I have to admit that Beijing has made a great culinary leap forward in the past two decades. Food bordered on inedible during my first visit to the city in 1983, but it has made a lot of progress in the years since I moved here in 1994. Unfortunately, I’m saddened that standards have gone down almost as quickly as they rose.

The opening of Yuebin Fandian (悦宾饭店) in 1980 marked the arrival of the first private restaurant in Beijing, which sparked the opening of many privately-owned eateries, as well as boosted the variety and quality of food available here. But while things got gradually better, the local dining scene never even came close to what Taiwan cuisine was 20 or 30 years ago, when I was a student in Taipei. Some of the best restaurants here today can’t hold a candle to even some of the island’s smallest hole-in-the-wall eateries, which were fantastic in those days.

Despite the incessant increase in the number and variety of restaurants in Beijing, to tell the truth, only a dozen or so of the restaurants I know are reliable and consistent, making the job of food writing and recommending quite a risky business. You really never know what you’re going to get, even in some of your favorite dining venues.

I’ve been feeling discouraged these days because when I go back to some of my favorite places to dine, it’s often been a disappointing experience. My favorite dishes just don’t taste as good as they should; even worse, the food at many restaurants is not as good as it used to be. Standards are declining.

What went wrong?

I’ve already written here about the obsession with presentation and noveau cuisine, which I think is only serving to reduce quality and blur culinary boundaries. And I’ve written about the worrisome problem of food safety. My husband ate in one of our previously favorite restaurants last Saturday and felt ill as he was eating. Almost a week later, he’s not completely better yet. We have no idea what caused the illness. Was the oil used too many times? Or was some chemical added to the food? Who knows. I only know I’ll never go there again. And this is not the first time this has happened to us.

Chefs are out of control with their liberal use of MSG, which is meant to be used sparingly. Actually, MSG should be banned from professional kitchens. The use of this additive is just a cover-up for those cooks who lack skills in making stock from pork bones, whole fowl and the carcass. Chefs who use MSG are simply ignoring the core of Chinese cooking.

My visit this week to a newly opened vegetarian restaurant in Xinyuan Nanli was another awful experience. The hong yu cang jin (gold hidden under red jades), a lazi ji inspired  “chicken” dish, was drenched in an overdose of MSG. My mouth was offended by the artificial sweet taste of the MSG, while the “chicken” was a nauseating greasy deep-fried soybean product. Vegetarian dishes in a number of restaurants are flavored excessively with mushroom essence, black pepper and thick cornstarch sauce. I can’t even think of one decent vegetarian restaurant in Beijing to recommend—if you know of one, please tell me.

I am also fed up with the hit or miss quality and sloppy cooking of the Chinese kitchens. I’ve been wondering for a long time about the cause of this increasingly bad food quality, which is especially acute in Beijing.

Michael Chen, a Chinese chef and an old friend, told me not too long ago: “The focus of restaurants is about eating history and culture (chi lishi chi wenhua),” he said. “Food is not the main priority.”

Ji Kenan, a businessman who dines regularly at Tong He Ju for simple dishes such as jiangbao jiding and mushu pork, summed up the situation well. “Every restaurant serves abalone, bird’s nest, sea cucumber, and shark’s fin,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be good.  As long as it’s expensive, it gives you a lot of face.”

Chef Yap Baorong, a Malaysian-born chef who is passionate about cooking, has a different explanation.  “Western diners have high standards and they’re more demanding,” says Chef Yap, who was trained to prepare Chaozhou cuisine. “For Chinese people, food is to fill a hungry stomach.”

But this was not always the case. Chinese literature is full of references to the incredibly high standard of Chinese food in ancient days. Just read the essays of Yuan Mei, an 18th century Qing-dynasty epicure with exacting food standards, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, which is full of interesting references to food, and you’ll see what I mean.

The nationalization of private business in1956, when Chairman Mao gushed about cutting off capitalist tails, sounded the death knell for restaurants and led to a sharp decline in quality. Another big blow was brought by the calamitous Cultural Revolution, which resulted in a sort of culinary genocide. Recipes were burned and well-known chefs were taunted, beaten, and forced to serve cheap basic foods such as pancakes, cornbread and noodles for the masses.

Since then, Chinese have not looked on being a chef as a desirable or respected profession. Young people who become cooks are not well trained and they lack passion. While celebrity chefs in other parts of the world are falling over one another to put out new books and appear on TV cooking shows, this phenomenon does not exist in China. Where are China’s Jamie Oliver, Anthony Bourdaine, Ferran Adria, Gordon Ramsey and Bobby Flay?

The first time I met Andy Cheah at the Raffles Hotel we chatted excitedly for two hours about our favorite spices, condiments, ingredients and foods. I’ve never had such a conversation with a Chinese chef—that guy may be out there somewhere, but I’ve not met him yet. And attempts to ask local chefs questions about their cuisines are often met with blank stares.

Nor are there really any elite cooking schools here. Where is China’s Culinary Institute of America or Le Cordon Bleu? They don’t exist. The training of young chefs here is seen as nothing more than the turning out of robot-like kitchen workers. Anyone can get a certification from a cooking school today in as short as three months.

Zhao Dongyue, owner of Hand-in-Hand (手拉手) told me that finding a skilled chef these days is difficult.  “My chef didn’t even bother to taste the soy sauce when he switched from one brand to another,” said Mr. Zhao. “No wonder diners complained about how salty the food was.”

Xu Zhiqiang, the manager of Trends Lounge, felt so discouraged by the poor attitudes of his chefs, and their lack of initiative, passion and creativity, that he abandoned the idea of serving Chinese food. Instead, he hired a Japanese chef, trained in Western cuisine who loves cooking to run his kitchen.

I remember phoning a well-known local Chinese food expert to ask him to name some of his favorite Chinese restaurants.  

“Um…um…um…,” he hesitated for a few moments. Then, after a long silence over the phone, he spit out the word Pangu, the name of a Japanese restaurant inside a high-end Beijing hotel.

I immediately realized how far the quality of Chinese dining had sunk. Even a local prominent food writer could not recommend any Chinese restaurants.

“You can hardly blame the restaurants for not serving good food,” said Li Qigong, author of Bian chi bian liao. “Diners keep coming despite the poor quality.”

He is right. Until consumers start to get angry and shout that they won’t stand for it anymore, standards are going to continue to decline.

If you are looking for some places reliable to eat, please check my list of Top Ten Places for Chinese in Beijing.