BEIJING – The tiny restaurants that form the backbone of the lower
middle-class Chinese professional appear timeless. Inside there is
usually only three or four tables, each with a quartet of stools,
perfect for slurping bowls of spicy noodles and woofing down plates of
dumplings before heading home to sleep.
But these places are not immune to the pressures of the pre-economic
boom. Today after a visit to the Kro's Nest – that pizza place with
the great pies and lousy service – my friend Andy and I went to
investigate a rumor from another friend that a favorite haunt at
Tsinghua's West Gate has closed.
Where I used to enjoy spicy Lanzhou noodles and lamb kebab skewers now
stood a pile of concrete slabs, haphazardly thrown around the
half-demolished shell of the building. The roof had been completely
thorn down, but the walls remained as they had the last time I ate
there, two weeks before. A poster on the wall advertised Beijing Beer
on draft for three renminbi. I saw the counter where the cold
beverages were kept. The place looked abandoned in advance of a
steamroller.
I went with Andy to the restaurant next door for answers. I found
someone at an outdoor barbecue, grilling chicken wings for a party of
middle-aged women seated outside.
"Go to the big building," he said. "They've changed."
Whew. Here I thought my friends at the restaurant had been driven off
murderous thugs or corrupt government officials. Perhaps they
relocated to better digs. The fuyuan said the new place was 30 meters
down the road, on the right side. It was a strangely precise figure,
and we set off south for 23 footsteps.
Ten minutes later, we'd found no restaurant so I went back to the
fuyuan for a second set of instructions. This time he dispatched an
underling to accompany us and in under half a minute we were at a
Muslim restaurant with a large green sign called Twelve Tree Card
Restaurant. Perhaps I'm translating that wrong.
He took us to the restaurant's laoban (boss), a friendly man with a
broad smile sitting opposite his establishment's front door, leaning
against a metal pole.
"Two weeks I ate at the restaurant over there," I said. "Now it's
already demolished. We often ate there. What happened?"
"They demolished it. It wasn't clean. The sanitation was bad. They had
to close it." He didn't seem concerned. "You should eat here. We have
spicy Lanzhou noodles."
I wasn't interested. There was something about that old spicy noodle
and kebab joint that made it ours. The way I found out one day while
exploring the west side of campus toward the beginning of the
semester. I came back most weeks, usually on Friday nights right
after class. We would drink beer, eat fresh roasted meat and complain
about Brown or some grammatical point the Chinese had put in their
language only to infuriate foreigners. We planned nights out downtown,
ones that would end many hours later, miles away. The sudden
destruction of the restaurant reminds me that those nights now are
gone too.
