Buying Business Travel editor Paul Revel finds sanctuary in a German beer hall – in deepest China
After various adventures with local food, including the famous ‘hotpot’ – dark stew brimming with fiery red chillies and peppercorns – and struggling with chopsticks to remove flesh from bony alien fish, I found sanctuary in the wood-panelled beer hall at the sparkling new Kempinski hotel in Chongqing.
The Paulaner Bräuhaus bar and restaurant is a marked contrast to the five-star hotel’s acres of polished marble, expensive artworks, and lotus flowers floating in the gleaming black stream that surrounds the elegant lobby tea-lounge. The Paulaner offers hefty steins of lager and dark beer from the onsite microbrewery – shiny copper and steel fermenting tanks, pipes and valves form part of the décor, as does the scent of yeast and hops.
A multinational and good-looking rock’n’roll band, Peachy, play crowd-pleasing standards to a small but lively audience of locals and international visitors. They’re very good, but don’t take themselves too seriously: they’ll do a bluesy ‘happy birthday’ when required, and even comic Benny Hill-esque musical accompaniment to guests in a beer-chugging race. Bayern Munich football games are screened, and whenever the ‘home-team’ score, there’s a beer on the house for everyone. And for a jet-lagged chopstick’n’chilli-phobe like me, there are comforting and tasty wurst platters, sauerkraut and Wienner-Schitzel.
However, in defence of Chinese cuisine, I must add that I also stayed in the equally glamorous and opulent Hyatt Regency (opened in August 2012), on Paradise Walk in the Jiangbei central business district. The Yu Yue Chines restaurant has a new head chef, who specialises in Sichuan and Cantonese cuisine. He does wonderful things with goose, abalone, suckling pig – even jellyfish, and his paper-thin transclucent crispy beef is memorable. Sweetcorn soup sounds rather innocuous, but somehow he makes it sublime; crystal clear and fragrant.
Chongqing snapshots
- Taxis can be a hair-raising experience. I gave one cabbie three separate pieces of paper with the address of my destination written in Chinese, including a google-equivalent map with the route – to a well-known five-star hotel, the Jin Jiang Oriental. He spent the whole time bellowing at me, looking perplexedly at the various bits of paper, either shouting down the phone or looking things up on it in his lap, while we hurtled along the traffic-choked multi-lane highways. He blasted the horn constantly, but barely looked up to weave his 20-year-old rust-bucket across the lanes, narrowly missing the expensive hardware surrounding us – Range Rovers, Mercs and Porsches abounded. There were no seatbelts in the back of my cab. Just when I was convinced the driver couldn’t find his own arse with a torch and compass, the hotel hoved into view. We both smiled in relief. The only redeeming features of Chongqing cabs are that they are very cheap, they print off receipts and don’t try to rip you off (unlike an official taxi at Berlin’s Tegel airport at ITB this year).
- The Hyatt and Kempinski both have large, very well-equipped gyms and huge indoor pools – the locals don’t seem keen on sunbathing: umbrellas up on the streets can equally mean sunshine or rain.
- Private dining rooms are popular here – the big five-star hotels I visited had up to 18 lavishly appointed private dining rooms attached to their Chinese restaurants, with large circular tables, ideal for groups and meetings for up to 20 guests.
- The 12th-century Dazu rock carvings (pictured) are incredible to behold, and miraculously well-preserved despite centuries of weather and wars, and eminently deserving of their UNESCO World Heritage status. The downside is the three-hour drive each way from the city, a lot of it through congested urban sprawl.
- I travelled to Chongqing with Finnair, after the carrier held a press conference at its hub airport in Helsinki. Read the conference report here
hyatt.com
kempinski.com
finnair.com