Tatos: An Armenian Restaurant in Harbin

Tatos Ter Hakobyan also founded the first winery in the Far East in the 1920s, also named Tatos. It produced wine from Harbin’s black grape and Shandong’s white grape.

An unusual story is connected with one of the Armenian employees of Tatos Restaurant. In 1916, young Harutyun Mirzakhanyan escaped from his native village (nowadays Verin Karmiraghbyur in Armenia’s Tavush province) to avoid marriage and reached Harbin, where he worked at Tatos Restaurant. After several years, his godfather Daniel Babayan traveled to China, found him and took him back to marry. This information was provided me by my colleague at the Institute of History of National Academy of Sciences of Armenia, Mirzakhanyan’s relative Dr. Artashes Shahnazaryan.

Tatos Ter Hakobyan has run the business with his wife, Valentina Jarzeva; they have a son, Grigor Ter Hakobyan, who was a violinist. After graduating from the Russian Gymnasium of Harbin, he was sent to the United States for a higher education, and then was invited to Italy to perfect his technique for free in one of conservatories.

During World War II, Tatos Restaurant changed its title and owners several times during the Japanese occupation. Tatos Ter Hakobyan later resided in Shanghai, from where he moved to the USSR at the end of the 1960s along with his wife. Ter Hakobyan died at the age of about 100 in Tbilisi in the late 1970s. This information was provided by Susanna Majkalova (Shushanik Majkalyan), a Chinese-born resident of Yerevan, who knew Ter Hakobyan and his family from China.

Nowadays, Tatos is back to operating under the same name (the signboard is in Russian and Chinese), and the building itself is protected by the state. It is being remembered among the Russian and Caucasian restaurants of Harbin – Kavkaz, Iveria, Katusha, Allahverdi, Rogozinsky. The signboard of Tatos Restaurant is seen in the fifth part of the “Russians without Russia” documentary film series, presenting the history of Russian emigration – called “A Far East Result.” The atmosphere of old times is composed by gramophone, manual coffee grinder, typewriter machine, Russian dressers, books of the last century (Russian fairy tales, collections of verses by Tyutchev, Lermontov, pre-Soviet publications of Russian music, newspapers published at the beginning of the twentieth century), as well as the traditional collection of Armenian and Georgian wines.

As Russian journalist Larisa Jebokritskaya wrote in her article titled “The Russian Spirit in Harbin,” “In general, going here, as if you fall into another temporal and spatial dimension. The restaurant hall is spacious and cozy, the design is original, smiling pretty waitresses are dressed in accordance with European tradition. The menu is also designed in a European style: pizza, roast beef and other European meat dishes, soups, fries, potatoes, coffee, ice cream…. Both Russian Harbin residents and tourists, who know about it, are happy to go to this quiet and peaceful place. By the way, a Chinese translator, who is always at your service, also helps to ensure a comfortable stay here…”