A Very Long Read: My Love/Hate Relationship With 2024

It was a tough year to own a restaurant. It was a tough year to be a real estate developer. But I’m not in either business and my 2024 was full of love. Also, a touch of fire.

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Five Things I Hated in 2024, and One Bad Dish

Coverage of expat closures as BIG NEWS

On a personal level, for some people involved in the business, I’m sure The Camel Group, Simply Thai and Sherpa’s closing were unpleasant.

But is it Big News when 20-year old businesses have run their course? Is it BIG NEWS when companies that are working on outdated business models or that have been outcompeted go out of business?

No.

It’s natural and healthy. And in the scope of Shanghai’s F&B industry, these are tiny businesses.

The surprise wasn’t that Sherpa’s went out of business; it was that it lasted until 2024, deep into the Meituan / Eleme era.

The story here shouldn’t be the closures of three expat brands.

It should be the survival of so many other restaurants whose owners are working extremely hard to continue adapting to a market that changes every year. I know many of them personally and they have worked more than ever in 2024 to make sure they are still relevant. That’s just doing business in China.

General Motors losing half of their market share in China — that’s BIG NEWS.

One less foreign-owned brunch place? That’s EXPAT PANIC.

Tech bros trying to replace chefs

In summer, I reported a long piece for Esquire magazine about robotics in the commercial kitchen. I interviewed executives in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Hong Kong and Germany. I walked into the piece seeing robotics as just another tool in the kitchen, useful if useful, and unnecessary if not. No moral judgement.

But after stepping into some of these kitchens and talking to the people behind the automated robot arms, it really turned me off.

The turning point was hearing the CEO of Germany’s publicly listed Circus Group describe kitchens to me as chaotic, backward places, painting human chefs as unreliable and possibly unhygienic worker drones.

My distaste for these excited tech bros hardened when I walked into the back kitchen of a university in Hangzhou that’s trying to automate one of its canteens.

A robot arm, like what you might see in an automotive factory, was given a ton of space in a glassed-in room, put on a pedestal because it could lower a basket of eggplant into the fryer and load a tray of fish into an oven — the most basic mechanical tasks.

Meanwhile, five guys in the dish room were pressed shoulder to shoulder scrubbing pots and pans and loading plates into the dish machine.

So my problem with this industry isn’t that we are automating the kitchen. It’s that we are automating the wrong part of the kitchen. No one wants to be a dishwasher when they grow up. But I guess it’s not sexy to invent a better pot-washing solution.

In a broader sense, this is my worry with AI and tech bros running the world. We are trying to automate writing (ChatGPT) and the arts (Dall-E) and cooking (see my Esquire article) — the things that make us human, and that actual humans do best — but the real menial tasks of life, like dishwashing or street sweeping — these tech bros don’t seem to care about the people who spend their lives doing that.

Watching my noodle shop suffer

In fall, one of my favorite restaurants in the country, a noodle shop in Suzhou, suffered a massive wave of online abuse. I didn’t write about it and I’m not going to name them here (it’s easy enough to search if you really care) because they asked me not to; after talking to them, we all agreed it would be best to just let it blow over. Don’t feed the trolls.

Basically, a customer found something gross inside a duck leg and accused the restaurant of a food safety violation — ridiculously, they said it was a rat (inside the meat of a duck leg). But they also wanted public vengeance on my friends who own the shop and the story blew up on social media.

At first, I thought the customers were scammers looking to make a quick 7,000 RMB — the price of their meal times ten, the legal compensation for food safety violations. There is an industry of people who do this to restaurants for a living.

I looked into it pretty deeply, going to Suzhou to watch the security camera footage, hearing the back story and speculation (which I can’t repeat here), and some of the dark behaviour involved. The officials in Suzhou finally declared the parts that the customer found in the meat to be 100% duck.

Meanwhile, my friend’s restaurant was getting absolutely trashed on social media. They closed for several days to regroup. The mom, who is also the chef, a very proud and elegant Suzhou lady who had an entire white-collar career before opening this high-end noodle shop, was distraught. It was really harsh. Business is still suffering, they told me last week. I don’t know if they can recover.

In the end, I don’t know what to think. The motivations of the customer who blew it up on social media aren’t clear; neither is what exactly they found (or planted) in the duck leg.

I went so far as to contact duck disease specialists in the United States, who confirmed it could have been a cyst or abscess deep in the tissue — something no chef cooking a duck leg would be able to catch by looking.

That’s gross but it’s no one’s fault. It happens.

But even that is just a theory, and the reality is that thousands of people rushed to judgement, incited by a pissed-off customer, and it seems like they’ve succeeded in destroying a very excellent business.

The gelato-fication of my neighborhood

The block of Wulumuqi Lu between Fuxing and Wuyuan has seven gelato shops. I like gelato too but I also liked when my neighborhood businesses were meant for people in my neighborhood, before it became Xuhui Disney.

Watching two countries I love grow farther apart

The US and China. This has nothing to do with food, restaurants or anything I usually write about here on this account. But it makes me sad.

Bonus: The worst dish

The worst thing I ate all year: a muddy river fish in sugar syrup covered in what appeared to be hardened dental floss. Kaifeng is not my favorite city for food, but even it has much much better things to eat than this Henan classic.

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Eight Things I Loved in 2024

Talking about wet markets

I did this big project about a wet market (The Shanghai Wet Market Index) with a great team of researchers, artists and professors.

We started it in 2021 and released it in fall 2024. It made me think much more deeply about the food supply in China, and in other countries, and what each side could learn from the other.

China is in the process of industrializing and standardizing its food supply, a necessity in a country with a population this large.

But does it have to eliminate flavor, seasonality and natural variation in order to do that?

Do our spring onions in Shanghai need to be trucked in from Yunnan (they are), 2,500 km away?

At the more human level, what’s going to happen to the country’s wet markets, and what should happen to them? How do we want to use them, if at all, in the future?

If we are going to replace them with online shopping, what attributes do we want to keep?

I led a talk at Garden Books in late summer on the topic, which turned into a very lively debate. At one extreme, someone advocated just getting rid of all the markets. At the other extreme, people argued for their nostalgia value.

This is yet another part of the food industry that is changing / struggling / evolving in fascinating ways.

Market managers are desperate to figure out how to survive, young people are getting more and more interested in visiting markets (though mostly as tourists or for pictures), and cities are losing an important part of their food landscape every month as more and more markets go out of business.

