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 Chinese Restaurants Go Chic---Designer Dining ZT |
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ceo/cfo
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作者：ceo/cfo 在 海归茶馆 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
By BLYTHE YEE
January 26, 2007
HONG KONG -- When Bill Milewski was invited to the launch of a Chinese restaurant in Beijing last October, he balked. "I was just imagining this place with 12 tables -- and boring."
He went anyway, and didn't regret it. "We ended up at the equivalent of the Academy Awards," says the 44-year-old Beijing-based American who owns a Web search business, recalling the 6,000-square-meter venue's elaborate bars, private tented areas, bathrooms kitted out with chaise lounges and glam crowd.
LAN in Beijing
LAN, a restaurant-cum-lounge in Beijing, is one of a new generation of Chinese dining spots with cutting-edge design that are springing up in Asia. Over the past few years, entrepreneurial restaurateurs have successfully pushed concept-driven Chinese restaurants that evoke imperial-era homes, 1930s Shanghai nightclubs, or that ditch nostalgia altogether in favor of contemporary décor. Now, they're opening more -- and more elaborate -- eateries in such business capitals as Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai and Beijing, as well as moving into second-tier cities in China including Wuhan and Chengdu. Some operators even have plans to try to crack the U.S. market, where, they say, diners have too long associated Chinese restaurants with cheap meals in less-than-salubrious surroundings.
Dishes like Chinese hot pot, not usually considered haute dining, are being served at minimalist-chic Hot Loft in Beijing. In other designer venues, the cuisine has been revamped, with chefs using less oil and steering clear of traditional ingredients such as cornstarch. And restaurateurs are creating brands and concepts -- take Beijing's Green T. House, a contemporary teahouse/gallery with a new branch in Hong Kong -- that encompass the entire dining experience, from plates to service to menus.
Restaurant operators point to the rise in Asia of affluent local and expatriate professionals who demand stylish interiors -- and who are willing to pay heftier tabs to eat in them -- as one big reason to create holistic dining experiences. Plus, the talent pool in Asia's food and beverage business just keeps getting deeper. "We are now competing with the most creative people in the industry," says Andrew Tjioe, executive chairman of Tung Lok Group, whose stylish My Humble House restaurants, which serve modern Chinese cuisine with a pan-Asian touch, have been cropping up from Singapore to Tokyo. "If we keep the same (old) mentality, the Chinese restaurants will be left out," he says. In March, Tung Lok will open upscale Chinese eateries in Wuhan and New Delhi.
And with more competitors knocking off their menus, concept and décor, restaurants have to keep adapting, says Calvin Yeung, the founder and owner of Aqua Restaurant Group, which whetted Hong Kong's appetite for nostalgic-chic, northern-style Chinese restaurants a few years ago. Mr. Yeung's new Hong Kong eateries include Yun Fu, where the walls resemble carved stone, with Buddha statues interspersed throughout the space, and a yet-to-open restaurant styled after an old-fashioned Chinese bookstore.
Food and beverage specialists are bringing more international savvy to the table, too. Danny Wang, executive director of South Beauty Group, remembers taking a family trip to Paris in 1999, and bringing his parents to posh restaurants and venues like the hip Hotel Costes. "They thought we should have some places like this in China," he says. The trip helped spawn the company's chain of South Beauty restaurants, which serve Sichuan food and have sleek, contemporary décor, and are often located in office buildings to draw executive clientele.
Lumiere in Hong Kong
South Beauty Group has opened 23 restaurants since 2000, mostly in Shanghai and Beijing, where it owns LAN, the sprawling, Philippe Starck-designed venue that Mr. Wang hopes will raise the company's world-wide profile, which is critical to its expansion plans.
LAN, named for Zhang Lan, the company's president and Mr. Wang's mother, serves a mix of regional Chinese cuisines as well as mojitos, ginger-flavored cocktails, and Krug Grand Cuvée NV at $500 a bottle. The décor shows Mr. Starck's signature eccentric luxury touches, with velvet drapes, shelves full of stuffed birds, and old black-and-white photos. On a recent Monday night, all of the 35 private rooms were booked.
Mr. Wang's company aims to have 100 restaurants open in China by 2009, many of them in less prominent but increasingly wealthy cities. The group hopes to make its first foray in the U.S. this year with a South Beauty restaurant in New York City. "We have to do something to change the perception of Chinese restaurants overseas," Mr. Wang says. "I think that Chinese restaurants overseas (serve) garbage food, really unhealthy," often fried and oily.
