CITY GUIDE >Food Reviews
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CITY GUIDE >Food Reviews
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Maison Boulud
By Jeremy Webb (bestfoodinchina.net)
Updated: 2009-03-30 15:11
 The staff did more than just serve wine professionally. Indeed, the Chinese waiters and waitresses are so good that some critics conclude their reviews with rhetorical questions, begging to know the HR secrets of Maison Boulud. Opening just before the Olympics, the manager explains, there was a chronic shortage of trained local staff. Instead of competing, they opened positions to anyone, regardless of experience. Successful candidates were selected on the basis of personality, many of whom having never worked in a restaurant before. Therefore, most were trained from zero, something that makes the impeccable service at Maison Boulud all the more impressive to a critic more used to the sometimes uninterested and badly-trained wait staff of Beijing. The kindest thing any member of staff did was to not bring me the bill. Luckily, as a BFIC critic, someone else pays. While Maison Boulud offers cheaper options, the 800-yuan eight course epic that we enjoyed is among Beijing’s most expensive dinners. However, it is probably the best. The critics that Boulud and his team have impressed before are probably better qualified to judge this restaurant as it deserves, by the highest international standards. However, while they might pick up on a couple of things that this relatively inexperienced critic missed, I would find it hard to believe that they would not join me in saying that this restaurant is brilliant, in both relative, and absolute terms.
Location(s) No. 23 Qianmen Dong Dajie, Beijing Tel:+86 10-65599200 Beijing,
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