If you eat, you should care too. And if you care and want to know more, you should look up Zhong Shuru, an anthropology professor in Guangdong who studies markets around the country. I’ll be talking with her more in 2025 about this topic.

Building a YouTube channel with our team

Here: youtube.com/@saintcavish. This is a big part of my future, and it’s a team effort: Graeme, Jessie, Yifan, Leo and Rachel, plus many others.

Pasta diplomacy

We took three very accomplished Italian chefs to the hometown of Chinese noodles for the YouTube. Pasta diplomacy. We spent three days in Taiyuan and Xinzhou to look and learn.

The most touching part for me, however, was at a Noodle School on the last day, when Riccardo, Marino and Paolo turned the tables, and cooked for the students.

These kids have tough backgrounds; Noodle School is a vocational program meant to give them a basic living and a better life.

I don’t know how much they understood about the Michelin-starred, luxury hotel and restaurant world that the Italians chefs come from, or how rare it was to have three chefs of this caliber together, cooking simple Italian dishes.

But the exchange between them, watching the kids watching the chefs, and finally eating their food, was everything I hoped it would be as I fought to put this trip together (and pay for it).

Little experiences like that can leave big impressions on people, and it’s impossible to say if, or how, that day’s interactions will echo throughout a young chef’s life.

I suspect it might.

It will take years to know. Check back in 2034.

The people who said YES

My favorite quote this year came from Yu Dongcheng, a chef in a mass-market noodle shop in Shanxi for more than five decades, talking to the Italian chefs.

“People’s perspectives now are different from before. Back then, it was ‘you don't show me, I won't show you.’ That doesn’t work anymore. Helping each other improve, that's the way forward.”

So this is a huge thank you to all the chefs, restaurant owners, cooks, and other people who said YES to me this year when I asked them to show me what they do.

Mr. Pan in Kaifeng, who took his shirt off in the middle of making dumpling dough by hand in the July heat.

Mr. Cheng and Mr. Xiao of Lai Lai Xiaolong who let us step into their Jiangsu factory operations and see what it really means to pick and process 10,000 hairy crabs a day.

Zhou Hong at Jia Jia Tangbao for giving us access to the kitchen and his industry knowledge.

Principal Li Zhaohong of Ding Le Noodle School and noodle teacher Fan Jimei for demonstrating her craft from start to finish, in front of a camera.

Authors Du Leisheng and Yan Bing in Lanzhou.

Hai Fuchang, also in Lanzhou, who took us to the grave of his ancestor out in the Muslim cemetery, the man who invented the modern bowl of Lanzhou’s beef noodles.

The Chen family in Zhanjiang, Guangdong, raising and roasting pigs the old-fashioned way.

The Cheung family in Guangzhou, and the butchers at their roasting facility, where they still cook massive pigs over lychee wood, in ovens they designed and built.

And too many others to list. Thank you for bringing me into your world.

Taking people on tour and seeing their reactions

I started doing occasional food tours in 2024 for private groups. You might think it’s boring to visit the same four or five shops over and over again. But it’s not.

It’s incredible to see people’s reactions to that first xiao long bao or or spring onion noodle, and to see how wildly they vary — a big meh on a great potsticker but then a massive smile for its similar cousin, a shengjian bao.

I’ve had great guests too, from all over the world: Siberia, Luxembourg, Denmark, the US, the UAE, New Zealand, some from China…

My spots aren’t hard to find at all, but the stories that I tell about them are — it’s taken me years to collect them.

I’ll be doing a limited number of tours in 2025 as well, if you wanna join me and hear me turn a xiao long bao into a story of riches-to-rags-to-riches, 1990s economic optimism and how the suspension of Google Maps has helped fuel a copycat’s business.

The regionalism

The COVID era made people in China more inclined to look for interesting stuff within the country’s borders, and that has since exploded into a restaurant industry chasing Chinese regional cuisines. (And according to my friends at Chinese Cooking Demystified [look them up on YouTube], who did an exhaustive video about it this year, there are at least 63 distinct regional cuisines.)

It’s fantastic. There has never been a better time to eat regional Chinese food in Shanghai than right now. I can’t explore fast enough.

Three of my favorites have been Guanguan’er, a small Hunan restaurant in Hong Shou Fang that does food from western Hunan; San Bai Bei, an alcoholic hideaway with that fermented Shaoxing funk; and The Lightbulb Factory’s Mr. Liao, for Guangxi-style pork and beef offal and more. (They are a copy of a place in Xiamen but the food is good so I don’t care.)

There are sooooooo many more.

Learning about the meat industry

I explored the pork, lamb and beef industries in China this year, for clients and my own writing. Fascinating how much is happening here.

China has one of the world’s most sophisticated pork industries, and I followed it from tiny pig farmers raising heritage breeds to a pork museum in Jiangsu to massive companies with a million pigs in their farms, using foreign genetics.

In Ningxia, I was able to walk through the slaughterhouse of the biggest company doing real Yanchi salt-flat lamb, after an early morning at an informal animal trading market in a suburban parking lot.

In Shanghai, I looked at the beef industry for an overseas client, and began to understand the different generations of breeds that are out there, from “yellow” cows to Simmenthal to Angus and Wagyu crosses.

Ian Lahiffe, an agritech specialist in Beijing, helped me tremendously in understanding all of this, and made a point I’ve never heard before: modern China is one of the best places in the world to eat beef because it has all the different generations/breeds in the same place, and then imported beef from around the entire world, as international producers try to cash in on the Chinese market.

Changed my perspective. Thanks, Ian.

Small acts of kindness

In spring, I met a young reader who wants to be a chef or involved in food somehow when she grows up (she’s 13). Had she ever seen a professional kitchen? She had not. With her mom’s blessing and support, I asked the guys at Taian Table for a favor: give her a peek.

Stefan Stiller and Christiaan Stoop went above and beyond. Christiaan came in early on a weekend and toured Coco around all of their kitchens, prep space and storage space, and gave a really inspiring and impromptu talk about his background and why he ended up in the kitchen.

These guys are so busy, it’s unbelievable. The amount of prep they do to run their kitchen is daunting. They did not need to take two hours out of that for a young foodie and share their stories and answer her questions. But they did.

