Grain Store Unleashed: Poss Best Pop-Up Restaurant Ever

Remember a few weeks ago I was complaining about something or other, as I do, and got scared that I wouldn’t be able to find vegan dumplings in China, the one thing that would make it all worth it? Haha maybe dumplings aren’t that powerful but they are amazing and I had so many dumplings, guys. We even went to a place just called Vegetarian Dumpling. Twice. The food in Beijing was incredible, and I would happily go back there to hit more of the places on my list. After the boring food of Siberia and Mongolia, China so far has been a food paradise. There’s enough English spoken in Beijing that finding out what was vegan at regular restaurants was pretty simple, but when there are so many all vegan 0r vegetarian restaurants to try, why even bother elsewhere? 

As soon as we got to Beijing, we walked from our hotel to one of the SUHU Vegetarian Tiger locations, the one in the Fullink Plaza. We walked at least an hour (we really wanted to move and not get on another train by taking the strong metro system immediately), so by the time we arrived we were super hungry and ready to pounce like the titular tiger but on vegan food. It was a weird time because we landed in the city in the afternoon, so we got to SUHU at about 4pm. Luckily they don’t close in between regular meal times, like so many restaurants in China do. However, it was super awkward because 99% of their numerous staff was sleeping at tables with curtains drawn around them. I thought only the Spanish napped in the afternoon while still at work! The restaurant is giant, and very nice, but seeing all these sleeping workers and trying not to bother them was hilariously weird. Whatever, I’m just glad someone was awake to let us in and cook for us, because this is one of my favorite restaurants, anywhere. 

Given how tired I was after the train and the super loud Canadians I had to deal with, trying to choose what to order from the NEVERENDING MENU was actually stressful. Amazingly lucky, but stressful! Not only was there a big coffee-table-book style menu measuring 13×15 inches with beautiful full size pictures of everything, but they had a second smaller menu with even more house specialies. Ahh it was too much choice! And, even though it says Vegetarian right in the name, and on HappyCow it’s listed as a vegetarian not a vegan restaurant, the About page of the menu says they don’t use dairy or eggs, so like, maybe there’s some honey in some desserts but that doesn’t help me decide what food to order! How do people without special diets order at regular restaurants?! How do you know what you want if there’s not just one vegan option? 

We decided before we ordered that we would come back another day, which took a lot of the pressure off. First of all, I needed to get a toon dish, because Jojo raved about toon. I chose bean curd ‘noodles’ (like fettuccine-shaped strips I’ve seen everywhere in China) mixed with the delicate green leaf that I learned was toon. I had no idea! It’s like a little green sprout (little green ghouls mannn!) and it’s usually eaten raw so sign me up. This was a perfect dish for me after all this travel – the very mild freshness of toon mixed with the protein-packed bean curd to make a great starter salad. Definitely the kind of thing I would eat every day!

We next tried one of the famed vegetarian eel dishes. I was surprised to see how tiny the portion was, considering how the other plates were pretty big, but considering how much food we ordered, it was for the best (although for the price, it’s kind of a dick move). The eel did not disappoint! It’s been a minute since I’ve had real eel, so my memory is hazy, but it tasted as much like the real thing as I’d want! Caramelized slightly sweet skin and that really good fishy-but-not-gross-fishy flavor and a pretty spot-on texture, so I was a fan of this dish. Maybe I do want more…in the past…however that works.  

Next we tried a simple but delicious noodle dish, with glass noodles, spiralized and marinated vegetables of all/indiscriminate sorts, tofu skin, peanuts, mushrooms, and sesame seeds and oil. It was so yummy! And, of course, because they had dumplings on the menu, I had to get them! I got the Shanghai style, which are a little soupier (but not as soupy as legit soup dumplings which I really want to find vegan version of SOMETIME ughh. These were I think cabbage and miscellaneous other veg. I had been in China for like 3 hours and hadn’t had dumplings yet; I had a quota to fulfill! They were good! Are any dumplings ever bad?? Ahhh love them. 

