中国万岁！ / Long Live China!

So yesterday I had my most exciting and delicious meal in China to date. Before last night, there was serious competition among several meals, including a Korean barbecue that featured unlimited food and alcohol, where we selected and then cooked the raw meat ourselves on hot plates set in the table, all for $10. However 烤羊腿/kao3yang2tui3 definitely takes the cake.

We had heard about this kind of restaurant from several people and had been intrigued from the get-go. It seemed like a slightly strange and quite wonderful concept for a restaurant, though apparently it's fairly common in this part of Beijing. We had a recommendation for a specific restaurant several blocks north of us, but decided to try the one directly across the street first, for convenience's sake. I'm glad we did. It was a fantastic restaurant, though it was, at about $14 a person, a little on the pricey side for Beijing.

So what is 烤羊腿？It's roast leg of lamb. Literally, a large leg of lamb, roasted in an outside grill/oven place, then placed on a spit and set in the table in front of you over a bed of coals. It's just as great as it sounds.

Here's a picture of Martin (the blond one) and Ben (the red-haired one) right before we started eating.

We walked into this place, told them we wanted to eat the leg of lamb, and were then presented with several raw legs of lamb of different weights and told to choose. We ultimately went with a leg that weighted 3.6斤/jin1, which, at one 斤 to 500g, is equivalent to about 4 pounds of leg. We ordered a couple cold vegetable dishes and a basket of a flat naan-like bread whose name I didn't catch as accompaniments.

We cut the lamb using those ridiculously long fork/knife combinations you see Ben and Martin holding, slicing off the hunks of meet we wanted and then eating them plain or dipping them in any combination we wanted of whole cumin seeds, crushed peppers, and some sweet crushed nuts of an unknown variety. Everything was delicious. The lamb was crispy, fatty, and juicy, and we did a good job eating our leg, getting as much meat off as we possibly could.

The only downside is that because of the coals and the large slab of roasted meat in front of you, the table gets quite hot. To keep us cool, we were drinking some draft beer, a dark beer (black lager perhaps?) known as 富森啤酒/fu4sen1pi2jiu3 (Forest Beer), which comes from I don't know where and is quite delicious. More flavorful than your Tsingtao/青岛啤酒 (properly romanized as Qingdao) or Yanjing/燕京啤酒, the other two common beers in Beijing, though still not very strong and definitely easy to drink. However, apparently our drinks were not impressive enough, because about halfway through our leg, the table next to us of four Chinese men, probably in their 30s, and one little girl offered us some 白酒/bai2jiu3. This stuff is Chinese firewater, distilled from sorghum to a strength upwards of 40% ABV (though it varies based on the type you buy). So I poured all of us a shot, but said that we'd only take it if they drank with us. So two of the men poured themselves a shot and we all drank to a toast of 中国万岁/zhong1guo2wan4sui4！from the most boisterous of their group.

Later, we were talking to them and discovered they were all Beijingers, which we found rather surprising, owing to their lack of 儿化/er2hua4, the strong Beijing accent I discussed earlier. They responded that they could speak with that kind of accent, but then we wouldn't be able to understand anything they said. Which is entirely true. A very strong 儿化 accent is very difficult to follow, as the speaker's syllables all run together and can, in a particularly strong case, begin to sound more than a little seal-like. As they left, they also recommended we pick up some 二锅头五十六号/er4guo1tou2wu3shi2liu4hao4, a local Beijing specialty. It's a type of baijiu, most likely the one they were drinking, that is distilled to 56% ABV. Really potent stuff, definitely puts the hair on your chest. And now we have a recommendation on what baijiu to drink, which we'll make sure to heed. Not that it's particularly pleasant stuff. But it's very 北京/bei3jing1. With a final 北京万岁/bei3jing1wan4sui4, our new friends departed.

At the end of the meal, we were all stuffed and more than a little proud of ourselves for eating all that lamb. Martin here is attempting the infamous Beijing Belly look, one that I attempted as well as we walked away. It effectively increases airflow to the abdomen and cools one's body temperature, but apparently not all t-shirts are created equal with regards to this task. I had a fair amount of difficult rolling up my shirt to effectively expose my stomach (#beijingproblems), though perhaps this just takes practice...