The lines between my life and Beijing food-and-drink news are often blurred – I do, after all, write this column about my personal life and restaurant news. It gets weird sometimes. Whatever. I love my friends in F&B. They are so lovely, in fact, that they’ve given me what is perhaps an unhealthily rosy view of humanity.
So I was surprised last month when I was followed out of my lovely friend’s bar down a dark hutong by a black-out drunk expat trying to kiss me. Beijing is remarkably safe, sure, but do not let that blind you to the fact that there are still gross creepy dinguses out there. Gross creepy dinguses are a plague upon all humanity to which Beijing is not immune.
And yet, it is this yin-and-yang-like balance between the gross and the rosy that makes Beijing the clamorous metropolis we all love to hate. Maybe I’m striving too hard to segue from my personal life to food-and-drink news, IDK. Point is: I have good news and bad news this month. Where shall we begin?
Bottega. The spot has a new menu, along with a selection of Italian craft beers not-oft-seen in Beijing. TRIBE has freshened things up for fall, too – check out their dope single-origin coffee – and Big Smoke has introduced a hearty new brunch. Perhaps most excitingly, Migas has revamped The Bar at Migas, and we hear rumors of ping-pong.
As for the bad news, it’s almost all on Baochao Hutong. As we went to print, it was being cemented over, and businesses – including Modernista – were to be closed for an indeterminate amount of time. Sometimes weird crazy unexpected slightly scary things happen. As I’ve learned, there’s always light at the end of the hutong.
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