Published by Swiss James on 19 Nov 2009
Spicy Joint
Spicy Joint is a chain of Sichuan (i.e. spicy- that’s how they got the name, a team of monkeys worked for a week on that) restaurants.
They’re huge, busy, tasty and cheap. Dinner for 5 last night cost about 630RMB including plenty of beer and lashings of food.
Because they’re so big and busy, the queuing system is well organised: you turn up, tap your phone number into a machine, add how many people you are, and get a ticket with a number on it.
Three separate queues (for small, medium and large tables) tick through these numbers and you can easily wait for an hour or more in the waiting room. To amuse yourself, you can look through the onscreen menus the restaurant provides for you, or drink the beer that they don’t .
Viewing the menu onscreen in the waiting room
Last night though we were through in ten minutes flat though, maybe it’s not as popular as it was.
When you sit down they give you a funny lifestyle magazine.
Reading material whilst you wait?
That turns out to be the menu:
although it does still have the odd “feature” in there about how to be the perfect bride, or what hat looks cute while you’re holding a plate
Not many foreigners go to Spicy Joint (yay!) and there’s no English menu. So either bring your best pointing finger, or someone who can read foreign.
We ended up having to ask about some of the dishes for clarification- the one below was described as
“Some part of a pig that’s just north of the tail”
I’m still none the wiser which bit that is, but damn it was good.
Better than the bit just south of the tail huh?
Spicy Joint
Many Locations- including
4F 500 Jinling Lu near Xizang Lu


