Bar Review: All In

What: A Chinese-style club with live music

Why: You want to experience a KTV night without having to take centre stage

How much: Bottled beer RMB 30; standard cocktails RMB 45; bar snacks from RMB 30

Where: 372 Haifang Lu, near Shanxi Bei Lu. Tel: 3256 1977

Sitting in the borderlands of Jing’An District, where the density of foreigners all but drops to zero, you’ll find local café and bar All In. As you’d expect from its location, All In is Chinese through and through, and you feel it from the moment you walk in. The friendly, yet awkwardly inquisitive manner of the servers and the patrons says it all. This isn’t the kind of place that you go to if you’re looking to have a session with your friends where you walk out of the bar afterward to that sudden, amazed, drunken realisation: “Wow, I really am in China.”

No, this is the kind of place you go to if you’re looking to experience something a bit more authentic, but you don’t want to find yourself overcome by the ratatat of dice cups, boisterous house remixes and laser light displays. Of course, you’ll find all of those on a Friday night at All In, but you’ll also find something else – the ability to have a (hostess-free) conversation with friends, something the Chinese clubby-clubs and girly bars on Hengshan Lu just can’t offer.

Then, of course, nightly at 9.30pm there’s the band. The six piece, including a male and female singer, do renditions of Chinese pop songs and some surprising English tunes as well (Sade’s ‘Smooth Operator’ anyone?). It’s like watching a session of KTV without having to endure off-key renditions of the Beach Boys, your Chinese co-workers’ 1,000th take on ‘Tonghua’ – or worse, being forced to take to the stage yourself. In fact, for the laowai trying to get his shot of Chinese party culture, All In pretty much kills two birds with one stone. Roll some dice, check those tunes and have a chat while you’re at it… in Chinese if you dare.