The craziest thing we ordered at SUHU was the purple yam. I know you’re thinking, like, okay, that’s just what most people think are sweet potatoes, what’s the big deal. Well just look at how it was served: 

Can you even believe that that whipped cream looking business comes from a tuber? The whipped yam was mixed with a little sugar and a little magic and drizzled with blueberry sauce. It was SO good. It tasted like cheesecake, actually, but not in a disgusting cheesecake way, in an amaaazing way. Literally the only problem with this was that three fluffy clouds of it were too many. It’s so filling and rich-seeming that it’s hard to eat a lot of. But it was so delicious! 

On our other visit, we ordered much more conservatively. Well, not much. Actually, maybe not at all. We never do. For my requisite green vegetable, I got this lightly sauteed dish of what I want to say are pea shoots, though it was a lot more sturdy of a stem than I’m used to with those – in a good way, they kept some bite and weren’t mushy. Very good! The mildness of this dish was necessary to combat the incredible heat of our tofu dish. 

The tofu dish was incredible – dense (obviously pressed, good job!) hard little cubes of tofu covered in a spicy garlicky black sauce, with beans (beans!) of various sorts, a few small-cut vegetables, and most of all, CHILI and other peppers that made it suuuper spicy! We like spicy food (and are super excited for Sichuan province) so this was awesome. And despite the air conditioning in the restaurant, we were actually sweating and had to blow our noses a lot while eating it! Haha so fun! 

Less fun was our Singapore noodle dish, which on the menu looked like a good plate of noodles and accompaniment but in reality was a bowl of broth with noodles (and lots of chilis!) in it! We didn’t order soup! It was fine, just a little bit not what we wanted. 

Obviously, I couldn’t go a meal without ordering dumplings, so this time I got the regular steamed dumplings, which were great, as all dumplings are. The two different colors had slightly different tangs to them but still it was mostly a game of cabbage, tofu, and some other standard dumpling stuff. I packed up most of these for the train to Shanghai we took later that last night, and they were perfect train food. 

I wanted to order the hatcake that Jojo recommended, but for some reason my brain wanted me to order sesame buns to save for dessert later. I assumed they were the sweet, super chewy type of sesame bun I love from Chinatowns the world over, but instead they were buttery and flaky, falling apart in your mouth. Which sounds amazing, I know, and they were good, but I just don’t really like buttery and flaky, I like chewy. Regardless, SUHU was incredible and if I’m ever back in Beijing it would probably be my first stop. 

Well, it might be my second stop. Another place I absolutely adored was the well-named Vegetarian Dumpling, which was only 15 minutes walk from our hotel and so easy to get to that I went myself (without google maps or cell access at all!) once. The menu has English translations, the dumpling list has eggs next to the stuff that has eggs, it has good wifi, and it was full of actual Chinese people. All wins! 

The number of dumplings without the egg symbol is a bit limited, but they all still sounded great so we chose three. I read a lot about how Vegetarian Dumpling makes you order a double order of each kind you want, so 10 dumplings instead of the 5 that come in one order. I said, 1) if that was the case why don’t they just make the order size 10? and b) if it is true/so stupid then we will just cross one of the three we chose off!

The waitress came, looked at our order form (you check off what dishes you want and how many of them), and changed all the 1’s we put next to the dumplings into 2’s. So, it is true, and they are not just changing the official order size and price which makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE, but anyway, in more important news, we idiots could not decide what dumpling to cross off because they all sounded good so we just said FORGET IT BRING US ALL 30 DUMPLINGS. 30 dumplings is a lot, guys. 
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And guess what, having a limited number of vegan dumpling choices did not make ordering here any easier, because they still had an EPIC long menu of regular Chinese food! Ahhhh it looked just as good if not better than SUHU. We decided on a sauteed green vegetable with beans (BEANS!), plus one of their advertised (on the wall) specialties – a stewed meatball and cabbage (or other similar green) dish. SO MUCH FOOD. And it was all great. 

