisfaction into the night with a long, joyous baaa.
Moon Lamb Restaurant is worth a visit. In summation: Get the damn lamb.
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