Shanshi: Beijing's Quirkiest (And Spiciest) Chuan'r Joint
By Noelle Mateer
If you haven’t had a strange dining experience lately, you’re doing Beijing all wrong.
Instead, you may have seen Shanshi’s bizarre outer facade while drunkenly stumbling home from Slow Boat’s Sanlitun taproom, or worse, Hai Di Lao. It’s a wall painted to look like a bookshelf, sandwiched between two grubby fast-food restaurants. The no-real-door gimmick is pretentious when it comes to cocktail bars, but in the case of joints hawking chuan’r, it’s delightfully quirky. And that’s exactly what Shanshi is – a chaotic, odorous purveyor of spicy dips of the highest order.
Slide open the ‘bookcase,’ and you’ll enter a world of fiery delights. Pick from all manner of snacks on sticks, including tofu, chicken wings, mushrooms and, of course, innards and offal (this is the good stuff, folks). Your server will then cook them in the spiciest sauce you’ve ever tasted – we guarantee you, or your money back*– and then serve them to you, swimming in a large metal bowl of red liquid. It’s the most beautiful assault on your senses, a symphony of violence on your tastebuds. To use a cliche, it hurts so good.
Side dishes include spicy cucumbers, spicy eggs and spicy brains. Again, if you haven’t eaten brains yet, you’re doing Beijing wrong. A fridge of beers (both domestic and imported) and Arctic Ocean is there for you if you need help washing it down, anyway.
The reigning spicy-chuan’r queen of Beijing is the ferociously popular Sichuan restaurant and woman Zhang Mama. But we think Shanshi could be a threat to her throne. If only its customers could find it.
*Fooled ya, this magazine is free.
Daily, 11am-9.30pm, at the intersection of Gongti Nanlu and Dongdaqiao Xijie, Chaoyang 朝阳区工体南路与东大桥斜街交口(6500 0203)
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