AHHH SO MANY DUMPLINGS! They were all great too. We got the cabbage and peanut, which was probably the weakest of the three but hey still a dumpling; the carrot, cucumber, black mushroom, black fungus (how’s that different) and vermicelli kind, which was great; and the sweet and sour shredded potato option, which somehow was the best of the three. SO interesting and great! You’d think that after struggling to eat 15 dumplings each I would be sooo over them by now, but that lasted approximately 12 hours. 

The stewed meatball dish we got was one of the best things we ate in Beijing. It had NO business being that incredible. So delicious! Oh man! And the greens and beans were great too, if standard, but that’s what I want out of my greens usually. 

I was ecstatic to see cucumber juice on the list of fresh juices, the only non-fruit (well they have carrot but that doesn’t count) option. I ordered it and was SO happy to discover that it really was JUST cucumber juice! No mixing with apple or other bullshit that every non-Chinese juice place does! It was sooo good. I would soon learn that plain cucumber juice is hella prevalent all over China! Score! 

Z ordered a drink called ‘syrup of plum’ out of sheer curiosity. It was not delicious. 
I went back another night and had an incredible homestyle tofu dish, cooked and served in a black clay pot that DID NOT COOL OFF. I also had this raw cabbage and peanut salad that was just perfection. 

The tofu dish was my very first dish that would fall under the ‘gelatinous’ category of Chinese cuisine! I don’t know how they did it or why but it was good and not a gross consistency as I’d expect! The cabbage salad was a perfect food for me. The dressing was light and soo delicious, very fresh herb-y and if I didn’t have such a bastardized palette I’d tell you which herbs. 

Did I…did I not get dumplings this time??? What’s wrong with me! 

I love Vegetarian Dumpling so much. It was pretty darn cheap, too, for SOOO much food. I wish they had one closer to me. 

Another vegetarian restaurant we went to was Baihe Lily. This was not our first choice – after seeing the Lama and Confucian Temples, we wanted to go to a very closeby veg restaurant called Xu Xiang Zhai Vegetarian that was in the book and highly recommended. It sounded amazing! We got there, and it was NO LONGER IN EXISTENCE. BOOOO. The closest veg restaurant we could find on Google (we were hangry, no time to travel to something too far) was Baihe Lily. The food was good, but I can’t recommend it really because it’s super overpriced, frustrating to order, and impossible to get service. 

First of all, the menus are tablets. Like, electronic little fake iPad looking jawns. So cool and technologically advanced, right? No it was the moooost annoying thing ever. You can’t go back and look at things that looked good without going through 100 other pictures, and then trying to go back and find where you left off. WORST OF ALL, you can’t keep going through and pointing to the things you want to order! They had a kind of online shopping style checkout way to order, by adding things to your cart, but unlike the menu descriptions, the things added only in Chinese so if you added something by accident you couldn’t figure out which thing to delete and would just have to start over and OMG MY AGITAAAA. 

Second, no one came back to the dining room to do any of the service in an appropriate fashion. We had to keep flagging someone out in the lobby to order, to pay, &c. During our meal, a white woman was seated at the table next to us. We had seen her at the temples that morning so we made friendly small talk. We finished our meal before anyone even came to give her A MENU. When we saw someone, we asked ‘can someone please get this girl a menu?’ and no one did, so she left without even ordering. UNACCEPTABLE. 

Luckily, the food was pretty great. We had this cool vegetarian spare rib-meat kind of dish that was excellent, and of course a plate of leafy greens. 

They had a salad-y handroll looking thing that I’m always into, full of sprouts and other salad-y things. Unfortunately, the pink sauce tasting weirdly strawberry yogurty, and even if it was vegan, yogurt is gross, so blech. It reminded me of the gross pink dip that comes in supermarket fruit trays. no no no.

