Old Tower

Taikoo Li Sanlitun is Beijing’s shorthand for polished consumption: glass, fashion, late dining, and an international crowd moving between malls, terraces, and hotel bars. Inside that setting, Old Tower reads as a quieter proposition. The room is warm and minimal rather than theatrical, which matters because the cooking is already carrying a large idea: fine dining in mainland China can be pescatarian, ingredient-led, and still rooted in regional food memory rather than imported luxury codes.

The restaurant opened last September and entered the 2026 Opinionated About Dining Top Restaurants in Asia Recommended list, a useful signal for a city where international recognition often clusters around imperial cuisine, hotel dining, and high-capital tasting-menu rooms. Here, the argument is narrower and more interesting. Seafood sits at the centre, but the pantry reaches into Chinese and Thai ingredients, rural traditions, and French technique. That combination could easily become decorative fusion; the stronger reading is that the kitchen is using sourcing as structure.

Seafood, grain, and regional memory drive the menu

Beijing has never been a coastal city, so seafood-led fine dining here carries a different charge than it does in Shanghai, Hong Kong, or Tokyo. It depends less on local abundance and more on selection, supply chains, and the kitchen’s ability to make marine ingredients feel native to the meal rather than flown-in status symbols. Old Tower’s known ingredient set points in that direction: black abalone, sting ray, mantis shrimp, razor clam, and blue lobster appear alongside yellow corn, sticky rice, Northeast Chinese sauerkraut, mung bean, and buckwheat references from Shanxi.

The more persuasive dishes are the ones that connect sea and land through technique. Razor clam with chilli crisp and yellow corn chawanmushi brings a Japanese custard format into contact with Chinese heat and sweetness. Blue lobster with sticky rice and Northeast Chinese sauerkraut puts a luxury shellfish against preserved acidity and grain, a combination that makes more sense in a Chinese context than in a conventional French seafood progression. Kao lao lao, the rustic buckwheat pasta associated with Shanxi, gives the menu a rural northern anchor rather than leaving it in the abstract territory of premium seafood.

Bread service is another signal. In many tasting-menu rooms, bread operates as a borrowed French marker, useful but rarely specific. Here, highland barley sourdough with clotted yak milk pulls that ritual toward Tibetan ingredients. It is a small but telling move: the European frame remains visible, but the point of interest is the origin of the grain and dairy, not the imported etiquette of the course.

Talib Hudda's Beijing fluency matters, but the story is the city's changing fine-dining language

Chef Talib Hudda, born in Canada and classically trained in French cuisine, has spent a decade working through Chinese culture and language. That credential matters because this style of cooking depends on translation without flattening the source material. The stronger point, though, is not biography. It is what Beijing’s contemporary dining tier now permits: a non-Chinese chef can work seriously with Chinese rural foodways, Thai ingredients, and French training in a room aimed at the city’s international dining public.

Hudda’s earlier restaurant, Refer, was the first Beijing restaurant to appear on Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list, giving Old Tower an unusually clear lineage inside the city’s modern fine-dining conversation. That recognition places the new project in a category apart from Beijing’s better-known heritage dining formats, where the appeal often rests on roast duck, palace cuisine, or regional nostalgia. For those traditions, start with 1949 - Duck de Chine, 1949 The Hidden City (Beijing cuisine), or 1949-å ¨é¸­å­£. For a broader contemporary European thread in the city, Amico BJ (European Contemporary) and Aroma sit in adjacent territory without making the same pescatarian sourcing argument.

The design has a handmade dimension as well: Hudda personally designed cabinets, tables, trolleys, trays, and brass floor details shaped around ingredients such as eggs, morels, and chestnuts. That detail is worth noting because it reinforces the room’s ingredient-first grammar. The space is not asking to be read as spectacle; it is asking the diner to notice the material culture around the plate.

Where it fits in a Beijing itinerary

The restaurant is a Sanlitun address for travellers who want Beijing’s current fine-dining conversation rather than only its established culinary canon. The area works well for an evening built around restaurants and bars, especially for visitors already staying in Chaoyang or moving between shopping, hotels, and nightlife. The dining decision is clear: choose it for a seafood-focused tasting-menu mindset, for Chinese regional references filtered through French training, and for a room that treats sourcing as the organising principle.

For broader planning, use Our full Beijing restaurants guide alongside Our full Beijing hotels guide, Our full Beijing bars guide, Our full Beijing wineries guide, and Our full Beijing experiences guide. Travellers comparing China’s regional dining circuits can also look beyond the capital to #8 in Chengdu, 100 Century Avenue Cantonese in Shanghai, 167 Shan Hai Li in Fuzhou, 1913 in Hangzhou, 1927 Dong Yuan Si Chu in Xiamen, and 1980烧肉粽 in 厦门市. For Asian drinking and casual-format context outside China, see Jōdo Saké Bar in Los Angeles and Onigiri Time in Pasadena.