What is TaoTie (饕餮) you ask? Is it mythical beast capable of swallowing you whole? A fierce and cruel person? A voracious eater? A gourmand? Well, it’s all of those things. But now, TaoTie is Laonei’s fresh look into fine dining in Beijing. We’re not talking about the old expat standby’s like Kro’s Nest or The Tree (don’t get me wrong…these are both great places). But we are more interested in authentic, healthy, clean, and relatively cheap Chinese food that most expats aren’t aware even existed. And it can be quite hard to find a restaurant that fits all the criteria. So we have scoured the streets to find the best of the best.

There are strict requirements for a local restaurant to be chosen for TaoTie; the food has to be exceptionally good and offer something that you can’t find at just any run-of-the-mill restaurant. Before we shoot a TaoTie episode, we sample a wide variety of dishes to make sure they are up to our 好吃/不贵 standards.So keep your eye out for new episodes of TaoTie coming soon and let us know what you think!

It has come to the attention to some of the Laonei staff that the new logo, which  is a “内” written in the seal-style of the Qin Dynasty (篆书- zhuàn shū), looks something a prophylactic and/or phallus. Well, we here at Laonei do not condone the use of sexual imagery for marketing purposes, but we do encourage the use of condoms, whether used for birth control, STD prevention, or water balloons.

With condoms in mind, I headed on over to the Jissbon website and was pleasantly surprised with their “sexual knowledge” section (性知识). I picked up a few new vocabulary words in the process, along with their descriptions in Chinese. Here are just a few (visit the website for a more complete list, though without translations):

安全套 (ān quán tào) - condom

前戏 (qián xì) - foreplay

手淫 (shǒu  yín) - masturbate

舔阴 (tiǎn  yīn) - cunnilingus

吹萧 (chuī  xiāo) - fellatio

G点 (G diǎn) - Need I explain?

69 式 ·体位 (liù  jiǔ  shì  tǐ  wèi) -It’s all about the numbers