Hokkaido, next door

One of the hottest dining spots among Beijing's young executives these days is an unassuming eatery tucked away in a side street off the Third Ring Road. Pauline D. Loh slurps up the soba and enjoys the sea urchin.

The chopped spring onions were bright green, fresh and cleanly cut. The sesame seeds were perfectly whole and still a little shiny from being just toasted. By their side, a fresh quail's egg sat, its top chopped off for the diner's convenience. The soba was cold, and neatly coiled into two piles on a bamboo platter.

I was mightily impressed by the knife work, the careful attention to details and the presentation. Cold soba is a simple dish that appears on almost every Japanese restaurant in Beijing, but this was quite the best I have tasted.

The warm and artistic ambience helped impress. Just outside our little cubicle, samples of the lady boss's calligraphy decorated the wall. Inside, two rows of simple hooks let us hang our winter jackets up, a thoughtful detail that made us more relaxed simply because we did not have to share space on our chairs with heavy coats.

As soon as we sat down and flipped through the menu, the seduction began. Almost every item made us pause and debate if we wanted to order. But just being four people, and not very heavy eaters at that, we had to settle for just a dozen or so dishes. Well, maybe we were hungry eaters.

For starters, we had the fresh sea-urchin-roe sashimi. It was also the most expensive dish of the meal, but the sea urchin was very fresh, with none of the dark veins that would taint the roe with a natural fishiness. We cleaned the bamboo platter in just a few minutes.

We also ordered fresh oysters, one each. The flesh was firm, clean and the oysters tasted bright and salty. A ponzu sauce helped them go down very easily.

Sometimes, the simplest dish is the best test for the chef, and at Hokkaido Restaurant Xunxian, he passed with flying colors. The cabbage salad is usually a side served with a tonkatsu cutlet set or maybe the oyako donburi chicken set, but here, it is proudly presented on its own, accompanied by a fragrant thick sauce which the waitress described as a cross between a sesame and a Thousand Island dressing.

The owners' lyricism comes into play here: The dish is named Snowy Landscape, alluding to the mini mountain of icy crisp thinly shredded cabbage.

Our sushi choice was the avocado and soft-shell crab long roll. This was one of the prettiest dishes on the table, with glistening pearls of golden salmon roe on top. Unfortunately, the wasabi cream that accompanied it was a bit too strong for me and I started tearing.

We saw several fish dishes, but decided on a grilled salmon head that came on a black ceramic platter. The fish was grilled to perfection, cooked but with none of the charred skin and watery flesh that mars the same item at other places.

For our mains, we also ordered what many young female bloggers have been raving about - the curry soup rice. It was a fragrant bowl of curry sauce with chicken, grilled eggplant and carrot batons. The bowl of rice came topped with black sesame. It was spicy, a bit sour and very tasty.

Then we had two bowls of rice in tea, one with salmon flakes, and the other with the Japanese sour plums or ume.

Hokkaido Restaurant Xunxian has no English name, and the signboard is in Chinese and Japanese. I extracted the name from the lady boss, whom I contacted online. She tells me that she will go to Hokkaido this month to bring back more konbu, the kelp that flavors a lot of their dishes. She's originally from Beijing and her husband is a Hokkaido native.

That explains the connectivity to the land that makes their food so honest. I sincerely hope they preserve this crucial ingredient, and I hope to sample the konbu-flavored soba the lady boss promises to add to the menu soon.