Jacob and I were invited to dinner at Cepe at the Ritz-Carlton a few days before our trip to Seoul, and it was nice to experience the hotel on the eve of that famous sporting event in August. It seemed that the Financial Street area had yet to receive its influx of tourists, so it was still pretty calm for the time being.

As regular readers may know, I have been pretty obsessed with seafood lately. I'm still doting on my photos of mussels and scallops from the Westin brunch, and obsessively searching for a recipe for seafood stew like the ones I had in Korea. This is because I have been deprived of good seafood since moving to Beijing. Chefs in Guangdong province seem to be blessed by some divine oceanic god; in the north, not so much. So every once in a while, it's nice to visit a restaurant that is able to source good marine life and cook it well.

This big beautiful scallop came on a bed of white asparagus and prosciutto. It was roasted until just done, with maximum tenderness. Rarely during a formal multi-course meal would I want another dish of the same instead of anticipating the next (mild ADD, perhaps?) but in this case I would have jumped at seconds.

It's fitting that a country so obsessed with kimchi would have a museum devoted to it. On one of our last days in Seoul Jacob and I took the subway to the COEX Mall, which housed the Kimchi Field Museum in the basement.

The place was rather small, but included a small tasting room and the standard "history of" and "how to make" displays. Over a hundred plastic models of various kinds of kimchi took up a third of the museum. I would probably have expected the shrimp, cod gills, and ginseng kimchi. But pickled pumpkin? Persimmon? Pheasant? The museum was indeed an eye-opener. 

Mall food in Asia tends to be of higher quality than its counterpart in the west, so it wasn't surprising we found Korean restaurant inside COEX that served a nice bubbling beansprout rice stew...

...along with the requisite 5 or 6 side dishes.

One of the most memorable things I ate last week was in Hongdae, the funky district around Hongik University. We found a pod-like little glass box of a restaurant amidst higher concrete buildings. You are free to draw all over the tables, and are given pens to do so.

(Bibim naengmyun)

My week-long trip to Seoul turned me from a recreational dabbler of Korean food to a full-on addict. Now that I'm home and about 10 pounds heavier, I can't stop thinking about bibimbap, dakgalbi (pan-fried chicken), bibim naengmyun (cold noodles with Korean chilli paste), among others.

The first thing I ate after landing in Seoul was dolsot bibimbap, presented in a hot stone pot so the rice on the sides become crispy and the raw egg on top cooks as you mix everything. This was at a traditional Korean restaurant in Insadong where the seats are cushions on an ondol wooden floor. A nice experience, but certainly not the most comfortable.

I instantly fell in love with the spicy seafood bean paste stew, which I apparently forgot to photograph in my state of rapture.

(Dolsot bibimbap)

(Side rant: As my luck would have it, when I started uploading photos after returning home, my card reader started acting funky and ejected in the middle of the upload. Unfortunately, the mishap caused about 100 photos, including everything from my last day at Noryangjin Fish Market, to disappear. This is what I get for buying cheap card readers in China.)

When your significant other decides to extend your birthday by suggesting Sunday brunch at the Westin, it's hard to refuse.

Granted, I had a long-time hatred and distrust of buffets. In fact, I revulsed at the thought of them. Buffets reminded me of soul-sucking Vegas vacations and childhood meals out in suburban Massachusetts. My well-meaning but frugal parents even held my college graduation party at a Chinese-style buffet; insisting that the all-you-can-eat platters of strange-flavor beef and California rolls were a "good deal". I would have sooner organized a reception at a Chinatown dai pai dong.

But I digress. 

Beijing's Westin Sunday brunch shattered my belief that buffets were all about quantity over quality. I even went easy at first on the limitless Champagne, so my judgement wouldn't be clouded. It was an exercise in restraint.

The strongest indicator of substance over fluff was the seafood. I piled my plate with lobster, crab legs, jumbo prawns, clams, and the freshest mussels I had tasted in ages. And I doubt I could have found a better seafood bouillabaisse this side of the Caucasus. (For the record, Jacob and I had a very light dinner the night before, and didn't eat any more food for the rest of the day.)  

(Thank you, Chuan Ban)

Maybe it's not just me. Maybe other people also go through a cursed period of dining out, when every restaurant meal makes you want to crawl back to the safety of your own kitchen.

It started with a string of three Vietnamese restaurants. I had been avoiding Vietnamese here for lack-of-authenticity's sake, but recently got an immense craving for pho. Two weeks ago Jacob and I were in Houhai and, for lack of better choices, ate at Nuage, a trendy joint that seemed to care ten times more about décor than food. I won't go into a whole review. But I will say the spring rolls skins were lockjaw-inducing in their toughness. And the cocktails were possibly the worst I have had in China, which is saying a lot. 

The next day I met up with Sandra from Savour Asia for lunch at Le Little Saigon, a new Vietnamese/French restaurant just north of the Drum and Bell Towers. The Vietnamese coffee was what I had been craving for months. But thick well-done flank steak has no place in my ideal bowl of pho. However, I'm such a sucker for good coffee and copies of Le Monde for perusing (in China!) that I just might return.

