the Beijinger

Every year we ask you, the readers, for your opinion on the best in Beijing dining at the Reader Restaurant Awards. We value your opinion very highly but we thought you'd also value the opinion of the experts so we canvassed a select few. Here's part one of their picks (and a little introduction as to why we consider them to be experts). Bon appetit.

Here's a list of Dianping.com's active coupon discounts for some of the most-popular restaurants in Beijing with savings from Hatsune, Blue Frog, Flamme and more.

If you were one of the approximately 1,200 guests who came along at some point to our 2012 Reader Bar & Club Awards party at Sanlitun Soho on Saturday, we hope you had a good time. The numbers suggest that you must have - collectively, we managed to get through around 700 liters of beer, not to mention countless bottles of spirits and cans of wine spritzer. We're also pretty sure some of your memories of the day might be hazy at best, but isn't that what the photo galleries on this website are for?

China Music Valley Festival 2012 ended on Sunday with a sparse crowd staying to catch the headline act. UK pop diva Joss Stone looked decidedly less than impressed that revelers left in their droves as she gave the final performance of the three-day extravaganza in Pinggu district’s Yuyang International Ski Resort on Sunday night.

Three years ago, I taught at a building on the southeast corner of Guanghua Bridge. It was an ugly thing, with peeling maroon paint and dark, musty hallways. There was no air conditioning and in the summer it got so unbearable that sometimes we had to relocate to a nearby coffee shop.

I worked on the eighth floor. Between classes I’d look out the window by the water cooler and watch the construction of the new CCTV headquarters. People called it the Big Shorts but back then it looked more like a pair of assless chaps.

Affordable Art Beijing (AAB), the event that aims to both help new artists get a foothold in the industry and provide us non-millionaires with the opportunity to buy actual art, has reached its seventh year and is still going strong. The unconventional art fair will take place in 798 Space on June 2-3. Considering that China is now the world’s largest art market, this event's a good way to get in on the action.

The New Yorker is famed for its text – whether long form journalism or fiction, in today's Twitter world the magazine's continued commitment to text that takes time (for both writer and reader) is admirable. But under editor Tina Brown, it's also grown to have an eye for the visual. In an exhibit curated exclusively for the UCCA by Elisabeth Biondi, the magazine’s visual editor from 1996 to 2011, we get a chance to see the images that have come alongside the text.

(This is part 2 of 2 ... for the first batch of awards, see this post here)

If you've been lounging around at home all afternoon you might well have happened upon our first 2012 Reader Bar & Club award winners post. We could only let you know the winners in the first 18 categories at that stage - we had to save some excitement for the people who came down to the event itself - but now that all the award cats are out of their proverbial bags, we can fill you in on the second half of the winners' roll call. Here they come ...

(This is part 1 of 2 ... for the second batch of awards, see this post here)