At the appointed time and place, Chang introduced herself and delivered the good news that our tour would just be the three of us. After checking our tolerance for foods and chilli, and giving us a brief overview of the tour, including a warning to give timely notice so she could locate 5 star facilities if required, she swept us through her tour of the foods of Beijing houtongs, starting with hotpot and beer. 
Chang was a wonderful host and guide, but we soon we abandoned the idea that she was there to provide information in a one way transaction, and three of us began talking like old friends who knew nothing about each other.
We ate cold sliced pork in garlic sauce and two kinds of dumplings, and already I started to feel the weight of responsibility upon us to consume vast quantities of food. Chang guided us by saying that Confucianism suggests you should only eat until you’re 70% full, but to ignore that tonight because we would be tasting 15 dishes over 3 stops. If we especially liked something we should eat a lot of it, for fear we may not encounter it again.
Wandering to the next stop, Chang gave us pots of sweet yogurt, unchanged after my first experience of it 35 years ago, to sip as we swigged our beers. I claimed the pots as momentos.
We stopped briefly for soy flour pancakes from a window on the street, hot off the griddle, with crunchy fried wanton skin filling and sticky hoi sin sauce, and then to the next restaurant. I was sure Chang said the place was popular with ranchers, but figured I had misheard. Surely there weren’t donkey ranchers in Beijing?
This place was so popular, we got the donkey burgers to go and in the next restaurant we sat and added cucumber salad to the donkey meat which was wrapped in flaky chewy fried bread.
Chang brought us a bowl, mercifully to share, of fat bouncy biang biang noodles. She described the toppings: spices, tomatoes, pork, and mixed it into a sauce and told us to dig in. Biang biang noodles are long and slippery and getting them into the bowl was a challenge solved by chopstick collaboration. Biang biang noodles: the noodles so nice an academic created the most complicated character in Chinese in exchange for a lifetime supply.
Here, Chang started warning us about the proprietor of the next restaurant, who had a minimum order and a clean plate policy for his chuar grilled chicken wings. We still had a mountain to climb.
In a house converted to a restaurant, with birds in cages and dogs roaming for scraps we were served a platter of skewered chicken wings in four levels of heat. I started with the mildest, seasoned with cumin and coriander seed and secret spices, and by the time I had sampled the hottest wings, I was defeated. 8 wings. 4 skewers. Poor show.
We drank a fruity baijiu, chased by plum juice and beer. By now we were very relaxed and toasted again and again and our conversation flowed like the beer. Once we figured out we could resolve the insult to the chef by getting our uneaten wings to go (thanks for taking that hit, Chang), we were out in the street for our next adventure, agreeing how lucky we were for fate to have put together such a compatible team.
Sarah Bonnar 