In the last year, as private enterprise accelerated in communist China, there has been a big wave of restaurant and bar openings in Beijing. The Chinese capital now offers all sorts of eating places, including Thai, Indian, Korean, Indonesian, Italian, French and American, and a huge range of indigenous cuisine from Mongolian hot-pot to Sichuan, where "hot" has a different meaning.
The Sanlitun area which excited foreign residents a year ago when a couple of espresso bars opened now has dozens of western-type bars, cafes, bistros and night spots, and has been officially renamed Bar Street.
But the place for the in-crowd is none of the above. It is an obscure Muslim tavern called Afanti, hidden away in a dingy east Beijing alleyway known as Walking Stick Lane.
On any given night, all its 150 seats are occupied. On Friday and Saturday it is almost impossible to find a place without a booking made earlier in the week. Even so, dozens of Chinese and foreigners crowd into the doorway late on weekend evenings hoping for a table.
The typical clientele represents a cross-section of modern Beijing. One might see an important western ambassador entertaining friends, a Chinese office party celebrating a birthday, a table of Central Asians tucking into a whole roast lamb, a cinema star showing off to admirers, a pack of foreign correspondents waving beer mugs, and a couple of Russian mafia types shouting into mobile phones.
Afanti is a cross between a beer hall - the tables are placed in long, tightly packed rows - and a kebab house. It is run by native Uighur people from Xinjiang province, the exotic north-eastern part of China, through which the Old Silk Road used to run.
Many foreigners love the restaurant because it provides a glimpse and a taste of remote central Asia. Also, it is neither Chinese nor western, so it provides a brief escape, an evening off as it were, from both traditions, which long-stay residents appreciate.
Inside, one wall is decorated with an Uzbek-style mural. Another is festooned with long-necked string instruments. Camel cigarette advertisements have been pinned up here and there to add to the central Asian flavour.
The highlight of the evening comes when a beautiful Uighur woman called Gu Li Zar appears in exotic costume to perform a stunning Arabian Nights dance, accompanied by a moustachioed man playing fast and furious traditional music. This is Casablanca, Beijing-style. Everybody cheers, and a few are dragged up to dance with the performers.
Customers also relish the Central Asian dishes, which are heavily based on mutton and lamb. The meat comes fresh every day from a tiny Uighur enclave 100km outside Beijing where sheep are slaughtered according to Muslim rights, said Wei Xiaogu, one of the family running the restaurant.
She said that as Afanti, which opened as an ethnic cafe in 1995, drew in more and more foreigners, it expanded and began printing the menu in English as well as in Chinese. The menu today lists "toasted" whole sheep and "toasted" mutton with "toothpick" (meaning roast sheep and kebab on wooden skewers), plus sheep's hearts with green peppers, sheep's intestines, saute of sheep's kidney, stewed mutton, mutton with chips, and dozens of other variations.
Wei Xiaogu also attributed the popularity of Afanti to the fact that inside it is clean and safe. Diplomats worried about infection have been allowed to inspect the kitchens, she told me. "And if a client dropped a wallet we would return it right away."
The restaurant is proving so popular that the owners are planning to open a second nearby with about three times the floor space. Afanti might one day become a chain.
Chinese restaurant owners everywhere are on the lookout these days to capitalise on the new freedoms and expand. Star East, a new worldwide chain of theme restaurants backed by Asian performers such as Jackie Chan, has just been started in the southern city of Gunagzhou.
It is Planet Hollywood with Chinese food, and it is coming soon to a restaurant near you. The second Star East will open in Pasadena, California, and more are planned for Beijing, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Shanghai and Singapore, and European cities.
Afanti so far remains an original. And half the attraction is the sense of adventure which comes from picking one's way through the darkness of Walking Stick Lane on a rare snowy night like last Saturday, and pushing through the crowd around the turban-shaped doorway, knowing you have a table booked.