A dusty road lined with automobile repair shops east of Chaoyang Park isn’t the kind of place you’d expect to find a trendy new Chinese barbeque restaurant like Spirited Away. More often than not, Chinese barbeque, or chuan’r, is eaten from street-side vendors who use hairdryers to whip up the heat of the coals. They are the kind of places where dining experiences are followed by morning-after gastrointestinal disturbances.

Spirited Away is going for something else entirely: modern, clean chuan’r. We arrived around midnight for a post-booze bite (the proper etiquette for eating chuan’r, after all) and sit down at one of the tidy, clean booths, under a bold mural of a monstrous green face.

To begin with, the endless pages of skewers on the menu baffle us. Can you really skewer bone marrow (4RMB) on a stick? Yes you can, in fact – the marrow melts across the tongue, leaving a trail of cumin in its wake. The charcoal-crusted peanuts (18RMB) prompt a quick Internet query on the phone: ‘Will eating charcoal kill you?’ No, as it turns out. They may look like little cannonballs, but they lack firepower in the flavor department.

We recommend that you choose the ‘Superb’ variety of skewers over the regular wherever possible. You’ll be glad you paid the extra cash for meat that is much more substantial and juicy rather than spindly and dry. The cheaper ‘beef with black pepper’ amounts to a middling combination of meat alternated with bell pepper, but an order of ‘pepper with meat’ from the Superb section charmingly conjures up the central Italian tradition of stuffed peppers. Continue on that tip and order some makeshift bruschetta – a few skewers of grilled white bread– to combine with an order of aubergine with meat.

Spirited Away may lack the charm of your local chuan’r guy and his hairdryer, but its youthful take on barbeque proves to be well worth the journey out east.

Address: Park Avenue Apartments, South Gate, Liulitun Zhong Jie, Chaoyang District 朝阳区六里屯中街公园大道小区南门

Source: timeoutbeijing.com