The Taste of Home

Like many other diners, Lifestyle found the restaurant named "Kai Xiao Zao Xiang Xia Cai" through a microblog in Baiziwan. As we entered a small door and walked upstairs along the creaky wood staircases, the space suddenly became spacious, with several classic style wooden tables and chairs.

The two-story restaurant has 80 seats, including two private rooms, and the chairs were used in the national council room during the Republic of China (1912-1949). If you look up, the walls are covered with strange antiques: old clocks, cameras, radios and black-and-white televisions. There's even a kettle used during the Normandy Landing, by the US army.

Owner Jin Pengyuan, a local Beijinger who lives nearby, said the restaurant serves home-style dishes from Hunan because the chefs are from the same village (as the table number shows, Longtang village) of Hunan and the executive chef used to be the head of the village and serve village banquets for weddings and funerals. Every week, the chefs and owners develop new dishes and put them up on the walls, canceling the ones that aren't popular enough. Since opening, it has added more than 40 dishes to make the number available to exceed 100.

Lifestyle tried two: The sautéed beef was quite tender and fragrant, with a bright color and intense flavor; the steamed pork is fatty but not greasy, and the taro underneath is not to be missed - it's soft and sweet and packs a sensational pork-flavored punch. It was an ordinary Wednesday, but half of the first floor was full by 1:30 pm. Liu Dou, 22, a white-collar worker, told Lifestyle, "I came with a Hunan colleague who said things are really typical Hunan tastes. I love the braised carp best, it was fresh and tender."

Jin told Lifestyle that he opened the restaurant not to make money, but to satisfy his own tastes and to see if restaurants with good faith can survive, as nowadays many restaurants use unhealthy materials. "Consumers can eat healthy and delicious food like at home - it's our purpose. We don't use MSG or chicken powder; we buy fresh vegetables every day; we buy beef and mutton from Niujie, Beijing's largest Muslim area; fish heads and bullfrogs are made in limited quantities each day for freshness."

Another owner, A San, even posted on his microblog showing all the details from purchasing pork to smoking hams and from buying fresh bean strings to getting the dried ones on the rooftop with photos. Besides, the diced chili peppers are diced from fresh peppers by the chefs. "We hope the restaurant can have the same good tastes and health like home."