So, a very public thanks for their very private act. They didn’t do it for any media coverage or kudos or anything — I didn’t even tell them I was writing this. They did it because they wanted to help inspire one future chef.

Beautiful.

A Conversation with a Shark Fin Trader in Shanghai

In spring, I did something risky: I tried to research shark’s fin. It’s one of the most controversial and emotional disagreements in the food world between China and many other countries. The western image, of tens of millions of sharks being finned and then thrown back into the ocean to drown, is probably not the full reality. Neither is an argument I heard often on the other side, which is that the sharks are caught for their oil-rich livers, used by the cosmetic industry, and the fins are a by-product.

I wanted to get beyond the emotions and surface-level arguments and understand the issue. I ultimately failed. I contacted shark experts, NGOs and professors around the world, and was completely shunned. Academics who had written papers about shark populations and finning claimed to be out of touch with the industry now. NGOs had lots to say but little evidence. Shark experts told me they’d “get back to me”.

I had one interesting conversation and it was in Shanghai at the wholesale food market in Baoshan district: with a shark’s fin trader from Guangdong (Chaoshan) who has been selling dried seafood, and mostly shark fins, in Shanghai for the past 20 years. I’m not using his name or shop’s name because I asked him to speak candidly — and he did — though he was pretty ok with the whole thing; as he pointed out, he’s not doing anything illegal. A number of restaurants in Shanghai, including those with fancy international awards, serve it.

Below, some slightly edited excerpts from two hours talking with a shark fin trader.

Please keep in mind that these are his opinions. Publishing them doesn’t mean I agree with all of them.

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On the industry’s controversial reputation

The shark fin industry isn’t sensitive or a gray area, but it is controversial. But there’s no law in China right now that prohibits you from eating shark fins. It’s allowed, as long as it’s not from an endangered species. Morally, it’s controversial, but there’s a market. The government doesn’t promote it but they also don’t prohibit it. At the same time, on some level, they put a lot of effort into advocating the disadvantages of killing sharks in great numbers.

But as long as the shark is not a rare or endangered species in China, we can sell their fins. This is allowed in China.

On the types of fins and their quality

There are five categories: gold hook (金钩), greens (青片), tail fin (尾翼), tail hook (尾勾), and the anal fin, which is called zhi. The gold hook (dorsal fin) helps the shark make turns. They use it all the time, which is probably why this fin is thicker and has more “threads”.

We look at the thickness of the fin to determine if it’s expensive or not. The thicker, or the bigger the fin is, the more expensive it will be. The bigger it is, the rarer it is. Chinese people like rare things, so the rarer it is, the more expensive it is. It also depends on species. The quality of the great white shark’s fin is different from that of the fin of some species native to China, for example. But we don’t distinguish between sharks close to the shore or the sharks that are in the deep sea.

We don’t have many species. The Chinese government only allows us to sell a small fraction of them. You can find great white shark’s fin and some popular species here. But many governments have restrictions. We probably work with less than ten species.

On purchasing, supply and customers

We only sell shark’s fin from mainland China. Although Hong Kong has a free trade policy, it restricts exports to mainland China. The Chinese government doesn’t allow Hong Kong shark fin into the mainland. But they can go through third parties…

We have legal ways to cooperate, like with Customs. Every year, Customs auctions seized shark fins and sells them through designated companies. We can buy from the companies who win the auctions. That’s a reliable supply channel. There’s quite a lot.

We sell to businesses, restaurants and even individuals. This area — Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang — is the biggest market in China for shark fin, bigger even than Guangdong. But it’s hard to get into this industry. The barriers to entry are really high, and you need millions of RMB to get started.

On restrictions and their effects

Hong Kong has already put restrictions on two types of fins. No one wants to take the risk to smuggle fins these days, which means there are going to be fewer varieties of shark fins in the market, and ones you see now will slowly disappear from the Chinese market as our stocks are sold off. There’s no substitute for real shark’s fin, so prices will go up. What cost 30 RMB before is going to be 300 RMB in the future.

We don’t like the restrictions. We want to see this industry grow bigger with the support of the government. If the government continues to put restrictions on the shark’s fin industry, we could be trapped in an embarrassing situation, where we sell out of our inventory and have nothing left to sell.

We hope that the government will help keep the price of shark’s fin down, so that regular people can buy it too. The more volume, the higher the profit. We make money on volume, not single products.

On Yao Ming’s famous campaign from the 2000s

In 2008, (basketball player) Yao Ming promoted the idea of protecting sharks. After that, many first-tier hotels in China stopped selling shark fins. Sales basically dropped by half. Then, when the new leader took office, government stopped ordering shark fin, and the industry became even more miserable. But it’s never been like the peak years again, from 2003 to 2007.

On shark’s fin and health

During COVID, business was good. A lot of wealthy families ordered from us — they thought shark fin was good for health, so they ate a lot during that time. It offset the impact on the industry.

I don’t know if it’s really good for your health. There’s no data or scientific evidence to support this. People like folk medicine and tradition. You can’t eat shark fin too often. It has a lot of calcium, which is hard to digest.

On flavor

Shark fins don’t have any flavor. You eat them for texture; the flavor comes from the soup.

On the environmental impact

If we don’t fish for sharks, they’ll have a negative impact on the ecological balance.

When a Chinese fishing boat catches a shark, it dies quickly once it’s onboard. So what should the fishermen do with the shark and its fins? You sell them, and that creates an industry. Why not?

People outside of China look at this in an extreme way, which is not right. Look at Australia. If they don’t catch sharks, will people be comfortable be going to ocean? No! We need to achieve ecological balance, so we need to fish for sharks regularly. There are too many sharks in the ocean. If you don’t catch them, they’ll hurt the ecological balance. They don’t have any natural enemies.

And once they are caught, who is going to buy the fins? China can buy them.

I also think governments should place some limits on fishing though.

But the large-scale harvesting, we don’t really consider this issue. We are just part of nature; these issues are too complex for us. Governments should be the ones to set quotas and restrictions.

On tradition

Eating shark fin is not a common habit. It’s for the rich. But a lot of people want to try it and hotels want to make their menus fancier, to use it as a signature dish. If high-end hotels abandon it as an ingredient, sales will fall dramatically.

