| New coffee shop replacing Starbucks in Forbidden City
A new coffee shop opened last week inside the Palace Museum, located exactly at the same place where a controversial Starbucks coffee shop had situated for seven years.
With wooden tables, wooden chairs and pictures featuring Chinese culture, the "Forbidden City Cafe" serves not only coffee, but also traditional Chinese beverage such as tea.
"Different from the Starbucks coffee shop, the Palace Museum is the managerial authority of the cafe," Beijing Daily quoted Li Wenru, deputy curator of the Forbidden City, as saying.
In a separate interview with the Beijing Youth Daily, the deputy curator emphasized that the "Forbidden City Cafe" is only part of a store which mainly sells souvenirs to tourists.
"We want to provide tourists with a package of products relating to imperial palace and Chinese culture," Li said.
On those iced tea orders, specify everything to a T
Now that a dining companion has taken to ordering iced tea "60-40" -- the desired ratio of sweet to unsweet -- and not been shot, I've decided there's no excuse for anything but clear communication between diner and server about tea. Not to mention everything else. So I appreciated a recent thread on a food Web site about missing modifiers -- words that servers should volunteer for clarity or that diners should ask further about, to be sure. People complained about ordering "tea" and not getting what they wanted. Some wanted plain and got fruit-flavored; some wanted sweet and got unsweet, some wanted hot and got cold (no, they weren't from around here). So whose responsibility is this? Everyone's, in an ideal world. But barring that, I'd break it down this way: • Diners should specify sweet or unsweet or hot when they expect basic and ubiquitous orange pekoe (which is a form of black tea: think Lipton).
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