Ginkgo: Turning Over a New Leaf

After Vineyard Cafe, my next venture was Ginkgo: a bar, coffee shop and live music space downstairs and a European restaurant upstairs, on Andingmen Nei Da Jie in Beijing, in the space that had been the bar Room 101. Like the café, it had a blog, at ginkgobeijing.com, and the posts that follow are brought back from it. This was the first:

Welcome to Ginkgo. Over the past month we have renovated the space formerly occupied by Room 101 and we are pleased to welcome you all to our new venture. Ginkgo is a restaurant upstairs serving northern mediterranean cuisine with the freshest ingredients used to create interesting twists on traditional ideas. The menu is being finalised this week and we hope to be open for food by the end of next week. In the mean time, the bar downstairs is open serving drinks, coffee & tea and free wifi from 10.30am till late. We also have a number of bar snacks including paninis, pizzas & burgers which are available all day. We are currently operating in a soft open state with the date for our official opening party set for 5th December.

PS I must apologise for the cheesy headline but I couldn’t resist…

This post first appeared on the Ginkgo blog on 9 November 2008. Ginkgo was the restaurant and bar I opened in Beijing in 2008, after Vineyard Cafe; its blog (ginkgobeijing.com) is long gone, so I have brought it back here. See the whole Ginkgo story.