On who makes the best shark fin

After the end of the Qing Dynasty, imperial chefs left for places like Hong Kong and Taiwan. They brought their skills. Regular people didn’t know how to cook shark fin; they’ve never even seen it. Over time, the cooking methods from Hong Kong became the most popular, and it became part of Cantonese cuisine, and then spread back into mainland China from Hong Kong. So actually the chefs from Hong Kong and Taiwan are the best with shark fin.

In terms of cuisine, Cantonese are the best at using high-end ingredients. It’s undeniable. They also have the resources to learn about it. Fujian? It might sound a bit blunt, but a child from a poor family who doesn't even have enough food would not have the chance to study and perfect cooking, right? IIt's like building aircraft carriers in China — if China doesn’t have aircraft carriers, how can it build them? It's not the birthplace of aircraft carriers.

On where to eat

Luxury restaurants do it best. They have the skills. When we eat shark fin, we are not eating it for the fin; we’re paying more attention to the other cooking methods. The cheaper restaurants that sell shark fin, they’re just selling you calories, a way to fill up. It’s like steak. There’s a difference between having a nice steak at a fine steakhouse and having one at Pizza Hut. The only thing the cheap one does is stop you from being hungry. 

From the Archive: When Chefs Lie, or The Fake French Chef

In 2009, I wrote a story about a fake chef who was cheating customers out of a lot of money based on his fake work experience in Europe’s best kitchens.

I tracked down the kitchens he said he worked at and proved him to be a liar. When I confronted him with that evidence, he kicked me out of his restaurant.

Soon after, I began getting anonymous emails from someone claiming to be a lawyer. They suggested that if I published the piece, they would find a way to have me deported.

My employer at the time didn’t want the risk, and the story was never published.

While going through some old files the other day, I found the story and thought it would be fun to publish it now, fifteen years later.

I’ve taken out the sensitive details, like the chef’s name. He made a mistake years ago — he may still be making this mistake — but no need to name him now.

The rest remains more or less as I wrote it in 2009, with a few thoughts at the end.

— saintcavish

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I came across Chef X in December 2008, intrigued by the Gansu-born cook’s private French restaurant on Nanchang Lu. The menu was 880 RMB, a fortune back then, which he justified by saying he worked in the best kitchens in Europe for eight years.

I was skeptical.

Twenty-nine years old, and already sous chef — the number two — at Michel Bras, one of the world's best restaurants? Positions at Alain Ducasse's Plaza Athenee and Paul Bocuse's restaurant in Lyon? And he started cooking at 20? The background was too stellar.
Going from cooking school graduate to sous-chef in a three Michelin star restaurant is like going from a degree in International Relations to a deputy ambassadorship, and then giving it up to be head of the neighborhood committee.
 
In January 2009, (a magazine) picked up on him. The January issue interviewed X, anointed him "The Michelin Man," and asked easy questions about his time in the kitchens of France and his involvement in the Expo.

He talked about his “role” at Michel Bras, his upcoming "head chef" position at the restaurant attached to the Institut Paul Bocuse, which was opening a Shanghai branch in the regional Rhone-Alpes Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo later that year, and waxed nostalgic about the pressures, and pleasures, of working with the best.

The magazine urged: "Book soon to try X’s private restaurant, as it may only be open for a few more months."
 
So I did.

But first I contacted the restaurant Michel Bras, the three Michelin star restaurant X would later claim to have spent two years at, as chef de partie and sous chef.

Regine Bories, the assistant to Michel and his son Sebastien Bras, replied: "Sébastien Bras and Régis Saint-Geniez (Chef) remember that X stayed about 15 days in the restaurant. He was just 'commis de cuisine.' Mr X did not give them satisfaction."
 
A commis de cuisine is a grunt, the lowest rung on the kitchen hierarchy, the guy who picks the leaves from 20 kilos of watercress, or peels the potatoes with a spoon.
 
I ate dinner at X’s restaurant. The decor was charming, a three-story lanehouse with summery yellow walls and a bathtub full of ice and bottles of Champagne. The food less so. The first dish to the table held butter, the pickled cucumbers used for congee, and olives. Black olives, sliced, with the pit punched out in a perfect circle — the kind Subway uses on sandwiches, and Pizza Hut on pizzas.
 
Dessert was a dacquoise, a cake of sorts, made from almonds and beaten egg whites. X's version was decorated with neon pink strawberry coulis, from a tube.
 
In between, X offered a mackerel, a seafood soup with crayfish, a poached salmon, and a single lamb chop. The mackerel was average — the same fish you find at a thousand Japanese restaurants — and the crayfish tails mushy. The salmon was simple, the lamb low-quality. It was not the food of a prodigy.
 
After dinner, X joined us to tell stories of his “two years” at Bras, his “two years” with Ducasse, and his “four months” at elBulli, arguably the world's best restaurant. The stories were echoed in the restaurant’s own brochure, and in a wall of pictures in the stairway:
 
X: the founder of (company name). He graduated from the world's top culinary institute, France Bocuse School of Art and Food. He has worked in three-star restaurants for eight years at the Restaurant Paul Bocuse, Restaurant Michel Bras and Restaurant Alain Ducasse. He has exquisite cooking skills and rich experience at the management of a restaurant.

I spent months communicating with these restaurants to verify this. In the end, this is what they said.
 
Marine Cossard, Media Relations Officer for Alain Ducasse Enterprise, checked into X's claim of roughly two years with Mr. Ducasse's Plaza Athenee as chef de partie. It was, it turns out, "a training period at the kitchen of the restaurant Alain Ducasse at Plaza Athenee from November 2007 to March 2008."
 
And of elBulli? From Marc Cuspinera, who worked with elBulli in many capacities since 1990, including head chef: "I must tell you that between 1998 and 2009, X has not worked at the restaurant elBulli."
 
I took all of these emails to Chef X in person and asked him about the discrepancies.

He suggested that all of the restaurants must have been mistaken and turned defensive: "It’s not that Chinese people can’t cook French cuisine well. Chinese people can. A lot of French chefs are not as good as Japanese and Chinese chefs in France. Not all Westerners can cook better Western food than Chinese or Japanese."

On this point, I happen to agree with him. But it’s a distraction. That’s not the issue.

He insisted he “worked in those places”.

“But you pulled out these three emails and claimed that I only worked 15 days for one of them and didn’t work at the other one at all. Frankly speaking, this is nonsense. This is certainly wrong because I did work for these three places. I couldn’t have been sleeping for all these years and doing nothing."

