Donglaishun

Donglaishun

　　Donglaishun Restaurant is a celebrated historic establishment among Beijing’s renowned traditional eateries. Over the past hundred years, its Halal cuisine, as a key branch of Beijing-style cooking, has made a notable impact on promoting Chinese food culture and on sustaining, innovating, and evolving the capital’s culinary heritage through its founding, development, and ongoing refinement. The Donglaishun brand, forged through a century of challenges, has become an iconic symbol of Beijing cuisine and a “China Time-Honored Brand” known both at home and abroad. In 1903, with the opening of Dong’an Market—the earliest and most famous market in Beijing—founders Ding Deshan and his brother started their business by pushing a cart equipped with a wooden counter and a few stools to the market’s north gate. There, they set up a humble street stall selling Halal snacks such as douzhi (fermented mung bean drink) and pagao (a type of rice cake), marking the first step in their entrepreneurial journey. A few years later, the Ding brothers established a proper shop and put up a signboard, giving birth to the name “Donglaishun.” Initially called “Donglaishun Congee Shop,” the small-scale operation was no more than a modest wooden shed offering items like douzhi, mixed noodles, stuffed pancakes, and sheep offal. In 1912, a fire destroyed Dong’an Market, burning down the wooden shed. After the market was rebuilt, Ding Deshan constructed a three-room tiled house on the original site and renamed the business “Donglaishun Lamb Restaurant,” beginning to serve hot pot lamb. Guided by a principle of integrity and a commitment to quality and authenticity, and adept at learning from others’ business methods and cooking techniques, Donglaishun’s lamb hot pot soon rivaled the fame of “Zhengyanglou,” a well-known restaurant in Beijing at the time. By the 1920s, Donglaishun had improved its hot pot equipment and, with its unique strengths—careful ingredient selection, meticulous preparation, comprehensive seasoning, and strong firepower—it rose to become the best lamb hot pot restaurant in the city. From then on, the success of Donglaishun snowballed. The restaurant not only built elegant multi-story premises with private dining rooms but also continuously expanded its offerings. It developed a complete range of Halal dishes featuring techniques such as quick-frying, roasting, stir-frying, and hot pot. Amid the thriving presence of Sichuan, Shandong, Hunan, and Cantonese cuisines in Beijing, Donglaishun carved out its own distinctive niche and grew into one of the city’s most famous time-honored brands.