Catch sight of a looping trail of red neon on any Beijing street and odds are it’ll be spelling out chuan’r. The Chinese character for “food on a stick” (串) is Beijing’s favourite xiangxing wenzi – a character that resembles its meaning. In this case, skewered sustenance. Like Gotham City’s bat symbol, the chuan’r sign is a call to arms for hungry Beijingers.

What's your first memory of China? Mine, strangely, concerns scorpions. Fresh off the plane, I bowled up to my hostel (somewhere near Xinjiekou) and met an investment banker from Birmingham who invited me to accompany him to Wangfujing Snack Street. I did. I ate a scorpion. The jet-lag hit. I barfed. It was horrible. I wanted to go home. That was more than three years ago, and I've never been back... until now.

This 24-hour chuan’r dive has a drinks selection that would cause El Nido to do a drunken double-take. But when you discover it’s run by the same peeps as the Paradise CVS liquor store around the corner, it all makes sense. The food is clearly designed to soak up excess booze.

What long-awaited cheap-chic brand is finally debuting in Beijing early next year? We’ll give you a hint: They’ve been sued over 50 times for copyright infringement. (We wonder what’s taken them so long? Seems like they’d fit right in here. Heh.)

How long has it been since you ate something really good, something new? Something revelatory? Something that changed your opinion about, oh, raw tomatoes, or fried oysters, or how x food is “supposed” to taste? If it’s been awhile since you’ve had a moment of food "wow," and you’ve exhausted all your old food haunts, we’ve got a few new eats for you to investigate. And if you remember your last food "wow", give us a shout in the comments. I'm still waiting for someone to explain the appeal of douzhi to me.