It has become a common practice for firms to release apology letters and announcements after reputation damage, but not all such public discourses lead to expected reputation repair. This paper, integrating reputation management with discourse analysis, conducts discourse analysis to the apology letter and the handling announcement by Haidilao Hotpot Restaurant after its sanitation crisis in 2017, and thus explores and elucidates how discourse is employed to repair corporate reputation. The case study shows that the three metafunctions of discourse, that is, textual, ideational and interpersonal functions, respectively promote the recognition of problem, presentation of problem solution and the mitigation of stakeholder relationship, thus changing the stakeholders' negative perception against the firm. The discourse combines superficial and substantive reputation repair in the communicative process. Such findings enrich our understanding about the discourse-based reputation repair, and present suggestions for corporate reputation management and organizational communication.