Jiao quan, a fried flour snack, at the Nine Gates Snacks Courtyard. Photos Provided to China Daily

Fight back your snack attack with small bites

The Nine Gates Snacks Courtyard offers such a variety of traditional Beijing snacks - up to 300 kinds - that you will be spoiled for choice.

Established in 2006, it employs 10 traditional snack makers from Beijing to prepare their specialties on the spot, in a food street located in the center of a refurbished courtyard house, that also contains ordinary dining area offering standard Chinese cuisine. The food street is a copy of Menkuang (door frame) Hutong in Liulichang near Qianmen, from where snack stands pulled out when the area came under renovation in 2005.

Many of the 10 snack makers on this "food street" bring to bear on their creations food traditions that have been passed on through generations. Their specialties are therefore often associated with their surnames: Wei's cheese, Li's millet congee, Hou's wonton and Ma's lamb head.

Among the most popular, and safe, Beijing snacks are "donkey roll-over" cake, made with mashed glutinous rice and yellow rice, yundou juan, mashed kidney bean roll, and wandou huang, yellow mashed pea cake.

Wei's small bowl of cheese, bean curd jelly (dofu nao), and sweet-and-sour fried hawthorn fruit (chao hongguo) are all worth trying.

Some of these traditional "small eats" involve pork giblets that may be considered unhealthy today. But snacks such as lu zhu, boiled pork intestines and lung slices with cake in soup, and bao du, boiled beef stomach stripes, are old Beijing favorites and a must-tries.

Dou zhi'er, fermented bean drink, is an acquired taste but considered a healthy beverage by Beijingers. If you can take it, you could get hooked for life.

The restaurant's bilingual menu features English translations for a number of other traditional Beijing specialties. Chao gan is fried pork liver in broth, while guan chang is actually deep-fried crisp starch cake. For the more conservative, there's always mutton kebabs, stuffed beef cakes and beer.

Those looking for an authentic hutong feel will not be disappointed by Nine Gates. Located beside Houhai Lake, it offers the additional attraction of a stroll along the lake before or after a meal. But be prepared: Not all the foods may suit your palate.

Average spending is about 40 yuan ($5.9). One needs to purchase a card, with a minimum value of 10 yuan, to use on food street.

Daily 10 am-9 pm. 1 Xiaoyou Hutong, Denei Dajie, Xicheng district. Tel: 6402-6868