Mutton Shuanrou at Manfulou in Beijing

When my local team asked me what I wanted to eat for dinner, I suggested a hotpot chain called Little Sheep, in part simply because I kept reading about them in the news (basically, the owner of Taco Bell and KFC now owns this Chinese chain, and it was caught up in a scandal around the quality of its meat). The team retorted back that Little Sheep wasn't any good, and that it was more famous overseas than it was in China itself. So instead they took me here (38 Dianmennei Street, 6403-0992), an ornately decorated place in the middle of the city.

This was what they called shuanrou, or literally boiled meat, which in this case was mutton. When it was described like that, I thought it was going to be like that sour one that I once had in Taipei, but this wasn't sour at all - it was brewed from beef bones, if I heard it correctly, and all done with individual pots. The mutton included both machine-sliced frozen meat as well as some special ones that were hand-cut from fresh meat. Frankly I preferred the former given that it was sliced paper thin.