The Restaurant
Hatsune Beijing opened in 2001 on the second floor of the Heqiao Building in Guomao — the heart of Beijing's central business district — and remains the senior contemporary-Japanese room in the city. The project of restaurateur Alan Wong, Hatsune was the first kitchen in Beijing to bring a serious sushi counter, a robata-grill programme, and a creative-roll repertoire together under one roof at international-hotel-grade quality. The dining room runs about ninety covers across a main floor of dark-wood banquettes, a nine-seat sushi counter at the back, a four-seat robata bar, and a small private dining room that takes parties of six to twelve. The Sanlitun location, opened in 2008, extends the format with a more youthful design register; the Guomao original remains the room of record.
The kitchen is led by a Japanese-trained team and runs three parallel lines. The sushi counter offers an omakase at ¥980 (twelve courses) and à-la-carte nigiri sourced from a daily Tsukiji-Toyosu air programme that the restaurant has maintained continuously since opening — bluefin tuna in three cuts, hokkaido scallop, sweet shrimp, sea urchin in season, and a selection of Japanese-sourced cured and aged fish. The robata bar grills Wagyu short rib, Japanese-sourced eel, miso-marinated cod, and Mishima Reserve beef skewers. The contemporary-roll menu — the 'Motorola Roll' with shrimp tempura and tobiko, the 'Marilyn Monroe Roll' with avocado and unagi, the '119 Roll' with spicy tuna — was created in the early 2000s and remains the format that introduced Beijing to American-style creative sushi.
The wine and sake list is the most thoughtful of any independent Japanese kitchen in Beijing — about sixty references with a particular Burgundy and Champagne anchor for the sushi pairings, a careful Japanese sake selection that the head sommelier curates personally with semi-annual trips to Niigata and Yamaguchi, and a small Japanese-whisky programme that includes Yamazaki and Hibiki aged bottlings. Service runs at the polished international-Beijing standard — bilingual, captain-paced, and unhurried. For a quarter-century the room has anchored Beijing's contemporary Japanese identity.
Why This Is Beijing’s First Date Pick
For a first date in Beijing — particularly the international and English-speaking expatriate-and-locals circle for whom the Guomao address is the most accessible serious dinner in the city — Hatsune delivers a precise format. The sushi counter offers a deliberate twelve-course tempo that structures the conversation without requiring the work that a tasting-menu French room demands. The creative-roll menu is shared by design — pieces arrive cut for sharing, the table inherits its own conversation about which piece each person liked best. The price ceiling is generous but defensible. The Heqiao Building address is unambiguously easy to find. And the room's twenty-five-year Beijing pedigree carries a kind of cultural-cachet weight that the city's newer openings cannot yet match.
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