He suggested I call the chef at Plaza Athenee, who would sort it out. I explained that I had.

X offered to send an internship certificate from elBulli on the following Monday. Instead, I received an email from an anonymous email account in legal language, threatening my ability to stay in China. It was the last word from X and his associates.

The restaurant closed quickly after that. X lost his position with the Institut Paul Bocuse.

When I told the story to the French chefs around town at the time, they either laughed or got angry at X (or both), but they all recognized right away that his CV was too good to be true in 2009, before the wave of Chinese cooks training in Europe that would come much later.
 
X was clever. He exploited the gap between Shanghai's desire to appear sophisticated and its actual knowledge of fine-dining Western food.

He played France's reputation for expensive fine dining against his customers' unfamiliarity of the cuisine, and profited from the discrepancy. Wrapping up the whole package in privacy and exclusivity ensured a low-profile, and a small pool of people to leave starstruck.
 
A single table meant he was only telling four or six or eight people a night his inflated stories about his career and the level of food he was cooking, while serving them something quite different. The high price tag only added to that. He deliberately confused price with quality, while cutting corners on ingredients.

If he was charging as much for a tasting menu as the most expensive Western restaurants in Shanghai at the time (Jean-Georges was 878 RMB and Laris was 888 RMB), the thinking goes, then surely he's serving something equivalent.

But those menus included luxury ingredients like tiger prawns, black cod, poached foie gras and a cheese course, and are created by teams of professionals.

X was just a liar.

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Follow-up, 2024:

Lying on a resume is common. But doing it to the extent that X did, and using his ludicrous claims to justify 700% markups on wine and poor cooking, made it something different.

In 2024, there are still a number of restaurants in Shanghai and across China serving western food that exploit the same knowledge gap that X recognized in 2009, and trying to confuse customers with high prices.   

But I have to hand it to X. In all my years in Shanghai, he was the boldest, the bravest and the biggest liar I’ve met. Coupled with his high prices, to a former chef like me that’s not just resume inflation — it’s almost a crime.

A few years after I wrote and buried this article, X applied for a job with a French chef I know well, who knew about this story. The chef passed me X’s real CV — he wouldn’t have dared to lie to a chef of this stature.

The reality, it turned out, was more in line with my assumption: a university degree in material sciences before graduating cooking school in 2007, then a few brief internships as commis here and there.

X may still be around in Shanghai.

A few years ago, I heard he was the head chef of a French place near the Bund. Perhaps he has turned into a very good French chef in the years since I wrote the first article. But I Googled him for this 2024 follow-up, and found him still selling those old lies to fancy magazines.

It would be fun to visit him again. No doubt, I’d be the last person he would expect to walk into his restaurant in 2024, the annoying “chef policeman” from his past.

But I gave Chef X 880 RMB once, and apart from that and a good story, that’s all he’ll ever get from me. 

Robots Are Taking Over Chinese Kitchens. Is This What We Want?

This article was written for the Chinese version of Esquire Magazine and was recently published on their account. It is re-published here in English with their permission.

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They presented it to me like it was the future: a white articulated arm in a glassed-in kitchen, retrieving a basket of noodles from boiling water, shaking them dry and then dumping them into a bowl. I was on the campus of a well-known university in Zhejiang, at the new partially automated canteen, where students can now order robot-assisted noodles (but I’m not allowed to say which one).

In the adjacent kitchen, another robot arm moved clay bowls to burners to be heated. In the back, in a production kitchen, a larger yellow robot arm moved trays of fish into a steamer oven and lowered eggplant into a fryer.

It was underwhelming. Instead of the future, it felt like the past, or, generously, the present. Robotics in kitchens are not new. In the last decade, companies from Japan to the United States to Europe have been borrowing ideas from the automotive industry to, as they say, increase efficiency.

In Tokyo, Connected Robotics has built an almost fully-automated soba noodle kitchen, complete with a dishwasher, as well as the Octochef, a takoyaki-making robot. In the US, an overhead arm on rails, nicknamed Flippy for its first iteration turning burgers, operates the fryer section at some White Castle outlets.

In 2023, McDonald’s opened an automated drive-through and take-away restaurant in Texas, and, like many fast-food chains, has been experimenting with AI to take orders. Most ridiculously, a British company has invented a pair of robot arms, with hands and fingers, that hang above a burner in your home kitchen and mimic the actions of a professional chef.

For the most part, however, this has happened in a western food context. Automation in Chinese food has been limited to simple chao cai ji, rotating drums that spin like washing machines to simulate a chef stir-frying with a wok.

But this is changing. Now a handful of Chinese companies are competing to standardize and automate the Chinese kitchen.

“I’ve always suspected that there’s something particular about Chinese food that makes it ripe for automation,” Hong Kong chef and restaurant owner Lucas Sin told me. “The recent technological push has focused on making the tossing and temperature control of the automatic wok work.”

Shenzhen’s Botinkit, started in 2021 with help from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology professors, is one of those companies. In just its latest fund-raising cycle, the company received RMB 100 million in investment in a Series A+ round, based on its cooking robot. A kind of advanced chao cai ji, it’s used in Walmarts in Shenzhen, Sichuan fast-food chain Delibowl in Singapore, and, most recently as the system underpinning Tigawok in Los Angeles, a quick-service Chinese restaurant serving more traditional dishes like mapo tofu and tomato-and-egg.

Sin notes the flattening effect of technology. “Operators end up having to pick and choose dishes that fit the system; usually, they are dishes that are cooked in one go (without the removal and readdition of ingredients), continuously tossed, and visually uniform,” he says. “That’s when the breadth of the cuisine gets narrowed down; everything becomes a stir-fry.”

Across the border, Rena Li and her husband got into the restaurant business about a decade ago in Hong Kong and quickly realized that finding enough chefs and achieving consistency were harder than they thought, especially if they wanted to branch out from their one Hunan-style restaurant to become a small chain. So with help from a team of newly graduated engineers, also from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Li developed a prototype robot that she says cooks 95% as good as her best chefs, and can achieve the same wok hei (锅气) as a traditional restaurant.

