New all-day buffet mirrors Chinese admiral's voyages

The hotel calls the chefs its "dream team". The kitchen's leaders - executive chef Nikolaos Lekkas from Greece, executive sous chef Eugenio Iraci from Italy and Chinese executive chef Tam Yim Chan from Hong Kong - are just the start of a culinary bonanza from a dozen countries. Other chefs bring the tastes of Thailand, India, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia and Syria in an armada of cuisine that would have made the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) admiral Zheng He smile.

That's precisely the idea of N'Joy, the all-day dining room of Beijing's brand-new Nuo Hotel.

The gray-walled dining room, elegant but understated, is a sea of kitchen islands offering the cuisines that Zheng, the legendary Chinese navigator, might have encountered on his 15th century voyages that foreshadowed the traders who populated the Maritime Silk Road.