What topic of conversation do we hear over and over while sat at Charcoal’s bar? How the long-suffering residents of Shunyi – where this new barbecue/microbrew is located – have been waiting an eternity for a place like this. We’re inclined to agree. As arguably Beijing’s only suburb, Shunyi – The Great Beyond, where your gated compound dreams become a Fifth Ring Road reality – has been a haven for heavy-walleted CEOs, diplomats and mid-life crisis biker gangs for some time now. They might be the antithesis of hipster, but surely they deserve their own craft beer and BBQ hang-out?
As befits the name, the place screams barbecue. The decor is stone, iron and wood (blackened in the bathroom for the charcoal effect). Wallpaper? Don’t be ridiculous. There aren’t even many walls – just glass separating diner from kitchen and drinker from brewery. It is studied utilitarianism – the wood for the smoking oven is piled up in a ‘wood library’ (stacked in varieties of peach, pear, apple and hazelnut wood).
On to the food: all meat is sourced from either local farms or trusted suppliers, and presumably chosen based on how good it tastes when cooked over charcoal. The locals at the bar are all in agreement – the food tastes good. The 21-day dry-aged beef rib-eye is our favorite (RMB148 for 250g or RMB258 for 500g). The jerk chicken (RMB88/half, RMB128/whole), smoked in a converted duck-roasting oven, has gloriously moist flesh beneath tasty skin, while the yak ribs (RMB188), flown in from Yunnan, are a falling-off-the-bone,
melt-in-your-mouth kind of deal. Salads are available but – as admitted by the restaurant – unimportant (we expect they don’t taste so good roasted over charcoal).
Smack in the middle of the restaurant, and central to Charcoal’s appeal, is the brewery – all twelve gleaming vats worth. It’s the new flagship brewing operation for Arrow Factory, whose beer you may well have tried at Stuff’d or The Vineyard Café. The brewpub marks a partnership with the teams responsible for Kro’s Nest and The Corner Melt. The beers are priced competitively, coming in small and large sizes ranging from RMB25 for a small (250ml) A Whiter Shade Of Pale wheat to RMB45 for a pint (460ml) of Seeing Double IPA. With the new facility, Arrow Factory promises us a wider range of consistently high-quality beer, which they’ll need to keep up with the high standards set by the likes of Great Leap, Jing-A and Slow Boat. There’s more of a traditional European influence than the aforementioned brewers though – the Longbow Men Session Ale (RMB40/30) and Blonde on Blonde Belgian Ale (RMB40/30) we could drink all evening long. And we’re quite happy to do so at Charcoal. We’ve come all the way from downtown so might as well make a session of it – how much is a taxi back to Chaoyang again?
Price
RMB150-300 for meal, RMB25-45 for beer
Who’s Going
Bearded Shunyi biker gang dudes and their kiddies
Good For
Craft beer minus the hipsters
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Images by Holly Li
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