Today, her company, Hestia Kitchen, makes a complete automated kitchen suite, with a “particular focus on Chinese food”, including an induction-driven chao cai ji for stir-frying (“No Chef. No Space. No Problem.”), an automatic fryer, a touch-free dispenser for portioning out sauces and seasonings, and an integrated larder. Taken together, the Hestia Kitchen system moves prepared food from the refrigerator to the fryer or stir-fryer via a conveyor belt, and, according to the company, for $6,000 USD a month, can replace the work of 2-3 chefs. All five of her restaurants in Hong Kong are now automated.

For Li, the important thing to preserve was not the cooking skill of the chefs but the fact that each dish is stir-fried to order, she told me. Despite having a system she says is built for Chinese food, she is focusing on the Japanese and North American markets, with clients in Tokyo and New York City. “Our research shows that in mainland China,” she told me, “a shortage of skillful chefs is not really a pain point.”

Back in Shanghai, where I live and have worked as a chef, I went for lunch one day to an “AI canteen” run by Shanghai-based technology company Xixiang. Two cooks and an automated kitchen serve up to 500 people a day at this neighborhood spot, filling a buffet with 20 dishes that rotate daily. In its first month, customers were wary of the technology, the manager told me, but they quickly got over it; for the past three years, it’s been packed with elderly residents from the area and white-collar workers from nearby buildings looking for a bargain.

The day I went, the technology seemed to fade into the background. A human-sized yellow robotic arm stood in a glassed-in kitchen behind the buffet but the customers barely glanced at it, more focused on that day’s dishes: red-braised pork with dried bamboo shoots, Shanghai-style fried rice with ham, sweet cubes of pumpkin.

Despite all the robotics used in the preparation, the serving process was decidedly low-tech: a crew of (part-time) human employees spooning a standardized amount of each dish from the buffet onto the plates of hungry customers. A camera sensor at the end of the buffet line, meant to read each plate and charge accordingly, was out of order; another (part-time) human acted as cashier. Even with the human help, the manager told me the robotics cut labor costs at the canteen by half.



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Is this what we want?

In my conversations with multiple kitchen robotics companies in China and abroad, in reading about them online and watching countless videos of robotic arms doing some simple kitchen task, the common reasons for the founders to get into this business, and the major challenge they identify in restaurants, is a labor shortage. Some talk about employee safety, consistency issues, inefficiency and hygiene. As a former chef who spent ten years working in restaurant kitchens of all kinds (although not fast-food), something doesn’t sit right with me.

The labor shortage is the most troubling.

If kitchens can’t attract people to work in them, isn’t the answer to make the job more attractive? Business models might have to change to accommodate higher pay, better working conditions, more sane schedules. Perhaps menus need to shrink to simplify the kitchen complexity. That’s a more humane solution than just “replace them with robots”. But now we are talking about the nature of capitalism, its constant drive for profits and “efficiency”, and political systems — a far way from dinner.

Kitchens are not easy places to work. And yet millions of us choose this profession, out of passion or necessity. How many more would join if the pay was a little better, if we didn’t have to work 12 or 14 hours a day, if we had holidays? Instead, China’s kitchens are emptying out as young workers choose to deliver food, work as couriers, or drive for ride-sharing companies, where they might work just as hard but earn more than a young cook’s salary.

I spoke to a Chinese chef with more than two decades of kitchen experience, who now works with a large kitchen robotics company, helping to train their international customers. Privately, he admitted he was conflicted about his job, wondering if he was working against his own interest and background.

“Business owners’ first question is always ‘How much manpower can I cut with this machine?’” he told me. “It’s not about consistency, which these machines are great at, or efficiency. It’s just about eliminating jobs.” As a chef, he didn’t think that should be the first answer. We talked about his company’s machines as a tool, but one that may divide kitchen workers into two very unequal categories: the one who creates the recipes, and the one who just follows the robot’s prompts to add ingredients to the barrel.  

“I have been asking myself,” the chef confessed, “am I helping the chef industry?”

Call me biased, or defensive, but there is an undertone of disrespect among some of the tech class toward kitchen workers. The CEO of Circus Group, a German kitchen robotics company that has raised EUR 40 million in funding and is in talks with the Beijing university system to potentially supply thousands of its fully automated micro-kitchens, described professional kitchens to me as “pure chaos”.

Some talked about eliminating “mundane kitchen tasks” so that chefs can focus on creation and innovation.

“By integrating advanced technology, restaurants and foodservice operators can improve efficiency and consistency,” the Circus Group told me.

“We used to need professional cooks and yet the food we served was not good,” another says in a company promotional video. “But now [with a robot] … our efficiency and effectiveness are greatly improved.”  

This is the talk of people who have never worked in kitchens, and further, it misrepresents what these robots can do. It supposes that the ultimate ambition of every cook is to be a great chef, spending their days inventing new recipes, and that there is no order to a kitchen service. This could not be farther from the truth.

In my experience, there are two kinds of cooks in our kitchens: creators and operators. Creators, indeed, have a vision. They have something to express. But they are a tiny minority. The vast majority of us, myself included, are operators. We get joy from the act of cooking, from executing a dish perfectly, from the meditative and flow states that come from repetitive work — the “mundane kitchen tasks” the tech world seeks to eliminate. We do not need to reinvent every recipe or create something no one has tasted before. It’s true we can be inconsistent. The pride comes in attempting to transcend that. We are only human.

As for service, think of the kitchen choreography like a basketball or football game. Without understanding what’s going on, it looks random, chaotic, “inefficient”. And yet every move in a good line cook’s night is strategic, calculated to get as much done with as little wasted effort. Time pressures demand it.

Of course, not every task in the kitchen is rapturously boring. Sometimes it’s just work. Dicing 50 kg of carrots or shredding a case of ginger into threads may not inspire us. These tasks might be better done by robots. But, alas, the robots don’t do this. Instead, in all of these fancy robotic systems, the ingredients must still be prepared by humans, cut into the shapes required, by hand, with a knife.

At that first university, as we walked back into the production kitchen to see the yellow arm move trays from a rack to an oven, I peeked into the dishwashing room. Four men in hairnets labored with dirty trays, scraping them clean and loading them into a dishwashing machine. Many young kids have dreams of growing up to be cooks and chefs; no one dreams of being an institutional dishwasher. But, alas, robots don’t do this.

No, instead the tech world focuses on the sexy side of cooking, the part that involves fire (or used to) and skill (or used to), the final assembly in a cooking vessel — the part that requires taste. But, alas, robots don't do this either — yet.

