Keen-eyed readers of everyone’s favorite click-bait news pimp The Daily Mail will have noticed that among the tales of terrorists living on benefits in million pound houses and photos of reality TV stars leaving the gym that a prison-themed restaurant has recently opened in Tianjin. I certainly did, although offbeat China stories like this also appear in slightly less knee-jerk news outlets. Anyway, there is such an eatery going under the catchy name of 789 Prison Feng Yun and it seemed worth a 30-minute trip on the train and a taxi to Wanda Plaza to get a taste of dining in the big house. Here are some photos and all the words that have been invented in an attempt to describe it. My only experience of jail is based on film and television. That also seems to be true of the owners here. The main room has lots of iron bars including one around the drum kit/DJ area to give it the vibe of the photos of George Clooney playing a lip-syncing transvestite in The Harvest but with enough neon and chandeliers to suggest that there was a special offer at the neon and chandelier store. Also, the wallpaper depicts outer space. It’s the little touches like that that make you realize that this place is prison-themed in the loosest possible sense. The pictures strewn over the walls betray a general infatuation with Western culture. For every framed postcard of Ernest Goes To Jail there’s a pixelated printout of the poster for I Am Legend, a snap of Saddam with a shotgun, a Hentai O-Face or a classy shot of a bikini-clad woman bending over a motorcycle. A prison-theme is pretty poor taste but it’s somehow worse when it’s not fully carried out. The iron bars strike an authentic note as do the fuwuyuans officer uniforms but that’s about it when it comes to a prison feel. Maybe it’s the fully-stocked bar or it could the ladder propped against the wall or even the fact that all of the doors are left open. I was pretty disappointed that we weren’t locked in our cell or at least handcuffed just a little bit. They missed a trick there. If we were locked up then we wouldn’t have been treated to a ride in the rickety elevator to the private rooms on the second and third floors. They will lock you in up here and serve you through a hatch. The owner took great delight in telling us that the free appetizer was what they actually serve in Chinese prison. In fact, she took great delight in everything but she should be rightly proud of making a dish that evoked despair and counting down the hours until you could get out. The rest of the food is nothing worth writing home about, unless home is a place where they demand emails about meals that seem to have been based solely on children’s crayon drawings of Western cuisine. The meat pizza looked like a prop discarded from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? It tasted somehow less real. The chicken nuggets could have been brought over from McDonald’s any time in the 72 hours before we got there and were strangely comforting. The curry pineapple chicken over spaghetti tasted like a Pot Noodle because of the surprise presence of peas but it did provide an excuse to trot out a terrible impression of Noel Coward in the original version of The Italian Job: “ I hope he likes spaghetti. They serve it four times a day in the Italian prisons.” So that was nice. Best of all, the Tuborg was ice cold and had those fancy ringpull bottle tops that make you think you’re on a European citybreak. Even though it’s clearly a terrible idea that has been badly executed, they do sell cheap drink and passable chicken nuggets so it’s worth considering as an alternative for your next inevitable birthday/leaving party. It will certainly make a change from spending every weekend for the next three months at Jing A’s new taproom, where all such events are obliged to be held. Plus you also get the bonus of photo opportunities where you have a prison bitch. That’s worth a day out. To sum up 789 in a sentence: Life without parole. *** 789 Prison Feng Yun is in Wanda Plaza in Tianjin -- Taixing South Rd, Hedong. Here's Wanda Plaza on a google map.