Hot Loft in Beijing
Indeed, boosting the global image of Chinese restaurants seems almost a moral imperative for some of these restaurateurs. Japanese cuisine, they note, was taken to the West by food and beverage professionals, and anchored by star chefs such as Nobu Matsuhisa. By contrast, the typical Chinese restaurant in the West is "pretty much an immigrant, dad-cooks-and-mom-goes-to-the-cash-register situation," says Paul Hsu, the executive director of Elite Concepts, a Hong Kong-based company that is opening a branch of its yè shanghai restaurants, a brand meant to evoke the glamour of old Shanghai, in Shanghai's Pudong area this month. Within a year, Mr. Hsu plans to open a restaurant in Las Vegas for Chinese visitors to the gambling capital. It's probably going to be Sichuan, a cuisine he thinks is more likely than others to appeal to Western and Chinese palates alike.
Elite Concepts is looking to take yè shanghai to London, and also developing a new restaurant brand offering a mix of regional Chinese cuisines to places like Chengdu.
Clockwise from top left: Cuisine Cuisine in Hong Kong; My Humble House in Singapore; LAN in Beijing; yè shanghai in Shanghai's Xintiandi district
For inventive designers, China offers a big opportunity to strut their stuff. It's easier to create innovative interiors in mainland China than, say, Hong Kong, says Mr. Hsu, pointing out that cheaper real estate and bigger spaces give designers more flexibility. What's more, new office buildings and other venues around the region are allowing restaurateurs to let their imaginations run wild. For instance, when Singapore's Esplanade arts center opened in 2002, Tung Lok's Mr. Tjioe took advantage of the new space to realize a concept -- My Humble House -- that he'd been toying with for years: combining modernized versions of Chinese regional cuisines in a dramatic space, with a menu he describes as "poetic" (a chicken drumstick marinated in Chinese wine is labeled "Tender, Delightful, Divine"). "In my house, you have to play by my rules," says Mr. Tjioe, recalling that his years in the restaurant business had made him tired of catering to traditional tastes and ready to try something new. "I thought, 'this restaurant is going to be different, very individualistic.' In a way, it's been an experiment."
In making over Chinese eateries, interior designers sometimes adapt features traditionally found in Chinese restaurants, such as round tables and private VIP rooms. At Cuisine Cuisine, a Cantonese restaurant in Hong Kong, patrons who want privacy but not silence can opt for a circular area closed off by a fabric-and-knitted-leather curtain that doesn't block out the hum of the restaurant. There's a glowing aquarium -- a Cantonese restaurant staple traditionally used to house fresh fish for diners -- near the entrance, but it's not for customers to pick a garoupa from: "Don't call it a fish tank," says Samson Lam, the assistant project manager of Miramar Group, which manages the restaurant. "It's an art piece where you can see marine life."
In designing the interiors of Cuisine Cuisine and Lumiere, the Sichuan-South American restaurant next to it, the group didn't worry much about adhering to traditional feng shui principles. "If it was feng shui-driven, you wouldn't have that international flavor," Mr. Lam says. "You'd have gold dragons, red everywhere."
As for the food, many of these restaurateurs are willing to borrow from and blend regional cuisines to create their menus, upending culinary purists' notions about how Chinese food should be cooked and served. In the Tokyo branch of My Humble House, there's no wok stove, says Mr. Tjioe, adding that there are plenty of dishes that can be prepared without one. "I don't advocate that the Chinese kitchen should also go Western-style," he says, "but I think there should be another way of doing it." Instead of cornstarch, a staple thickener for sauces, his chefs tend to use reductions, and he doesn't allow meat tenderizer, which some restaurants use to soften beef, because he thinks it destroys flavor.
Even with the array of regional cuisines coming out of the various designer kitchens, these restaurants tend to offer smaller, more carefully edited menus; this, say restaurateurs, simply reflects diners' preferences for a relaxing meal, rather than a fully authentic culinary experience.
"People want to go to a visually stimulating restaurant" with a simple menu, says Elite Concepts' Mr. Hsu, and "pick a few dishes."
--Mei Fong in Beijing contributed to this article.
作者：ceo/cfo 在 海归茶馆 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 Chinese Restaurants Go Chic---Designer Dining ZT -- ceo/cfo - (9727 Byte) 2007-1-28 周日, 20:16 (993 reads)
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