Botinkit’s founder has said the company is “developing multimodal sensors that can also detect flavors and smells.” The ultimate goal, she said, is to “leverage artificial general intelligence so its robots can understand human preferences and refine cooking processes based on data feedback.” No one wants to talk about “disrupting” the dish pit or “innovating” the nightly clean. The focus is wrong.

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I am not against kitchen technology. I use a microwave at home, and when I was still cooking full-time, a programmable digital oven that could control both temperature (to the degree) and humidity (to the percent). If a chao cai ji can produce the same (or better) than an average chef, then it’s just another tool. If it becomes the tool that frees cooks from long split-shifts, then even better. But as these machines become more developed, at what point do they stop serving us and we begin serving them?

When do we become the robots, using our human knife skills to cut eggplant, to then feed into the machine for fish-fragrant eggplant, or human gophers to refill the flour hopper when the university noodle station’s noodle extruder runs out? When does their programming replace our ability to cook?

More worryingly, what are the implications for society? As our institutions — hospitals, universities, nursing homes, train stations and airports — prioritize efficiency over human working conditions, the divisions between social classes will only deepen. The less fortunate will eat robot food, while human-cooked food will become a luxury.

In fact, it’s already happening, Rena Li of Hestia Kitchen pointed out to me. Fast-food restaurants are supplied by automated food factories, and their technology has quietly advanced to the point that just three or four workers are necessary to run a busy KFC, for example, as I saw recently while waiting for some fried chicken at the Yinchuan airport. They don’t write flashy press releases trumpeting their mechanical achievements; they just whittle down the labor cost with ever-more advanced kitchen tech. Your French fries are not washed, peeled, cut, fried, frozen or packed by hand.  




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It’s a cliche to talk about “cooking with love” and, beyond that, a fantasy about how the professional kitchen works, much less institutional kitchens that create 20,000 or 30,000 meals a day. Cooks battle the chatter of the kitchen printer or the stream of new order tickets, working through task after task until service is over; they are not driven by love for the people in the dining room, who they most likely never even see, and whose only connection to the kitchen is the order printed on that slip of paper. The working kitchen is not your grandma’s house.

And still, something is lost when cooking becomes standardized, automated, impersonal. Chefs might not love you but they do care about how their food tastes. They automatically adjust to the natural variations in ingredients: ripeness, size, quality, appearance. They don’t need machine learning to recognize a brown spot in an apple or a piece of connective tissue on pork. Regular intelligence, not AI, is enough to know how the temperature of the wok will interact with the amount of oil in it, and how that will affect the cooking process.

But these don’t seem to be conversations that business owners want to have. There are hundreds of companies in China, if not more, making automated kitchen tools like chao cai ji and others making robot arms, and there must be thousands of customers. Yet in researching this article, it was almost impossible to find any restaurant willing to admit they use the machines. (Xixiang, which operates the AI canteen, is an exception.)

One restaurant owner who uses full automation in their restaurant chain told me “I don’t think customers are interested” but I sense there’s more to it than that. It seems to be an industry secret.

“The development of robotics in Chinese cooking mirrors ongoing trends of industrialization in other aspects of cuisine,” Sin, the Hong Kong chef argues. “Menus at sit-down quick-service restaurants are now concentrated on singular dishes instead of regions and flavors.”

He calls it “a reduction of Chinese cuisine, in the name of operational simplicity, control, and ultimately profitability.”

“I don’t think robotics is the only sector where this is happening,” he says.

I left the university canteen with a sense of disappointment at the state of kitchen robotics — an industry that has thrown billions of dollars at research and development but still has little to show for it besides mechanical arms doing the most basic of tasks, like transferring noodles from a basket to a bowl. But my sourness quickly turned to hope as I added up all the humanity in those noodles.

A human had made the broth, had sliced the meat and diced the peppers and cooked the spicy beef topping, had placed both within reach of the machines that portioned them out. There were fingerprints of humanity everywhere. The robot was the dumbest link in the chain. For all the advances, and all the press releases, and the chao cai ji silently multiplying in kitchens across China, and the world, there’s still no one better at cooking than a cook.

We Live in a Different China

We are born here, we get old here, we get sick here and we die here. But we are not from here. We are the foreign residents of China, our lives here forever temporary, no matter how long they last. We give birth here but our children are not Chinese. We get old here but never retire. We have heart attacks or get cancer here, and whether we survive or not, we must return home. No matter how much of our lives may have been here, foreign residents in China can not be buried here. We will all leave eventually.

You see us in the street or in your city but we live in a different China. No matter how good our Chinese or how well we’ve integrated into our communities, no matter who we’ve married or how long we’ve been here, for the most critical stages of life, we can always go back to our bubbles.

Birth

If China and the world agree on anything, it’s how to make a baby, but once that’s done, differences quickly arise. Pregnant Chinese moms are often cautious and treated delicately; in North America, Europe and some countries, women have run marathons while eight or even nine months pregnant.

Having A Baby In China.com slips into that gap, trying to bridge the cultural differences between the individualistic western approach to pregnancy and birth – where people talk about “the birth experience” – and the top-down approach of most doctors and hospitals in China, where being pregnant and delivering a grandchild is, as one foreign birth worker described it to me, almost considered a job.

“Having a baby overseas can be scary!” the website reads. “WE’RE HERE TO HELP.” I do not have kids, or know anything about having them, and even though many of my foreign friends have had kids in China, the internet was my first resource for information on the first stage of life.  

Started by an American couple in Tianjin with five kids (four born in China), Having A Baby In China includes a weekly podcast; a section of Chinese pregnancy vocab from breast pump (吸奶器) to umbilical cord prolapse (脐带脱垂); and a 199 RMB course  (“Our goal is ‘Peace of Mind for the Expat’ as you experience the amazing joy of giving birth in China”) that addresses topics such as ‘Choosing a Hospital in China’ and ‘Advocating for yourself During Pregnancy in China’.

The site is a glimpse into what’s important for foreign would-be moms and couples, and how some are trying to recreate the western experience — The Birth Bubble — in Chinese hospitals.

Enter the foreign doula.

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As an idea, the doula goes back to the beginning of history, when experienced women and midwives would help others through pregnancy and birth. As a modern concept, the idea of the doula — a Greek word for female servant, coined in the 1980s — is less than fifty years old, started by American doctors who recognized that women who received physical and emotional support during their pregnancy and childbirth had better outcomes.