This was the case a few nights ago. Our friends S and K had been in Beijing for over a month, and it was their last night in the city. During their time here, they have visited just about every single vegetarian restaurant in the city. (If you have ever wondered what it is like for a vegan to travel in the Meatlover's Republic of China, visit S's blog.) When they suggested going out to Sichuan for one last meal together, I naturally expected a vegetarian Sichuan restaurant.

The restaurant (Yuxiang Renjia) turned out to be a regular omnivore's joint, and one that Jacob and I had already eaten at twice. On both previous occasions, the food was pretty good, but not impressive. We had eaten 口水鸡 koushui ji (mouth-watering chicken), mapo doufu, sizzling beef with peppers, and a lot of other unmemorable meaty dishes (obviously, since I can't list them.)

What was different this time was that we ordered all vegetarian dishes. That is, if you leave out the possibility that anything could have been cooked in a meat broth, which S and K have decided long ago to stop worrying about, to keep their sanity intact.) Who knew that a restaurant that turns out mediocre meat dishes, a staple of Sichuan cooking, could also produce much better vegetarian food?

This past weekend Jacob and I look a train from Shanghai to Hangzhou for a short trip. His main objective was to attend a tech conference, mine was to hang out on West Lake and to chow down on local specialties like beggar's chicken and prawns in Dragon's Well tea.

After the conference（held at a hotel) we asked a university professor for restaurant recommendations. He suggested a place called Grandmother's Kitchen, a popular local chain, but gave confusing directions.

"Where can I find Grandmother's Kitchen?" we asked one of the hotel employees. He shouted the question to a colleague using his Walkie-Talkie.

"My house," the colleague yelled back. Apparently Hangzhou-ese hotel staff have a sense of humor. About 15 minutes later we got to the restaurant, which, with its bright lighting and IKEA-esque furnishings, actually does feel like someone's house.

We got Dragon Well prawns. Pork and sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves. Edamame and roasted peanuts for cold dishes. Dry-fried green beans. Some other dishes that I don't remember. And my favorite of the night, red braised pork belly with smoked fish. I almost never use the term "unctuous", but it accurately describes the delicious sinfulness of the pork. This was even silkier than dongpo rou, Hangzhou's famous fatty pork dish. Granted, the accompanying fish was too salty, but the sweet sauce of pork drippings was excellent over rice.

For this month's That's Beijing, a local English-language magazine, I wrote an article on exploring Beijing's spots that serve absinthe. (I know, it was quite the tough gig.) Absinthe has been in the news back in the States ever since last year, when it was un-banned and subsequently started popping up on many bars' lists. So I decided to explore Beijing's options and found a few places that served not only shots but also tasty cocktails. (It's still not online yet, so perhaps I wil have to make a PDF to link to.)

More self-promotion (after all, this is what food blogs are for): In the feature, the 2007 Restaurant Awards for Beijing, I was on the "panel of experts" and gave my picks for restaurants in cagetories including Best Sichuan, Best Indian, and Best for a Romantic Dinner. Though I do have to point out the wording mistake (not mine) in my profile at the end. In NYC I worked as a pastry cook for several months, and did not go through the years of work it takes to become a pastry chef. To those outside the restaurant world this is a minor word issue, but to those who work in the industry, it's a huge distinction.

Minor grievance aside, this issue is a handy guide for anyone looking for restaurant recommendations in Beijing.

My original plan for Hong Kong was fitting in as much amazing Cantonese, Japanese, and Southeast Asian food as possible in a 3-day period. I solicited recommendations on Chowhound and did research on Openrice. I had dreams about sitting in a cha chaan teng with Hong Kong milk tea, French toast with condensed milk, and the odd-sounding but comforting macaroni with Spam. Then I got sick.*

I did get my milk tea, some congee, and a nice Cantonese dinner with relatives. But I was in no mood to hunt down new restaurants on streets and alleys I had never been to. Sneezing, wheezing, headaches, and a sore throat can dampen the spirits of any seasoned foodie. The best meal I had in Hong Kong was on the day I arrived, before the bad stuff started.

Jake and I got into Kowloon's train station at 1:30pm. By 3pm, after dropping off luggage, we were sitting in plastic chairs at Victory Kitchen in Northpoint. We were with my uncle, a HK foodie, who had never been to the restaurant but has always seen lines of people outside the door. That's a good enough sign for me.

Pu'er (sometimes spelled Pu-erh) is a complex tea with a huge following. It is the caipirinha of teas...drunken for centuries in its native land, and just now become ultra-popular to the outside world. The NYTimes recently had a good story on how farmers in Yunnan province are benefitting from the the rest of China and other countries discovering their native tea.

Pu'er originated in Yunnan but is also grown in neighboring Burma, Vietnam, and Laos. You may know it as the tea that's compressed into disks, bricks, or little dumpling-shaped cakes. Sheng Pu'er, also called green or raw Pu'er, is the kind most sought after by tea connosieurs. Like a good Bordeaux, it is aged for years, sometimes decades, and has a rich earthy taste that is particular to the land it grew on. Shou Pu'er is darker, oxidized after harvest to resemble the aging process Sheng Pu'er naturally undergoes. It can be drunken immediately and is much less expensive, but has a less complex flavor.