Our three days in Beijing ahead of our honeymoon cruise aboard Diamond Princess in 2008 was also hosted by Princess Cruises and as well as taking us on some incredible excursions to see the sights of the city (and you can read all of them here: China – Beijing) included breakfast in the hotel each morning plus lunch at a restaurant each day, the evening being for us to sort ourselves out.
I can’t actually remember much about the breakfasts. This was, if you didn’t already know, our first foreign holiday together, the first time either of us had been out of the country in well over a decade, we’d just got married, and thoughts of blogging about travels didn’t exist. In short, cut us some slack. Like you even wanted to know what breakfast in an international hotel was like anyway.
As for the lunches, while I cannot tell you what restaurants we visited in Beijing on this pre-cruise tour other than one (I made a note – Wahaha restaurant – so we almost certainly went there for one of the meals), I did at least take some photos and videos, and I can recall some details. I can tell you, for instance, that each day’s food was a different type of cuisine. One day we had Cantonese-style, another was Szechuan, and another was Hangzhou. The styles were very different and you definitely didn’t think you were getting the same thing each day. Unless you were an American woman in our group.
Excuse me! Can you tell us what sort of food we are going to be having at the restaurant today?
Yes, certainly. Today we are visiting a restaurant in an old theatre and you will be able to make your own Peking duck in the traditional style!
Wait. Are we having Chinese food again?
Yes, yes we were having Chinese food again. Funny that. It was lovely. It was completely different to what we’d had on the days before that. Don’t be like that woman. Embrace the culture when you’re travelling.
So, let’s take a look at some of the photos and videos from two of our visits to restaurants in Beijing.
One of the restaurants promised very fresh food. Some of it was still alive and in tanks as we arrived.
There were some interesting looks from everyone at some of the dishes that were then presented. I’d like to say that we were brave and had a go at the chicken head but my recollection is that nobody on our table did. Everything else was tried, though.
Some photos from just outside the restaurant were taken as well.
Our last restaurant meal in Beijing was to the old theatre mentioned before. This was where we got to try some Peking duck and was also memorable for the sea lion swimming about in a small pool in the restaurant entrance. I would like to say for certain that sea lion was not on the menu but I can’t. I’d like to think it was just there as a tourist draw and while it’s something we don’t agree with I can say that the animal appeared to be well looked-after.
Our evening meals were left to us. I know that a lot of people in our pre-cruise tour group dined at the hotel in which we were staying and I suspect it was very good there; for the price I’d expect it to be. That price was shockingly high, though, as we discovered on the first evening and while we’re not tight with money even we have our limits. Dining there for one evening would have cost us a fortune so doing it for all three would have left us with a sour taste in our mouth before the cruise had even properly begun. Luckily, following a quick chat with the guide who’d accompanied us on the first day exploring Beijing we discovered that one road behind the hotel there was a local restaurant with better prices.
That restaurant was the Great Wall Restaurant and I’ve included some photos of a small, fold-out menu as well as a shot from a larger one that was provided to us at the table, the reason for that being pretty obvious if you’ve got the mind of a juvenile like us.
The Great Wall Restaurant was absolutely fabulous. The food was incredible; the variety of dishes was superb; the price was laughingly cheap. About twenty pence for a bowl of sticky rice, for instance. Their most expensive bottle of wine – something the waitress was hesitant to serve us initially because she thought it might be too costly – was fourteen pounds. We have drunk Chinese red wine in China and we’ve drunk it out of glasses barely larger than thimbles. On top of that the restaurant brewed its own light and dark German-style beers (you can see that in the first photo from the menus above) which was under a pound a pint and it was absolutely wonderful. Another British couple we got talking to visited that same restaurant every evening specifically for the beer alone.