With development crashing through the hutong, this is a restaurant to visit sooner rather than later.
The article 'Hutong alleyways: Old Beijing at its timeless best' was published in partnership with Lonely Planet.
But for many other hutong, the future of their slow-paced, village-like way of life hangs precariously in the balance.
The hutong go back almost 800 years and are in fact a Mongol invention.
By the Qing Dynasty there were 2, 000 hutong, and by the 1950s that total had almost trebled.
Set around a sweet courtyard, hung unsurprisingly with red lanterns, Red Lantern House is located down a hutong (old alleyway).
Yes, the hutong are where bottles of lager get delivered to your doorstep by a man shouting "beer"!
Heading south along the popular Nanluoguxiang alleyway you cross over the main road at the pedestrian crossing and pick up the next hutong.
The best way to experience hutong life is to simply wander around the alleys, either on foot or by bicycle.
Lined with family-owned shops and siheyuan (traditional courtyard homes), each hutong illustrates a way of life that has endured in Beijing for eight centuries.
Yan Yue Hutong, in which Hotel Cote Cour is located, used to be home to the dancers and musicians at the Ming court.
Countless "hutong, " as Beijing's traditional courtyard housing is called, have been knocked down and replaced by skyscrapers, shopping malls and apartment buildings.
Mr Fan insists that the authorities do have a concern for history and says some of the hutong areas will be preserved.
Above Aqua Shard is Hutong, a Chinese restaurant focused on cuisine from the north, namely the Shandong Province, rather than usual Cantonese style found in London.
Beijing's planners say that the hutong neighbourhoods are too dilapidated to renew and too narrow to be modernised with gas, water and sewerage systems.
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Yet equally, it is not hard to imagine that a clearer system of property rights would render hutong houses valuable propositions for private renovation.
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Some, like Beijing-based designer Mi Qiu, believe China ought to preserve more of its traditional housing forms like the centuries-old villages and hutong--neighborhoods traversed by narrow, winding alleys.
For something more regal, try the imperial hutong courtyards, including those once lived in by royal eunuchs, in the area immediately northeast of Jingshan Park, just north of the Forbidden City.
The old city, once as admired as Paris for its beauty, has been under siege since the Communist Revolution, and its charming hutong, or narrow-lane neighborhoods, have been steadily disappearing ever since.
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The setting itself seemed to capture the quixotic nature of the enterprise, since the historic mansion, once in the heart of a hutong, is now the lone survivor, overshadowed on all sides by skyscrapers.
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Up until a couple of years ago this relatively isolated alley, surrounded by high-rise apartments in the western district of Xuanwu, was Beijing's oldest surviving alley, clocking in at a wheezing 900 years old and predating even the Mongol-designed hutong network.
While the rest of the city darts around in sharp suits, with a takeaway coffee in one hand and an iPhone in the other, old men sit on wooden stools at the entrance to their hundred-year-old hutong bungalows, drinking beer, playing chess and chewing the fat.
Living conditions in these are basic at best - a one-room family-house with a tiny shed-like kitchen-conversion and often no private toilet - but it is this unusual mix of ancient aristocratic architecture and current-day, salt-of-the-earth locals that gives the hutong alleys their unique character.
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