Hans Freshly Brewed Beer Entertainment Supermarket

To commiserate/celebrate our HSK results, we went to Hans Freshly Brewed Beer Entertainment Supermarket - a popular chain of South American Barbecue Restaurants with a stubbornly incongruous Bavarian theme.

For 38RMB (£2.50), patrons get to enjoy an unlimited buffet of cakes, salad, and staples such as noodles and rice, in authentic Chinese/German/Brazilian style.

We were greeted at the door with the familiar "欢迎光临!", and this decidedly less familiar headscarf and apron combination.

A waitress then led us past Germanic murals into a substantial but crowded hall, where buxom, rosy-cheeked wenches with naughty smiles and hearty German men in lederhosen, had been replaced by unsmiling, skinny waitresses and invariably adolescent-looking waiters.

The latter weaved through between the tables carrying giant skewers of barbecued food products in their left hands, and a sizeable carving knife in their right.

Several televisions played a looping advertisement, singing the praises of ... Hans Freshly Brewed Beer Entertainment Supermarket! Surely a case of preaching to the choir? In an ill-advised move, the happy groups in the promotional videos were enjoying much better service than anyone in the restaurant itself, but on the positive side, they were also enjoying an encouragingly vast amount of beer.

We ordered all four types of beer that the Hans microbrewery turns out - Strawberry, Barley, Wheat and Black Beer.

Waiters visited our table periodically, carving off chunks from their skewers on to our plates. Apart from barbecue's usual suspects of sausage, pork chops and beefsteak, there was an awful lot of chicken heart, and ox tongue thrown in too.

After we'd eaten our share of salad, we noticed this waitress cleaning. With blatant disregard for anything approaching health and safety, or basic common sense, she busied herself spraying on cleaning solution underneath the sneeze guard and wiping it off again, right above the food. I'm sure I saw some detergent drip onto a lettuce. Yum! Lemony fresh!

The menu promises a minimum of twenty barbecued food products every night, which seems a lot, until you realise that portions are no more than a mouthful each, and the twenty include such cop-outs as barbecued banana, a square of pizza bread, and this honeydew melon!

Still, the beers were cold and alcoholic, and the wait staff sufficiently embarrassed and miserable in their ludicrous uniforms to make it all somehow worthwhile.