We of course got a noodle dish that was really good, the mix-it-yourself kind that has all the good herbs and peanuts and cucumber strips and spiciness but then when you mix it together like you have to in order to eat it all the good stuff sinks to the bottom and even though that’s annoying that’s just science and it’s all still soo good. We lastly got one of my favorite things, the fried vegetarian fish roll sort of jawn that I get all the time at our favorite London Chinatown restaurant. Leong’s Legends. 

So, yeah, all the food was mostly great! So if you are okay with bad service and frustrating order process, then by all means go to Baihe. But, it was also the most expensive restaurant we had been to since, well, the start of this summer’s travels! Sure it wasn’t as much as a meal like this would cost in London, but that’s a pretty high bar considering how expensive London is and how cheap China is. A pot of the most basic tea, for example, was 65 yuan – at most other places it’s, like, 10. That’s crazy! We did not order the tea. 

A few meals were not at all-vegetarian restaurants, if you can believe it! In the APM Mall (SO MANY MALLS IN BEIJING I LOVE IT, AIR CONDITIONING AND BUBBLE TEA!) was an outpost of the very famous Din Tai Fung restaurant, which is in the New York Times Top 10 in the world, apparently. Crazy. There’s one opening soon in London, which I imagine will be priced at 100x as much, because it was pretty cheap and casual and hectic for being so highly ranked. It also was, like, just okay. Granted, they just didn’t have that much for vegans, so I got the standard Chinese restaurant order of a sauteed garlicky leafy green plus another leafy green with bean curd (the smallest amount of bean curd ever served in China) and plain rice. It was fine, perfunctory, but like, not even in the top ten of restaurants we went to in Beijing. I’m sure for Z it was better. The best thing about it, though, was that an official manager lady, complete with microphone headset for running the large restaurant, came over with not-our-waiter, and asked if they would take our photos while we were eating! We were like…seriously? We are used to people asking to take our pictures, or take pics with us, because we are white, but that’s out in the world from regular people. Being asked by the MANAGER of an important restaurant? SO WEIRD! And we were eating! I was literally chewing with food in my mouth and was like um noo thanks you are not taking me with my mouth full of food and then what, putting a poster on the front wall? To quote Danielle Brooks as Sophia in The Color Purple, ‘heeeeeeell no. HELL NO.’ But like, why the manager? And why us? It was full of other whites who were slightly less sweaty, so why us? Did they think I was famous? Who did they think I was? Now I’m curious. But thank goodness I’m not now on Din Tai Fung’s promotional materials before I was able to take my 3rd shower of the day. 

Fortunately, outside the APM mall (and just everywhere on the streets) are tons of fruit carts selling great fresh fruit. I scored this little bucket of melon for 10 yuan. 

Another night, we went into another random mall and found a decent restaurant. I got a thing of greens (always!) and the FUNNIEST salad I’ve ever seen. It was amazing. 

Guys I have no idea what this salad vegetable is! The menu translated as some sort of ice preserved plant, but it wasn’t iceberg lettuce, as I kind of suspected. If you look closely at the stem, you can see little clear beading, like water droplets. But it wasn’t little ice crystals! It was like…fake ice crystals? But it didn’t affect the taste at all, it just somehow made the VEGETABLE kind of icy? It was insane we were hysterical just like what is going on! It was actually really good. It came with a nice sesame dressing but the taste of the vegetable itself was so good and interesting that we preferred it plain. Just like…what is the process they put it through?! It’s so cray. 

Early in our visit, we went to the Zheng Long Zhai Vegetarian Shop to stock up on goodies, as per Jojo’s recommendation. It is a little hard to find and not really near anything convenient, but it’s so worth going to. They have all these amazing jerky packets, like beef jerky and stuff, of 100 different sorts and it’s all vegan! 

