Country Kitchen, Rosewood Beijing – Review

Country Kitchen at Rosewood Beijing is the place for traditional Peking Duck in the Chinese capital. A Michelin-recognised restaurant with an open kitchen, farmhouse-style tables, and a relaxed atmosphere, it serves the city’s signature dish with a refined technique and award-winning precision. The ducks are roasted over jujube wood in a brick oven and carved tableside. The food is excellent, and the experience memorable.

Peking Duck has imperial roots stretching back six centuries to the Ming Dynasty, when chefs in the royal kitchens perfected the art of roasting duck over fruitwood. By the Qing Dynasty, it had become the centrepiece of state banquets, and today it remains the iconic dish of Beijing. You cannot visit the capital without savouring it, and Country Kitchen is where to try it.

Informal Dining with refined cuisine

The setting at Country Kitchen is immediately welcoming with farmhouse-style tables arranged around an open kitchen where bamboo steamers stack high, fresh noodles hang from rails, and ducks emerge glistening from the traditional brick oven at the far end of the restaurant. The atmosphere is popping. Families share dishes across round tables. Friends chat and laugh over steaming bowls. It feels relaxed and informal, yet the cooking has the precision of fine dining.

Chef Zhang Shaogang is the Executive Chef. A Beijing native, he began his culinary career in 1989 under the tutelage of Li Qigui, one of China’s Top 10 Master Chefs. He spent a decade as head chef at Tai Feng Lou, once among Beijing’s top eight restaurants and famous for its Shandong-style dishes from the Qing Dynasty. Beijing-Shandong cuisine is the food of national banquets, and Chef Zhang is a master of this tradition.

Farm to Table Philosophy

His philosophy is farm to table, and nowhere is this more evident than with the duck. The birds are sourced from specially chosen farms outside the city. The ducklings are selected at 48 days old, weighing roughly 2.5 kilos, and grown to perfect plumpness. When they arrive in the kitchen, the skin is doused three or four times with sugared boiling water, which caramelises it to that recognisable golden brown. The ducks then rest in a drying cabinet before roasting.

The oven is another key part of the traditional roasting process. Country Kitchen uses jujube wood, the traditional fuel of Beijing’s great duck houses, burning in a high-temperature brick oven kept between 250 and 300 degrees Celsius. The chef adjusts each bird several times during roasting to ensure even colour and that essential combination of crisp skin and succulent meat. When it emerges, the duck is jujube red, tender, and remarkably light, not at all fatty.

When yours is ready, a chef wheels a carving trolley to your table. First comes the skin, sliced with expert precision, and arranged on a plate. The skin is considered the true delicacy. You lift a piece with chopsticks, dip it in white sugar, and eat it alone. The combination of sweet and savoury, the crackle of fat, the caramelised edges: this is why people come to Country Kitchen.

Then comes the meat, carved with a thin layer of fat still attached, ready for the pancakes. These arrive in a bamboo steamer, fine and delicate, alongside small dishes of spring onion, hawthorn sauce, honey melon, sweet flour sauce, and leek. The waiter demonstrates the technique with your first pancake, using dextrous chopstick work to assemble the perfect rolled pancake.

The duck does not end there. Country Kitchen offers duck soup made from the carcass, barbecued duck bone for snacking, and wok-fried duck bone too. A section of the menu is dedicated to barbecue skewers, and there are specialities like wok-fried vegetables and tempura seafood.

Beijing Dining

Rosewood Beijing itself is worth the visit. The hotel occupies part of the Jing Guang Centre, once the tallest building in the capital, now a striking presence in the CBD skyline. During our festive visit, the exterior was a sparkling mass of red lights, and the interior was sophisticated and refined. The hotel holds two Michelin Keys and houses several notable restaurants beyond Country Kitchen, including The House of Dynasties for refined Cantonese under a three-Michelin-star chef, and Red Bowl for upscale Chinese hot pot.

Beijing itself impressed us. The city was welcoming, clean and remarkably advanced. The food scene is thrilling, and Country Kitchen captures something essential about it, where tradition meets contemporary style.