So near yet so far from mom's home cooking

More than 9,500 kilometers away, my mother fumed in her kitchen. Pots and pans collided with a bang as she hurled them into the sink with a huff that said: "You would, too, if you had to put food on the table every night." The news that I might have found her replacement in Beijing had not gone down well.

To be clear, a mother's cooking is almost impossible to supplant. But for at least one night, Feng Huang Zhu, a Yunnan restaurant in a hazily lit corner of Gulou Dajie, came close to doing just that.

Feng Huang Zhu is a two-story restaurant one block from the Drum and Bell towers and is surrounded by purveyor upon purveyor of meat on a skewer. Inside, wooden statuettes with menacing faces hang from the ceiling near the entrance. Large peacock feathers line the walls and baskets of light illuminate the unfinished tables. It's dark and rustic but not romantic.