Day 46 in Beijing

The 30th of December 2009, Wednesday.

Today is such a windy cold day. It's quite alright to just sit inside the office where the air conditioning is on and the room is always kept at around 18 celsius degrees. But once you walk out of the building, OMG, the wind is so strong and cold that it can almost cut open my skin and give me the worst chilll down the spine. Eeek!

Tonight I had dinner with a colleague of mine at the Jiamao Shopping Centre, the huge shopping centre outside of the Xizhimen train station exit. I've been there once last week for Jordan Chong's birthday dinner (the scary turtles...) and I was really excited to see Honeymoon, the famous HK dessert shop chain inside Jiamao. So today, I've asked to go there for dinner and enjoy some real nice dessert =)

We had dinner at Chamate, 一茶一坐. This is a chain restaurant started in 2001 from Shanghai and it focuses on expanding the Chinese tea culture. There is more than 80 outlets now around the country and it's a very famous, casual, light and easy restaurant that focuses on providing the most natural ingredients and flavours to their customers. I remember Dianna told me once that she really likes Chamate, and today I finally understand why.

The prices in Chamate is about average high, a full meal can be between 25-50RMB per person. The food in Chamate is rather healthy (compared to a lot of other restaurants) given that most of the dishes are boiled or steamed, and more vegies than meat. Maybe it was already too late by the time we sat down at the restaurant (and that the restaurant is still FULL of customers) my top two choices were all sold out. Eventually I fixed on ordering a pot of vegies and mushrooms. It's quite Japanese style with sweet soup, boiled vegies, slices of meat, and lots of mushrooms. I really like it~ but I hate it how my camera lost all the photos!! RA!!!

Honeymoon is on the top of my recommendations list. It's soooo good! I ordered the same dessert: fresh mango with sago and sweet glutinous black rice. It's so good, it's a perfect combination of all the ingredients, refreshing, the right degrees of sweetness, a little chill, a little soft, mmmmm so good. Anyone who visits China or Hong Kong must try Honeymoon dessert!!