Beijing's expat community attracts some of the world's best and brightest minds, but that doesn't mean their talents are always put to good use. Colin Friedman has seen this time and again while working as the CEO of his FCGroup, (which, among other things, organizes industry themed networking events for foreigners and Chinese to meet and make connections). 

This year our 2015 Reader Restaurant Awards have four personality-based categories: Best Chef, Best Manager, Restaurant Personality of the Year, and Food Entrepreneur of the Year. During the voting period that runs through March 8, we’re profiling a few of this year’s crop of nominees.

This time around we present Aitor Olabegoya, executive chef at Migas and nominee in the Best Chef category.

[Update 3/11: Chinese news magazine Caixin is hosting the film locally. Click here.

[Update 3/7: local hosting of this documentary has now been scrubbed from the internet, see update here]

Good morning Beijing! Today is Tuesday, March 3, 2015.

Weather forecast: Partly sunny. Today's high will be 4℃, low of -6℃.

License plate restrictions: 4 and 9.
 

The Event You Shouldn't Miss Today Is:

NCAA Basketball Tournament

This year our 2015 Reader Restaurant Awards have four personality-based categories: Best Chef, Best Manager, Restaurant Personality of the Year, and Food Entrepreneur of the Year. During the voting period that runs through March 8, we’re profiling a few of this year’s crop of nominees.

The Friday March 6 Kawabata Makoto and KK Null show has been cancelled. Reasons provided are basically thus: the government just remembered that Makoto is a member of Acid Mothers Temple, a "banned band", and also happens to love tastefully integrating boobies in his album artwork, a big no-no.

Massachusetts hardcore band Bane, who were billed to play on Saturday (Mar 7) at Mao Livehouse, have also had to cancel their show as they didn’t get their visas done in time. Rookie error.

This year our 2015 Reader Restaurant Awards have four personality-based categories: Best Chef, Best Manager, Restaurant Personality of the Year, and Food Entrepreneur of the Year. During the voting period that runs through March 8, we’re profiling a few of this year’s crop of nominees.

After last summer's ice bucket challenge, it seems that all of us are going to have to start pouring buckets of sand on ourselves. Employees at a scenic spot in Sichuan province did exactly that, as they bathed in (dirty) sand in order to raise awareness for the environment, ecns.cn reports. No thanks.

If you are getting tired of the usual run around of pizza-burgers-salads that seems to dominate the Beijing food scene these days (Chinese cuisine excepted of course), then you might want to take a trip down to the area around Alien Street Market (Yabao Lu).

“Coffee is simple. You see everyone (in Beijing) with all this technology and they charge 10 bucks because of it, and people buy it. Coffee isn’t meant to be this complicated.”