Living the Dream: Beijing Edition: The Dream of all "Noodle Dreams"!

They prepare a great spread and are kid friendly at DinTaiFeng. They even have a play room.

Now that we've been in Beijing a few weeks we've made our rounds through some of the local spots for Niu Rou Mian (Beef Noodle Soup), one of Karen's favorites, and some of the other local cuisine. I've never been a picky eater but our daughter is not the meat eater I'd hoped for and our soon to be two-year old son is surprisingly picky at times. Of course we were very interested to see how these first few weeks would go in respect to meal time.

We recommend getting one of these shirt bibs for your toddlers. Kids and Chinese food is like kids and spaghetti. It's going everywhere. After we saw a few Chinese kids wearing these we realized we should do as the locals do.

"You go first".

Karen and her Niu Rou Mian.

Jacob enjoying some fried noodles with dried fried green beans and shredded pork (Rou Si Chao Mian).

Jacob at "Blue Frog" taking a break from the Chinese cuisine and enjoying some western delicacies.

For anyone coming to Beijing with children it's a good idea to get familiar with some of your local options right away. There are plenty of kid friendly western options and though the local Chinese restaurants don't typically carry a children's western style menu they are very willing to accomodate the kiddos.

Checking out what else they have at one of our favorite noodle spots.

I decided to try a few things.

No Reservations.

...and of course a little something to wash it down with.

The expat hang-outs have plenty of higher priced western style burger and mac n' cheese joints that will surely please the kids. However, if your children like noodles and mores specifically the local noodles, then almost any local restaurant will have a non-spicy noodle dish that they will enjoy. You'll have to experiment a little but don't give up on the local cuisine so quickly. We were surprised when we recently went to a famous Beijing restaurant (DinTaiFeng) known for its meat dumplings (xiaolongbao). They were also voted number one for family friendly restaurant in Beijing Kids Magazine. While we were there we also ordered a braised duck dish which our two-year old absolutely enjoyed. He ate it like he was famished. He was doing so well that we decided to leave it to him to finish off and he did. It must have been a quarter of a whole duck.

Jacob loving some duck.

Concentration is key.

Isabelle is becoming quite proficient with her chopsticks.

We've been here almost a month and we've eaten at local spots (not including breakfast since the hotel provides that each morning) about 75 percent of the time. As is true with most things in Beijing the local spots (non-western/non-commercialized) are certainly much more inexpensive and offer an opportunity to take advantage of the localized economy. If you frequent some of the more commercialized areas that draw a larger expat crowd you may find your cost of living easily reaching or surpassing that of what you may have experienced in the States.