New website about Chinese food in Beijing

[wiley]

Howdy folks,

I just put up the first version of what I hope can be a pretty cool project, documenting Chinese food in Beijing and sharing that information with the community. Without further ado:

chinabites.com

Since I'm just getting started, I'd love to get feedback from the community about the site, what you'd like to see, what works, what doesn't, etc. Since I just launched I don't have a huge amount of content, but that should be increasing steadily over the next several months.

Thanks for your thoughts and I hope everyone enjoy's the site!

Wiley

[Luobot]

Ah, my favorite subject.

You might want to turn chinabites.com into chinabites.com (i.e., make it a link in your post for convenience).

I'm not sure if you've already planned to do this and are awaiting more content, but on the site, I'd like to see customer reviews of individual dishes as well as of the restaurant as a whole. If you have a tally of customer ratings then that will make it more interesting.

Good luck with it.

[wiley]

Thanks much for the link and the feature suggestion. User comments and reviews are definetly in the plan, just trying to find a basic display format that works and get a bit of content up there first.

[liuzhou]

Looks promising. Although you still have some errors.

Try http://www.chinabites.com/city/beijing/sichuanese/plate-full-of-fragrance/plate-full-of-fragrance/

BTW, Eggplant in Abalone Sauce (鲍汁烧南茄) is NOT vegetarian. Abalone is seafood.

[wiley]

Right, so, full disclosure:

I did know that abalone is expensive seafood, listing the abalone sauce eggplant as vegetarian was a guess, and not good a good guess to make, I should be more sure of things before I post them. I guess my assumption was that the title "abaolone" might have been fanciful, much as:

鱼香茄子

does not actually contain any fish products (or smell even remotely like fish)

I'll ask next time I'm at the restaurant. Thanks for the feedback!

[DrinkDrankDrunk]

Nice, I'll be sure to check out all the eye candy.

Spicy tuna rolls for 12 RMB?! Where do I sign up?

[cdn_in_bj]

A lot of so-called "vegetarian" dishes here are not really vegetarian by western standards, they may contain seafood ("but it isn't meat!"), oyster sauce, chicken stock, etc. You really have to be careful here, or just not worry about it and become a temporary non-vegatarian.

[wiley]

Yeah, I'm actually writing up a little blog entry about eatin' vegetarian in Beijing. I'll post it to this thread when I'm done with it. Thanks for the feedback everyone!