May 12 (Bloomberg) -- Western visitors to Beijing often hit a Chinese wall, where they suddenly get a hankering for foreign food after filling up with Peking duck and other local dishes for days.

Here are three restaurants serving decent Italian, French and Japanese cuisine. Good luck with the last: Few taxi drivers speak English, and the place doesn't give an address.

Barolo, at the Ritz-Carlton, is surprisingly authentic for an Italian establishment in China, where Western chefs struggle to find seasonal, local ingredients and are not surrounded in the kitchen by seasoned local cooks brought up on European food.

This is attractive for a hotel restaurant, with an open kitchen where you can watch chef Alessandro Montedoro at work with his Chinese brigade. The brightness spills out -- as if from a stage -- across the dining room, where each table has a candle and there are comfortable leather chairs.

Mains are generally priced in the region of 250 yuan ($35.80) -- so it's not cheap -- on a menu featuring dishes from around Italy that may include monkfish medallion on fava beans puree. For a treat, try the six-course tasting menu, which costs 750 yuan, plus 420 yuan for matching wines. It makes for a pleasant evening.

I was eating alone, and the restaurant manager Ronnie Rizzi was very welcoming, explaining dishes, such as carbonara-style ravioli with home-made pancetta, and the wines, which included 2001 Vietti Barolo Castiglione to accompany the main course of smoked veal, liquid polenta, asparagus salad and Marsala wine.

French Jazz

You need a personality like Rizzi to bring alive a hotel venue. Le Pre Lenotre, down the road at the Sofitel, could use him. This French restaurant is housed in a windowless room off a corridor. The atmosphere is as a tad funereal, enlivened -- if that is the word -- by a generic jazz soundtrack and by the noise and light that spills across from the bar opposite.

Lenotre is a caterer owned by Accor SA, Europe's biggest hotel company, and the restaurant has all the carefree abandon of a corporate dining room. The inspiration for Le Pre Lenotre is the Michelin three-starred Le Pre Catalan, in Paris, and the menu is on solid Michelin ground, with an abundance of luxury ingredients such as foie gras, truffle and Kobe beef, and prices to match.

Service is formal, the staff dressed in black engaged in the dining equivalent of synchronized swimming, whether it's carrying plates or removing the cloches from them. It's faultless in that hotel-venue sort of way. Smokers will be pleased to hear they can add their own whiff of old-style Parisian authenticity.

Lemongrass Tuna

If you're looking for technically accomplished French cooking in Beijing, this isn't a bad option, and some of the dishes feature Asian elements, such as tuna fish cooked rare with lemongrass, preserved turnip, passion fruit juice. The big surprise came when the waitress suggested I should have my beef dish ``medium.'' Then I realized many customers want their meat well done.

For a more adventurous evening, you might enlist the help of hotel concierges or whoever else you can to track down Meshiya Hashiba, a Japanese restaurant that doesn't have -- or, at least, doesn't disclose -- a postal address. It's on the east of the Third Ring Road, in Chaoyang district. Taxi drivers don't know it.

The place is a sister restaurant to Jazz-Ya, a Beijing venue that is popular with Japanese tourists. The head chef is from western Japan, according to the Web site, which says he goes out to buy fresh seafood every morning. He aims to combine traditional Osaka cuisine with European influences and ingredients.

Large Sushi

Fortunately, there's an illustrated menu that also carries English-language translations of the dishes. Most diners probably just opt for one of the selections of dishes, which certainly saves time and thought. The sushi's not only good, it's large, with a generous fish-to-rice ratio you rarely see elsewhere.

The dining room looks onto a small courtyard. The waitresses appear patient -- though not always successful -- in trying to overcome communication difficulties. We wanted beef curry without the rice, and it turned up as just sauce and with no meat.

In addition to the usual selection of fish, meat, rice and noodle dishes, there's something called Hashiba's new-flavor hamburger, which turns out to be a bun-less patty of pork and beef in barbecue sauce, served with spinach. It's sweet.

Barolo, Ritz-Carlton, 83a Jianguo Lu, Beijing. Tel: +86-10- 5908-8888 or http://www.ritzcarlton.com/en/Properties/Beijing.

Le Pre Lenotre, Sofitel Wanda, 93 Jianguo Lu. Tel: +86-10- 8599-6666 or http://tinyurl.com/6zqcms

Meshiya Hashiba, East of Third Ring Road, Chaoyang, south of the International Trade Center. Tel. ++86-10-6771-0218 or click on http://www.jazzya.com.cn/english/index.htm.

(Richard Vines is the London food critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own. This is the fifth in a weekly series of articles on dining out for the Olympic Games in China.)