You what isn't broke? BBQ meat. Take some seafood or meat or veggies on skewers, dangle it over hot coals, let some smoke on it, listen to the the flames spit up a little bit as the food slowly roasts, and then dig in. 

This is a great way to cook fatty meat especially. The direct flames cause the fat to render down and drip out of the meat, making the flames flare up, adding heat and smoke and texture and FLAVOR to the food, and also, importantly, removing some oil from the meat so it's not so greasy. 

I guess then, that the exact opposite of this tried-and-true method for BBQ'ing would be to coat a miniature cast iron flat top with a shallow pool of vegetable oil, place that on top of the BBQ grate, and then place the food on top of that to. We are no longer grilling at this point. I guess we are frying, or blanching in oil. These are not how I want my skewers to be cooked. This was not broke, so why are you trying to fix it? What's the point of going out to a BBQ joint if it's essentially going to be a cast iron frying pan on top of a BBQ grate with no exposure to flame or smoke? Couldn't you have done that in the kitchen with an electric stovetop? 

When a newfangled cooking gimmick fails to improve the food, but doesn't take anything away from it, it may amuse me, or make me roll my eyes, but it doesn't usually make me feel annoyed. This, on the other hand, annoyed me. It annoyed me because it was more pricey than regular Chinese BBQ. It annoyed me because it didn't go a good job cooking the food- in fact it made it worse. It annoyed me because this place is wildly popular, has a stellar rating on Da Zhong Dianping and I had high hopes going in, only to see them dashed.

The specialty seems to be some obscene mountain of seafood for 450 CNY, which we didn't get, in favor of a bunch of more traditional skewers and veggies. The flavors were boring, the dipping sauces were uninteresting, the gimmick made the food greasy while robbing it of smoke flavor, and the whole experience was a sad bomb.

Also, there was a dessert made of grilled Oreos, bananas and cheese, which I got out of morbid curiousity, but I don't know what I expecting, beacuse it tasted exactly like melted Oreos, bananas and cheese, mashed together. 

Shao Huo Zhu Chang is located across the street from The Shed, upstairs from Delimuses on Xikang Lu and Kangding Lu. We spent something like 250 CNY and would have left complaining about still being hungry, but we were actually feeling a little queasy. 

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