Bodhi-Sake -- veg restaurant in BJ

I went for two of my favourite hobbies yesterday, one was tango but I'll tell you of the second, trying out new vegetarian restaurants. This one is near Taoranting park, relatively close to the Temple of Heaven, so after touring either of the places you might want to pay a visit. I heard about the place from China Daily, their review is here.

The atmosphere in this restaurant is really calm and peaceful, and I found it great to eat outside in the courtyards of the former monastery. On colder or rainy (who am I kidding, it never rains in Beijing!) days you might want to eat indoors in one of the many buildings. Some of the buildings farther back work as temples with Buddha statues one can pray at.

The menu was extensive and contained a variety of mock meat dishes as well as proper vegetable dishes. It was bilingual (Chinese and English) and even had descriptions of the foods and their health effects in both languages, as well as pictures of many of the dishes. This was also far better than the usual Chinglish, the English descriptions were at least mostly proper language. We went for a fried "fish" which was delicious and had some sea flavour due to being wrapped in seaweed; an interesting and absolutely heavenly mushroom dish with a Tibetan sauce that the staff verified was vegan, as well as noodles is soybean sauce which turned out to be quite necessary as the portion sizes were pretty small. The prices were also slightly higher than in most vegetarian restaurants in Beijing, not to speak of the regular restaurants, but the food was totally worth the price! The mushroom dish came with an amazing pagoda decoration made of a carrot, it just looked deli so I had to eat it which raised a bunch of smiles and laughter from the staff as it was supposed to be just decoration and not to be eaten. But why would good food be wasted, eh? :-)

Luckily they were also celebrating Buddha's birthday, and therefore every table was given a wish tablet that could be hung on a 400-year-old tree at the back of the restaurant. Usually one has to pay for it. This tree is supposed to bring blessings in bringing people together in love, so I made sure I wrote a related wish... in Finnish, surely the Buddha understands all languages. They gave people some literature to go with, I haven't really even tried to read through what it was, all in Chinese of course.

This is certainly one of the better vegetarian restaurants in Beijing and definitely worth another visit!