As easy as ABC : American-born Chinese are on a roll in the mainland's dining scene

>By David Eimer of the South China Morning Post
May 11, 2009

When Alan Wong arrived in Beijing in 2000 he was a 24-year-old intern at a property company looking to spend a year on the mainland before returning to his native California to study law. Nine years later, Wong is a successful restaurateur and leads a burgeoning pack of American-born Chinese (ABCs) who are shaking up the capital's dining scene. Stepping out from behind the sushi bar of his latest outlet, the second branch of his popular Japanese-themed restaurant Hatsune, Wong has every reason to be content. He owns or is a partner in eight restaurants in Beijing and Shanghai, with a ninth set to open next month. He says the secret of his success is simple. "My business is not really like a business. It's just what I do - it's who I am. I don't consider it work - it's just part of my personality. The restaurants are my hobby and my staff are like my kids. Every aspect of my life has to do with the restaurants," says Wong. It didn't hurt that the property company he interned at was owned by his multimillionaire father, who bankrolled Wong's first restaurant. Even so, in a city where diners are notoriously fickle and restaurants open and close on a weekly basis, he has succeeded where many have failed. In part, that's because Hatsune was the first California-style Japanese restaurant in Beijing. More importantly, though, Wong aimed his restaurants at westerners, just as more and more of them were flooding into Beijing. "I can't target the Chinese because I'm not Chinese. I don't consider myself Chinese - I'm an American, a foreigner," he says. "However, I always thought that if you open a restaurant targeting foreigners, then if it's successful the locals will come out of curiosity." Now, 40 per cent of his customers are mainlanders, with that number rising as the global financial crisis takes its toll on Beijing's expatriate community. And while his baggy jeans, sneakers and T-shirt betray Wong's Californian upbringing, his ethnic background as the son of a Taiwanese couple who emigrated to Sacramento gives him a decided advantage over other foreign restaurant owners. "It helps in building relationships with the local officials," says Wong. "It's a novelty for them. At first, they say, 'Oh your English is really good.' Then they realise that English is my mother tongue and then they ask questions like, `Who are you then?'. The fact that I look Chinese but I'm not Chinese is a topic for them to talk about and the more you have to talk about with people the better your relationship with them is going to be." If Wong is the undisputed star among ABCs in the restaurant business in Beijing, then Handel Lee is their godfather. Best known for being the driving force behind Shanghai's Three on the Bund complex and the redeveloped Legation Quarter in Beijing, now known as Chi'en Men 23, the 47-year-old lawyer from Washington opened The Courtyard, the capital's first upmarket restaurant serving foreign cuisine, in 1996. "I did The Courtyard because there were no standout places to eat, apart from in hotels. They just didn't exist in Beijing then," says Lee. But just as Wong was helped by his father financially, so too was Lee able to grab perhaps the prime spot for a restaurant in Beijing, literally next door to the Forbidden City, because it was once owned by his mother's family. Eileen Wen Mooney, the author of dining guide Beijing Eats, says Lee's legendary connections are the key to his success. "He's a guy with the right relationships to get historical places like the Legation Quarter," she says. And like Wong, Lee believes his ethnicity was a benefit in building that guanxi [connectedness]. "I think it did help. There's a connection, almost an intimacy, with the locals. If I was just an ordinary American from Grand Rapids, people might not have helped me so much," he says. But not all ABC restaurant owners have the advantage of rich parents or a bulging contact book. Leon Lee's first experience in the food and beverage industry was waiting tables in his dad's Chinese restaurant in San Francisco. After moving to Beijing in 2004, he is about to open Apothecary, a cocktail bar cum restaurant. Lee, 36, sees being an ABC as a hindrance as much as a help. "My train of thought is very western and a lot of the locals can't accept that. A lot of times, you get kicked around because you don't look like a foreigner, but act like one. "So they treat you as local Chinese when they want to, but they'll treat you like a foreigner when they need to take advantage of you," he says. Nevertheless, he sees Beijing as a prime destination for anyone in the restaurant business, a reflection of the fact that the first privately owned restaurant in the capital only opened in 1980. "It's still frontier land, the wild east. There's a whole world of food that doesn't exist here, or it exists in different qualities, which you can bring here. There's huge room for growth and diversification," says Lee. Many ABC restaurant owners are moving to fill those gaps. San Diego native Jen Lin-Liu spent two years researching her book on Chinese food, Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China, before opening the Black Sesame Kitchen, which offers gourmet dinners and cooking classes in a courtyard off the hip hutong of Nanluoguxiang. "There are definitely going to be more private kitchens like mine. It's a concept that's already taken off in Hong Kong and to some extent in Shanghai. You're going to someone's house for dinner, not eating out in a chain restaurant," she says. "I think in the future there are going to be far more niche restaurants for people who really care about food." Richard Wang, another southern Californian transplant, opened the All-Star Sports Bar & Grill on the night of the opening ceremony of the Olympics. "I think ABCs have seen a lot more than the local community in terms of restaurant concepts," he says. "When I came here it was all state-owned establishments or hole-in-the-wall places in hutong. That's changed, but we've all seen things overseas that no one has done here yet." Knowledge of the latest western dining trends is something locals can't compete with. "Having that experience of New York or LA is a great advantage when it comes to opening a great place in Beijing," says Handel Lee. "You know what works, so it becomes a question of execution. A lot of the local guys don't fully understand how a great place works because it's an alien concept - they haven't seen it at first-hand." Few ABC restaurant owners, however, are prepared to challenge the locals by opening places serving Chinese cuisine. "From the perspective of foreigners, there aren't that many restaurants catering to them. But from the Chinese perspective, there are lots of restaurants and different varieties of them. You can't be a foreigner and think you're going to take some of that market," says Alan Wong. Nor is he going to open any branches of his restaurants in the US. "I think they'd do very well, don't get me wrong. But I think if I went back to the States, I would like to quiet down my life a bit. I'd want to open something very small, like a 20-seat sushi bar with me as the chef," he says. Until that happens, it's a safe bet Wong's empire will keep growing.