Lamdre

The Restaurant

Lamdre opened in 2024 in a single ground-floor room of Block 14 inside Courtyard 4 on Sanlitun's Gongti North Road — a quiet inner-courtyard address one short block north of the city's busiest Sanlitun bar street — and the entrance is deliberately discreet: a single carved wood door, no exterior signage, and a small lantern lit at dusk. The dining room is the architectural counterpoint of a contemporary Buddhist temple: pale lime-washed walls, a single long oak table that runs the length of the room, eighteen covers at most, a working open kitchen at the back of the floor, and a high single skylight that lights the dining surface from above. Owner Zhao Jia (the principal behind several of Beijing's most influential vegetarian rooms) and chef Dai Jun, who trained for over three decades in Chinese vegetarian-Buddhist cooking — including a long working tenure at King's Joy and Shan He Wan Duo Vegetarian Restaurant — opened the room as the city's first plant-based restaurant designed for the international tasting-menu format.

The kitchen serves a single fifteen-course plant-based tasting menu that rewrites itself every three weeks across the Chinese twenty-four solar terms (jié qì). The cooking is contemporary Chinese in the technical sense: heat-tempered, savoury-led, never sweet, and architecturally plated. Recent courses have included a working aged-cucumber-and-fermented-bean-curd appetiser served in a hand-thrown celadon vessel, a smoked king-trumpet mushroom course presented with charred-leek consommé and pickled lotus, a soy-glazed yuba 'duck' carved tableside with the kitchen's working pancake-and-scallion programme that has become the room's signature, a Sichuan-pepper-and-aged-vinegar pickled vegetable course that the room treats as the menu's mid-course palette break, and a working mountain-fruit ice with aged osmanthus syrup that closes the meal. The wine programme runs both a working Chinese-and-international wine pairing flight at ¥888 and a parallel non-alcoholic pairing flight at ¥588 — fermented teas, working herbal infusions, and house-made working seasonal cordials — that the sommelier treats as the room's standing credential.

Service is conducted at the slow, near-ceremonial pace that the room's eighteen-cover ceiling permits: each course is plated and served simultaneously across the table by a kitchen team of six who run a working two-rotation kitchen brigade, and the chef Dai Jun walks the floor at the closing of each course to receive the table's notes. The Asia's 50 Best 2026 debut at No. 17 — the highest debut for any plant-based restaurant on the list and the second-highest position for any restaurant in Beijing this year — has made the room the city's single hardest reservation, and the eight-to-twelve-week booking lead time is now standing. For a Beijing dinner that needs to register as a serious contemporary kitchen rather than a Chinese-restaurant chestnut, Lamdre is the city's answer.