2FulFill Restaurant Fulfills Our Healthiest Desires With Delicious and Sizeable Salads

Recently opened in the basement of Sanlitun Soho, opposite Café Flatwhite in what formerly housed Moment Café and their delicious sandwiches, 2FulFill Restaurant isn’t much to look at from outside. Frankly, you might even miss it, possibly mistaking it for some kind of KTV-like café. Perhaps my inner vegetarian pulled me in, or maybe I was feeling nostalgic for the hearty pasta of Moment Café, maybe the heavy rain made me crave the flowers of springtime. Whatever the reason, I walked in.

You can tell that they put a lot of effort on the decor – an open kitchen is separated from the dining area by glass, a wall with color-changing neon lights glows purple, pink and green behind some fake bamboo, café tables with comfortable chairs in tiffany green dot the floor, another wall is covered with green plastic plants and hydrangea … Ok, we get it. It's all so over-the-top, it looks more like the setting for something like the annual Vanity Fair Oscar Party, rather than a place to grab a quick bite in a mall basement.

It’s not exactly a place that would seem to be in a serious foodie's wheelhouse. But we changed our minds when we saw the menu: There are a dozen salads here (RMB 38-78), a handful of pastas (RMB 38-48), and a dozen rice dishes (RMB 28-58). Amazingly, all items on the menu display the dish's nutrition information, including the amounts of carbohydrates, protein, fat, and calories, making it a good option for calorie counters.

Perhaps that nutrition information made us feel guilty, because we ended up looking at the salads. Hesitating which one to choose, the waitress highly recommended the chicken breast salad (RMB 58) with garlic bread. Turns out we are easily influenced by passionate people. The salad bowl was large and colorful, like a garden in mid-summer – and like the restaurant's green and flowery decor – with abundant chicken breast, green beans, pink dragon fruit, mashed potatoes, corn, lettuce, arugula, kidney beans, red and yellow bell pepper, walnuts, and raisins. To make it even more tempting, there were also dried mango chips, dried radish, and dried okra (adios, 7-Eleven). The salad was paired with sesame sauce and another creamy sauce for the juicy chicken breast. To be honest, we couldn’t even finish the bowl. What is this, magic? Feeling "stuffed" after a salad is something akin to blasphemy. At just, 422 calories, it didn’t fail us.

Aside from salads and pastas, you could still be healthy with roasted sole (RMB 58), fried tilapia (RMB 46), smoked salmon (RMB 88), chicken wings (RMB 56), and steak (RMB 128-198). To celebrate their opening, they are currently selling four of their salads at a special price of RMB 38-52 on weekdays. Just ignore the decor and walk in with your head held high. You'll like it if you are a fan of singer Wanting Qu, who also dated Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson. Fine, I accept that we are not the tabloids, but they play Wanting’s songs all the time, which made the place feel quite welcoming.

Time to confess: many a time when I have a salad for dinner, looking at sad and soggy lettuce in the small portion box, I start to question healthy ambitions. “Life is so short, why am I torturing myself like this?” Compared to those moments, I would say salads at 2FulFill Restaurant are humane – the colorful and delicious bowls will help you get through the upcoming frigid winter with maybe slightly less winter weight to lose come next year's bikini season.

2FulFill Restaurant
Daily 10am-10pm. B1, B1-525, BLDG 5, Sanlitun Soho, Chaoyang District (6592 7800)
成全轻食：朝阳区三里屯soho5号商场b1层b1-525号

More stories by this author here.

Email: tracywang@thebeijinger.com
Twitter: @flyingfigure
Instagram: @flyingfigure

Photos: Tracy Wang