Note: This post is written by Suanne. Ben’s comments are in quotes.

When exploring Qianmen, we stopped at one of the restaurant for lunch.

There is a side street called Dazhalan Jie along Qianmen. It is both Qianmen and Dhazalan that is the main shopping street here. The restaurant we went to is technically along Dazhalan Jie.

This is a famous Tianjin restaurant called Goubuli. In Chinese, the name Goubuli means “even the dog will ignore”. It does give you the notion that the food is so bad that even when you throw it to the dog, they won’t touch it. 🙂

Actually, the story many decades ago is that the proprietor of the Goubuli is a man who has a nickname called Gou (dog). His stall is so popular and he is so busy that he does not acknowledge you. Oh, the official English translation for Goubuli is Go-Believe! Fancy huh?

This is where I experienced a service that I never encounter before. We usually hang our jacket on the back of the chair. The server will remove the cover from the back of the chair to cover over your jacket. Perhaps this is a way to prevent any accidental spills onto your jacket?

Yeah, I never quite know why they do it. Maybe it is to prevent smell sticking to the jacket. Someone says that it is to prevent people from stealing stuff from your jacket.

The prices here are not cheap since it’s a touristy place. We picked one of their combo for their famous buns which comes with several buns in different flavours. They served the buns in individual steamer. Quite cute.

Actually the food here is super expensive for Beijing standard. So I recommend you come only for the novelty of eating in a Goubuli.

The buns were ok but nothing to shout about. It is regular steamed buns to me.

Being a southern Chinese, I am used to meat buns that are larger and you eat by picking up with your hands. I am referring to buns like char siu bao. However, I find that the buns in Beijing are a lot smaller and they usually eat this by picking it up with chopsticks.

The bun combo came with a small side dish of stir fry and millet porridge. The porridge served as a palate cleanser and it’s very bland.

Yeah, the porridge is very bland and close to being tasteless. So with porridge like these you need to eat it with something else.

We also ordered another dish that is served with wraps. There were some sausages like meat with soy wrap, chili pickles, cucumber sticks and a sauce that tasted like soy bean paste.

This is how it’s eaten; just like how one eats Peking roast duck.

The above meal costs RMB168 (about CAD28). It is not very cheap as Qian Men Dajie is a touristy place.