Peter_N-H

$20 is a lot of money, and brings you an innumerable number of choices in Beijing. It would be hard to know where to begin, and indeed the number of restaurants where you simply wouldn't be able to eat everything you were given for that amount of money equally innumerable.

A combination of guide books and the websites of local listings magazines (e.g. The Beijinger, City Weekend) will suggest a large number of places at the $20 end, and some below that. But wandering at random into anywhere away from expat ghettos isn't much of a risk, except that if you're wanting Sichuan dishes you'll want a Sichuan restaurant. They'll serve them to you in a Cantonese restaurant but not in forms any Sichuanese would recognise. There's no such thing as 'Chinese' food in the form of the menus (or indeed the glop) mostly served in the West (well, except nearly as bad in a few tourist-targeting places), but a number of regional cooking schools. If you want Beijing dishes you go to a specialist, Shanxi dishes to a Shanxi restaurant, hotpot to a hotpot restaurant and so on. Jiachang cai (home cooking) restaurants have a basic menu of approachable dishes, however, and are typically very cheap.

But for Beijing all the help you need with what are the key dishes from each cooking school, complete with the characters for their names, photographs of them, and reviews of restaurants from each school with recommended dishes, at a variety of price ranges, can be found in 'Beijing Eats' by Eileen Wen Mooney, and which can be found on sale in a number of bookshops and other locations around Beijing.

See Beijing Eats, and more broadly on food in Beijing in general, the author's blog Eileen Eats

Peter N-H
China