Jing Yaa Tang

Jujube wood at the duck oven

The ducks meet jujube wood before they meet the knife. Li Dong , executive Chinese chef at Jing Yaa Tang in Beijing, keeps that fire at the center of a menu built around Peking Duck and regional Chinese dishes. He is a Beijing-born cook, and since 2019 he has led the Chinese kitchen here with the discipline of someone working inside a form that already carries memory. The restaurant’s Michelin star came with the MICHELIN Guide Beijing 2020, published in 2019, and Li spoke of it as a milestone in his 20-year culinary career. Li Dong keeps duck roasted over red date wood, pancakes cut thin, a fermented sauce made in house, and condiments that do not blur the bird close to the bench. Li has described food as a way for people to share history, culture, and hopes for the future. At Jing Yaa Tang, that sentence sits less like a motto than a working brief. The menu reaches across Chinese regions, but the pass returns again and again to Beijing roast duck, Sichuan heat, dim sum, and dishes that ask the kitchen to hold seasoning, texture, and timing in the same hand.

A regional program with the duck in view

The open kitchen gives the room a clear sightline to the craft. Behind the glass façade, cooks work around the crackle of the open-fire oven, where the duck takes its color from jujube wood before it is carried to the pass. The finished bird arrives with paper-thin pancakes, house-made fermented sauce, honey lemon, leek, cucumber, and melon. It is a service of small decisions, not flourish. The skin needs its brittle edge; the meat needs the warmth to stay in it; the pancake must bend without turning heavy. Around that anchor, Li’s program moves through dishes such as Chongqing chili chicken stir-fry, Sichuan poached chicken with crushed peanuts and sesame, mapo tofu, Taiwanese three cups cod, and fried rice with superior XO sauce, shrimps, and dried scallop. The range matters because the kitchen cannot hide behind a single regional accent. Claypot heat, wok breath, dim sum texture, fermented depth, and roast duck carving all ask for different hands at different stations.

The room around the pass

Jing Yaa Tang sits on the lower ground floor of The Opposite House hotel, in the Sanlitun and Tuanjiehu area of Chaoyang District. The name translates as classic, elegant room, and the design holds that theatrical note without asking the food to perform more than it should. Alan Yau collaborated on the restaurant’s design, setting a central social dining space, the Tang, with elevated dining platforms and a gold, black, and red palette. From the tables, the room gives way to the open kitchen rather than concealing it. The counterpoint is useful: polished surfaces in front, fire and cutting behind glass. A duck can be watched before it is eaten. The room has its ceremony, but the truer rhythm comes from the pass, where a regional Chinese menu depends on station work more than spectacle.

What remains in the hands

The restaurant’s award belongs to this address, and Li has been careful to make it a team fact rather than a solo one, calling it recognition of the entire kitchen’s work. That matters here because the dishes that carry Jing Yaa Tang are not abstractions: Jing Yaa Tang Peking Duck, Chongqing chili chicken stir-fry, and the wood-fired oven ask for repetition, not announcement. The bird, the jujube wood, and Li Dong are at the pass.