Peking Duck in Beijing @ Huajia Yiyuan

When in Beijing, it's blasphemy not to try Peking Duck (or Beijing Duck).

So my friend and his gf brought me to the famous eatery street ( Dongzhimen Nei Dajie) in Beijing for a proper Peking duck dinner.





It was summer, hot and crowded. Lots of people waiting outside to be seated in. Just look for the area with the most red lanterns and you should be in the right spot.



He picked the restaurant Huajia Yiyuan as he claimed it was his favorite restaurant in Beijing. You see, my friend has been living in Beijing for several years now teaching English as a British and if I have noticed one thing in him, it's that he's becoming more like a Chinese and less like a British every time I speak to him over the years. He would bargain for 1 yuan for hours if he could whereas the old him wouldn't have bothered if it's 5 sterling pounds difference.

So while in Beijing, I let him make all the food decision for me as far as I was concerned.





Now I love Peking Duck, I love the British Aromatic Duck and I love most peking ducks I've tried in my life wherever I can find them.

I had, at that point, never tried Beijing authentic Peking duck; and was eager to find out what originality tasted like.

Restaurants in Beijing surprised me in lots of way. First and foremost, it's not cheap dining in Beijing. Sure you can get pretty decent affordable street food or even small eatery in the corner of every other street.

But anything slightly fancier (I'm speaking average class) comes with a hefty price. And I was blown by the creativity in food here. Some of the dishes I saw in the menu.

 
rmb218 (~=RM113)











My friend did most of the ordering, but I had to be greedy and made two orders for the table on dishes I wanted to try which proved later to be the biggest mistakes.



Soon as my lotus dish came out, I knew something wasn't right. There were color sprinkles on it.
I took a bite and I was sweetened out. It was a sweet dish! Like a dessert! I didn't know! Who would have known?! Perhaps I didn't read the menu properly? But it wasn't under the dessert section and I certainly didn't remember reading about sweetness.

Of course, I had to order a similar dish after that.



My pork ribs came with sprinkles too! And gosh was it sweet! T_T
Now this was nothing like your usual sweet and sour flavor, this was all out sweet, like candy dessert sweet. No sourness. Plain sugar baby. This was clearly a dessert dish, in meat form. ODD.

Thank god my friend ordered enough to feed a big family so we didn't have to endure my apparent bad taste of Beijing food ordering.


This was yummy. I have no idea what vegetable dish this was but it tasted good.


Soup was a staple to every meal for a Chinese, especially in Beijing where the weather can be gruesomely cold in winter.


Steamed bun served with Chop Suey (stir fried mix vegetables)

Then it was time for the main serving dish: Peking Duck - Yongzhen Dynasty Roast Duck.
Traditionally, Peking Duck is served with its signature crispy skin with little or no meat on pancakes accompanied by various condiments such as cucumbers, scallions and hoisin (seafood) sauce.

But more and more restaurants are serving the duck meat as well to prevent wastage, this is especially so in most average class restaurants.

First you have the extensive condiments served beforehand.



Two types of pancakes (one type in various colors), cucumber sticks, melon sticks, crab sticks, celery, cucumber shreds, plum jelly sticks, various sauces, etc.




pocket bread

Then a well practiced young chef came with a whole duck and started slicing skillfully away. Skin and meat falls off the bone in equal parts leaving behind a complete bone carcass with almost no wastage.







I enquired my friend's Chinese gf about eating the skin with pancakes alone; to which she said I could but it's normally too oily to eat so. I thought it odd since that was how we ate Peking duck back home.



When I took my first bite, I finally understood why she said that.

Maybe because of different way of breeding (force feeding, fattening), ducks served in Beijing were FAT. Even their skin was fatty. Almost similar to a roast pork crackling fatty skin, peking ducks here had incredibly tender meat and extraordinary fatty skin. Each mouthful was a mouthful of oiliness.

It was intense, overwhelming, and not my taste at all.

And that was generally my experience with food in Beijing. Lots of food here were either too oily, or a little bland (soup, steamed bun, stir-fry vegetables, etc). Two sides of extremities.

Perhaps it's Malaysian's rich cultural food I'm used to where one's tongue dances with all forms of spices everyday; Beijing's general of bland or oily food didn't really fit my appetite.





In my ten days of Beijing stay, I've never lost so much weight in a single trip.