Hot Bean Cooperative stuffs your inner child with chicken
“Autobots wage their battle to destroy the evil forces of the Decepticons …”

Liu Peng, one of the founders of the Hot Bean Cooperative, laughs as he comes back from his phone call to find me softly singing the Transformers theme song in unison with the music coming over his speakers. I can’t help it. Transformers was my favorite cartoon of all time, and I turn into a 3 year-old at the hint of a robotic voice. “We play music that we remember from when we were little to make us think of that time, to put people back in that mindset,” Liu Peng explained.

It works. The first time I ate at Hot Bean I had to get up in the middle of my meal and wander around looking for a TV to go with the music. My Chinese friends picked out cartoon themes from their childhoods that I had never heard of. The cheesy classical symphony that follows Doraemon is elementary school exercise music. “Yi, er, san...” Some of the rooms have toys sitting on shelves. The doodles on the homemade menus go with the fluorescent chalk scribbles of past customers and the happy flowers and bright suns that cover the cement walls.

“We want people to feel like they’re kids again, like they can really party,” Liu Peng smiles. “We started this place because we wanted to have fun, we made it a wing place because wing places were really popular last year.” Food was kind of an afterthought for Hot Bean, they just got caught up in the beginnings of what is now a full-fledged Beijing chicken wing craze. Liu and I could come up with eight places that traffic in Hot Bean’s fare: marinated chicken wing chuan’r at different levels of spiciness. One of the earliest roast wing bars (kao chi ba), Chi Ku in Xidan, has no sign, but a waiting list a month long. Liu says Hot Bean, which opened last November, was the third of its genre in Beijing. “The chicken wing fad first started in the summer of 2005,” Liu reckons, “Before then no one had ever seen things like this.”

But Liu is modest. The wings at Hot Bean are serene, greasy spiciness that numbs your mind and takes you back. He and his co-owners insist they aren’t really that much better than the competition. That’s not what’s important, they say. Hot Bean is laid back, all the servers are co-owners and are just having fun. “When I go to a restaurant I don’t even look at the menu,” Liu says. “Most places are pretty much the same, and you can’t tell beforehand how good it’s going to be. I look at the atmosphere and think about whether this is a place I want to be.” I liked being five, and Hot Bean is where I want to be.

–Michael Armstrong