Nor the Virtual Real Estate

How do you choose a restaurant in a megapolis?  If you’re in New York and are under a certain age, you may use Yelp. If you’re here in China, you turn to Dianping.  I don’t really use either and have never felt the need to.  But after last night, it is clear that I need to evolve.  The utility of turning to civic magazines, which had worked well enough since the 80’s when I relied on the Village Voice, appears to be, in Beijing at least, running its course.

Beijing’s long had some staple weekly English weekly magazines.  There is the British chain Time Out and the old City Edition founded by back in the late nineties and they always used to have a reasonably rich rendering of different cuisines.  The original hipper-than-thou rag was Beijing Scene, which was salty and authentic for its day, till the editor Scott was bundled up and thrown out of the country at the end of the last millennium. But whatever the magazine, one of the basic services on line or in the free print version was a list of restaurants: what’s new, what’s closed and what is?   In Beijing, you have every cuisine from across the civilization, well represented here.  The central government attracts concentrations of people from every province and every country.   We have a nearly infinite array of possibilities and seemingly no intelligent way to categorize it.

A friend had written.  He was in town and we were going to take out for dinner.  I checked the Time Out Beijing and the City Weekend websites.  Someone has clearly made the editorial decision that listing out cuisines in detail beyond “Best Beijing Duck” and “Best Pizza” is not worth the time nor virtual real estate to maintain.  There were a few new reviews.  Nothing seemed particularly interesting.  Can we evaluate a few different Guizhou restaurants, per chance?  What’s the final word on Dongbei Cai in the capital these days?  The restaurants all still exist.  English speakers are still interested.  But someone else, like Dianping must it seems, be filling the gap.  We ended up going back to an old favorite.   Exploration proved to be too much work.

I’ve looked and there is no shortage of listings for how to get the most out of Dianping.  Evolution is always a struggle.  And the old fave we headed to, pretty great, as usual.  Next time then.