Tasty treats for Chinese New Year

Braised beef with cigu, at Ji Family Banquet. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Some new dishes worth trying are hairtail meatball, crispy sour-and-sweet "squirrel" fish, and brown-braised pork with hawthorn fruit to degrease it. A braised beef with cigu is also interesting. Cigu is arrowhead, a water plant, or Sagittaria sagittifolia. It has a soft and floury taste.

The restaurant is holding Chinese traditional medicine lectures for regular customers. It hopes to reflect a healthy belief in its cuisine.

Another refined Beijing-style eatery worth trying is Hua's Fine Dining Restaurant at Wangfujing. Built in courtyard style, the eatery is a refined version of the brand name's famous branch on Guijie food street.

When it was first established on Guijie, the restaurant made a fortune by offering spicy and tongue-numbing crayfish. But its Wangfujing branch has been upgraded into an eatery proffering a mixture of popular Beijing, Sichuan and Cantonese dishes.

When it comes to Beijing cuisine, Peking roast duck is a must. Hua's duck is roasted with fruit wood and tastes as good as any specialized roast duck restaurant in town. But the sauces it offers are different - a traditional brown sauce with a bit of mustard, a sour-and-spicy sauce, and a sour-and-sweet fruit jam.

The restaurant does not serve shallots with the duck because it can bring an odor to the mouth. Instead they present hawthorn fruit jelly, slices of pineapple and Hami melon and pancakes.