The following is the dining news for Issue 4 of City Weekend. You'll have to excuse the pretentious 3rd-person. It's a magazine thing.

This editor tries to show love to cuisines of all nationalities equally, but when it really comes right down to it, your CW dining editor is American, with all the culinary biases, disdain for the metric system, and hazy grasp of geography that implies (to wit: last issue’s disavowal of all Portugal-related knowledge). Thus, you’ll have to forgive some excitement on the part of this editor at the announcement that professional baseball, a game that most of the world outside the Western hemisphere finds completely incomprehensible, will be landing in Beijing in mid-March (see Sports events for more details).

Naturally, the most important question to be answered was, “What kind of food will they be serving?” Alas, grand visions of vendors tramping up and down the aisles hawking yangrouchuan’r alongside peanuts and hotdogs were shot down in an email from Major League Baseball’s representatives in Beijing, who confirmed that spectators would be chowing down on “American-style ballpark food”, although they did add that “there may also be some more familiar Chinese snacks (instant noodles, etc.)”. Undoubtedly such details have you as much on the edge of your seats as we are on ours, so we’ll be following them as they develop. We can only hope that among the assorted Americana making an appearance will be the venerable "hot dog race" seen in the photo.

In other “USA-USA-USA”-related news, the tool of American imperium that is Grandma’s Kitchen is opening up a new branch in Wudaokou, thus ensuring that homesick students have a place to score late-night peanut butter milkshakes.

Finally, a brief plug: CW’s bangup Guanxi service (a lifesaver on the many occasions that this editor’s been lost in the belly of Beijing’s culinary underworld) has now added a mobile discounts feature, thus ensuring that not only will you stay un-lost on your way to your destination, but that you’ll remain un-poor once you sit down to eat there.