Even mid-afternoon, Beijingers seem to pop into Ji De Hua Tian a bit like a Londoner would pop into a café for afternoon tea.
The restaurant's speciality is a dish of finely chopped slices of lamb mixed simply with parsley, spring onion and sliced cucumber, which is stuffed into a sesame-sprinkled flatbread bun to become a Beijing version of an almost bite-sized brown hamburger. Add a lightly fried dish of watermelon, with enough chilli to make it fragrant rather than ferocious, and a dish of baby bamboo shoots mixed with red beans , and you know the days of the ubiquity of cabbage are long gone.
Be prepared for the scent of strong meat to pervade everything – even overwhelming the cigarette smoke that clouds every bar or eatery on the mainland.