We’d decided, this being our first day, and it being late in the afternoon, to take it easy and find a suitable place to eat, with the intention of having an early night.

The restaurant we chose, with the help of the concierge, appeared to be a five minute walk from the hotel, according to the map we’d been given by the receptionist. In reality this turned out to be about 45 minutes; this included time getting slightly lost due to vague hand directions that seem endemic in Beijing.

When we first arrived we were sure our concierge had sent us to some tourist-trap that his friend owned. He had assures us the restaurant offered “vegetables, no meat”, and he was right: everything on the menu was veggie or vegan. (We later found out the establishment was situated right outside The Forbidden City, which explains its tourist look, though on further reflection nearly all the half-decent looking places had an outer facade of tackiness. I suppose this is just the style in Beijing.)

The first ten minutes were amongst the most uncomfortable we’d ever spent in our dining careers. We were the only customers there, and were immediately encircled by 6 or 7 staff, ready to be there for our merest whim. The unwritten rule of “unseen attendance” simply does not exist here.

The food was very nice, well presented, original and reasonably priced. We left with enough food in our stomachs for the journey home; a journey home which took longer than the journey there, because of an untraversable stretch of water that meant our walking a fair distance in the opposite direction to that which we wanted; a journey home which took in Tiananmen Square, and pompous building after pompous building stretched along a road that would have looked like Les Champs Elysee if Les Champs Elysee had eaten all its spinach as a child.