Capital Bites: Local Honey Sale, Salmon Ring, and Crazy Town

3sums has extended their RMB 88 all-you-can-eat deal to Saturdays from 6-10pm. Beyond free-flow of their mini-bites (burgers, pizzas and fries), Tsingdao will also be poured freely.

Up the way from both 3sums and Home Plate, there's a new spot called "Crazy Town American Food." Breakfast offerings are the standard eggs, bacon and toast. There are cheese fries and strawberry milkshakes, too. Sounds alright, yeah? Well, glean what you will from the name of the place and the fact that feedback from my colleague made me think it might be slightly better than this:

But I don't know how much that is saying.

Come mid to late fall, Park Avenue should be seeing the latest eatery from the crew behind LMPLus. The new outlet should run under the same name, but with a slightly different concept. Details to be unveiled at a later date.

If you need seaside refreshment at the tail end of summer, Vasco's at Hilton Beijing Wangfujing has started a new Mediterranean brunch on Sundays (11.30am-2.30pm, RMB 458+15%). It's "fizztastic," naturally, which means along with your Moroccan lamb tagine, saffron rice and summer paella, you'll get free-flow champagne. It's running until the end of September.

On what seems to be the most active strip in the Gongti/Sanlitun region right now, O Sole Mio has been closed and gutted on the Xingfucun Zhonglu restaurant row. There's a sign posted for a place by the name of La Tavernita which, from the Chinese translation, looks to be Spanish cuisine.

Chef Billy from Chef Too has started a group buy salmon ring. If that sounds illicit, it's not. Imported directly from Norway, the fish can be ordered on the weekend (no later than Monday) and picked up from Chef Too between 2-6pm that Wednesday.

Since it's a group buy scheme, prices should be about half of what you would pay retail at Jenny Lou's or BHG with prices hovering around RMB 97 per kg (compared to RMB 320 at a retail outlet). Email Chef Billy for more details and to place orders.

To finish on a sweet and natural note, sustainable lifestyles organization We Impact has launched "Beejing organic honey." The honey is produced by local urban beekeepers in keeping with fair trade principles. There are only 30 pots of the first batch, so if sustainability and exclusivity are your thing, then this is an ideal combination of the two. Oh, there's a bit of charity, too. The price for a pot (700g) is RMB 98, and ten percent of that will go towards buying hives in an effort to save threatened bee populations.
Email here to order.

Photo: Iain Shaw