I wish someone who knew how to run a bar would buy this place.

The Nanluguoxiao branch has to be one of the biggest wastes of an excellent space under the sun. Especially under the sun.

If you want to sit outside, under the sun, of a pleasant afternoon, then you might as well go to your local kindergarten. At least if they were Chinese kids they might be slightly less offensive, but they are not. They are the vile spawn of mixed marriages – one previously unmarriageable refugee from each culture – and therefore as loud and entitled as any child ever was. Can I just explain something to these so-called parents? When you have children, you have abdicated your right to go to the pub for 16 years, unless you have an ayi to leave your kids with AT HOME.

It is equally impossible to sit inside. At one end of the bar is an ever-changing but never varying collection of guys who can’t afford a haircut but who can afford to seek out expensive designer clothes, specially made to resemble those from a thrift shop. These guys will shout constantly at the bar staff, who they foolishly believe to be their friends and interested in what they have to say, in uncompromisingly loud, brash, boorish Chinese which bears no similarity to any locution ever engaged in by any Chinese person sufficiently well-educated to be bilingual. They are migrant workers and they look and sound exactly like it, mostly from the States or Spain, with the educational level and manners of every other migrant worker in town. Does anyone want to listen to the noise these assholes make? For sure not the bar staff, for sure not the other customers; must be themselves!

At the other end of the bar is a blackboard describing, or at least naming, the 23 varieties of low quality home-brew on offer, all recipients of awards by the Beijing Society of Low Quality Home Brewers. In front of this board will stand “Sunday Drinkers” asking loud questions about the beers, with no real knowledge or preferences on the matter, but who know that a blackboard of home brew needs to have questions asked about it for it to have any value at all. They use words they do not understand or care about and receive entirely made up responses from a bar staff who know less than even they. The bar staff have been given some training, obviously, because they do not simply say, “It tastes like low quality home brew,” in response to every inquiry.

Then the menu! Well, well, well. Well… One of the main reasons for going out is not to have to fight a battle-royale with those people who answer the phones and take food delivery orders. I don’t want to have to fumble around with seven different menus. Is it not possible to simply assemble an in house menu from these burger pushers and have someone like a waiter call up? You know, a list of ten tried and tested food items chosen and recommended by the owners of the establishment which I can order from a member of staff and have delivered to my table? Is that too much to ask? I don’t care whether it comes on a silver salver, on the back of a bike or by camel train, but I am know I am not interested, not the least bit interested in where it comes from or how it got there.

And is there any advantage to making your beer garden look like a 1960s scrap yard in Plumstead? Any good reason not to simply throw away all this trash and sweep it once a day?

I wish someone who knew how to run a bar would buy this place.