I can’t rotate the picture above without crashing the computer (thanks Weebly!), but you can see it’s a LOT of fun stuff. I bought one or two of literally all the jerky options, and most are really good. A little soft for my taste (I’m not supposed to be cooking them…right? They are portable food!…right?) but great, seitan-y goodness. They will so come in handy in the ‘stans, if I don’t eat them all beforehand. I also got two pancake-style single-serving food things, one yuba, and one mushroom. I wish I got more of them because they were delicious. Darn. Then, they have a giant bakery section, for such an incredibly tiny store (so tiny). Everything apparently is vegan! I got a box of crunchy rice cakes that I thought would be like the ones I was addicted to in Thailand – that is, sugary – but they were just plain rice! I was kind of mad but it’s better because they make great daytime snacks while out and about instead of just dessert. I got a few little pastry things that looked great but ended up being buttery flaky things, which you know by now aren’t my favorite, but they were still good. My favorite thing was that pancake looking thing! It was filled with a just barely sweet bean paste and I wish I got a ton of them! So yummy. The cellophane bag of little brown squares I assumed would be peanutty, but despite being fine I really cannot tell what the crap they are. The strangest thing about Chinese dessert, I’ve learned, is that – for a country where people drink bubble tea and juice and all drinks so flipping sweet that just one sip will give you the ‘beetus, their desserts have the smallest amounts of sugar possible to still qualify as dessert. Actually, some things I wouldn’t even let qualify as dessert, they are so non-sweet! It’s crazy! Seriously, I bought a tea from a fridge case once and had to throw it away because it was like pure high-fructose corn syrup. And I get my bubble teas (MY FAVORITE THING NOW, more on those in later posts because I didn’t take pics in Beijing I was too busy eating all the tapioca balls immediately and pouring out the tea just kidding but I would do that) at the ‘zero sugar’ or ‘25% the regular sugar’ options, and they are still hella sweet! It’s so weird that all the drinks are way too sugary but the desserts aren’t sugary enough! Let the two categories share the sugar amounts and both would then be perfect! 

Regardless, this vegetarian shop is a must visit if you are traveling for a while and need snacks and emergency protein strips. 

In the complete opposite world, we also stopped at a Wal-Mart. They have Wal-Marts all over China! And while 90% is Chinese products, they do have a decent amount of recognizable stuff. Like sooo many weird flavored Oreos! We tried the vanilla sundae kind – reeeeally good! – and the strawberry kind – reeeeally gross! We got some candy and some drinks, including a lot of what we thought was cranberry and blueberry juice (as per doctor’s orders!), a really good apple cider vinegar drink, and an almond milk. Some of that is pictured; I think I forgot to take stuff out of another bag. 

The giant carton of coconut water came in handy on our exhausting sweaty trek of the Great Wall (next post!). Those macadamia chocolates are accidentally vegan and we see them EVERYWHERE! Remind me to get more before we leave China. They’re even in Family Marts and 7-11! Those little blue and red tubes in the middle, guess what they are? SINGLE SERVE PEANUT BUTTER PACKS BOIIIII! And the blue is Skippy! Ahhhh! I don’t like Skippy when I’m home but I’m very excited about having it in central Asia! The red kind is the Chinese (and cheaper) option. Yas peanut butter! 

Lastly, I have to share one of my favorite things. After my doctor’s appointment, we went into a nearby office building to pee, and of course the basement where the toilets were had an epic food court/mall style set up because every single building does. The very first thing I ran into? 

A JUICE BAR!!! Despite doctor’s orders to consume berries, I of course ordered the greenest option on the menu (which was also in English!) because I can’t not! If it’s my only real green  juice/smoothie opportunity for 4 months, I’m going to get the greenest one obviously! It was peasprouts, lettuce, pineapple, apple, and orange I think. I think I added spinach? It tasted just like peashoots, and you know what? I loved it. (Z did not.)

Well that’s all the food in Beijing that I have pictures of, so that’s all we’re going to talk about! The food really is incredible. I’m sure with five weeks in China, I’ll get sick of Chinese food at some point, but I don’t see that happening soon.