As an idea in China, it’s just beginning to take hold.

“There are about six of us,” Ruth Greene, an American doula in Qingdao, tells me. “I keep saying there has to be more. I constantly try to seek them out. We just added another one in Beijing two months ago, so that was really exciting.”

The path to being a doula in China looks like this: have a child here, become a resource for other pregnant moms by sharing your hard-earned information, and then formalize the experience with an international certification.

Greene, who has four kids, received certification in 2014, and has been helping new moms navigate the Chinese birth process since then. She, like most of the doulas, speaks fluent Chinese, including medical terminology related to pregnancy and birth.

Andrea’s path is similar. She moved from Germany to Ningbo, on a gap year in 2004 and has been there ever since. Her first child, a daughter, was born on the way to a Shanghai hospital, in a car at a rest stop on the side of the Hangzhou Bay Bridge.

Not wanting that experience again, she checked into a Shanghai hospital early for her second child, and during her stay, began a WeChat group for foreign moms in Ningbo. The technology, new at the time, finally gave her the opportunity to connect a lot of people in a single group — previously, it was one-on-one SMS messages.

The group morphed into a pregnancy center, where she has helped new moms with breastfeeding and post-partum depression, and finally a doula certification in 2020.

Their role is somewhere between translator, advocate and coach for the mom. They help at ultrasounds and sonograms, and even at the actual birth (which they sometimes attend by WeChat video call), but they are not medical professionals.

“I help them prepare for their birth,” Greene explains. “We walk through what the couple wants for their birth. C-section, a natural birth, an induction… We walk them through those decisions, and then I attend the birth in whatever capacity is possible for the situation.”

It’s also the doula’s responsibility to tell a client when a birthing method that might be common in their own country, like having a child at home, is strongly discouraged in China, or support the nurses and midwives when the mom wants to give birth in a different position than just laying on her back on the bed.

Andrea tells me a story about how the Chinese love for standardization and fixed procedures sometimes clashes with what the mom actually wants. She had a client who was a midwife herself, and wanted to move around during labor and then choose a birthing position she was comfortable with.

“But in China, they tend to just ask you to go to the bed and recline,” she tells me. Woman on her back, giving birth, like you see in movies — “this is the standard setting.” It’s what the nurses and midwives are trained in. They rarely see other positions.

“This woman decides to sit on a birthing chair,” she recalls. “The midwife (who worked for the hospital) got very confused, about how to sanitize the woman, how to cover her.” She spent a lot of time thinking about how to follow her protocol; with the woman in a chair, she couldn’t handle it. She consulted the doctor.

“Just take the situation as it is,” Andrea told her. “The mom doesn’t want to go to bed. She feels comfortable like this. So just, you know, get on your knees and help her to have this baby.”

In the end, everyone else was out of the room when the baby was born. Andrea caught the baby herself. “The mom was fine, the baby was fine,” she says. “But the midwife was stuck somewhere because of what she learned or what she’s not used to.”

“She’s never been trained on that,” Andrea says. “The standard protocol is being on the bed, and Chinese women just follow the instructions.” But the birthing chair didn’t fit the standard Chinese birth method. It was totally new. “The midwife couldn’t handle this new situation,” Andrea tells me. “It’s a cultural difference. This is still a challenge for us when we talk to Chinese doctors or midwives.”

The doulas work in both public hospitals, if the doctors are welcoming (they usually like the free help, though the doulas official status is ambiguous) and the couple can’t or doesn’t want to pay the high fees of private clinics; and in the private sector, where a fancy hospital’s checkups and birth fees can cost over 100,000 RMB.

“Chinese hospitals have zero tolerance for death,” Jacquelyn Carman tells me. Carman and her husband started the website I landed on, and are at the center of the foreign birth community, which exists almost exclusively online. “That’s great,” she says about the focus on moms surviving childbirth, “but the mom’s feelings and individual experience are not necessarily their first interest. This is where the cultures clash.”

“We want to be able to make our own decisions and we want to — it sounds a little strange — enjoy the pregnancy experience. We want to at least feel like we’re heard,” Carman says. “How the individual is feeling through this process is not the number one priority in China.”

Greene goes farther, saying that the birth experience can be traumatic for the mother. “Decisions and authority are typically taken away from the mom,” she says. “If they voice any objection, they are seen as being troublesome or even valuing their own feelings over the safety of the baby.” The undermining of confidence is a major factor in postpartum depression, says Greene.

She relates a story in which a pregnant mother was left alone in a room, not monitored, not allowed to have her husband with her, and “in so much pain she thought she might die — but didn’t have the strength to press the call button.” After the birth, the mother was told, “this is just part of the birth, you must 吃苦,” says Greene. “She carried that fear and pain for years.”

Today, Greene and Andrea are both in the early stages of formalizing their community-led experience into official businesses, though they emphasize that their passion for improving birth experiences is the driving factor over any financial potential. Often, they are not even paid for their services.

I ask Greene what she wants the outcome to be for foreign moms having kids in China.

“It’s the same for every mom,” she answers. “That they would be respected as human beings, not just a baby incubator.”

Illness

Aitor Olabegoya had just registered his marriage when a kite string slit his neck wide open.

The Spaniard, then in his thirties, was driving a scooter home from the wedding office in Beijing, his new wife on the back seat. They were both still in their wedding clothes. As the couple approached Chaoyang Park on the Fourth Ring Road, a taut string slammed into him.

The string paused for a second in the buckle of a bag across his chest before jumping up to his neck. As the scooter moved forward, the tension increased and the string cut into him. He felt nothing. By the time he stopped, onlookers were staring in horror. A man flying a kite in the park had been reeling it in at too low of a height at the exact moment Olabegoya was driving by. He took a selfie with his phone to see what had happened. His neck was sliced from side to side.

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We can be divided into many different demographics, many different classes, but what level of access we have to health care is almost a defining feature of foreign life in China.

As long as we’re working — and almost all our existence here depends on working, for visa reasons — we all have Chinese medical insurance (医保). We can visit public hospitals the same as any Chinese citizen, though figuring out what they specialize in, how to run the maze, how to get an appointment, and how to communicate with the doctor are just the beginnings of our problems. Doing it while probably sick and vulnerable is really too much for most of us.

Entrance to the Medical Bubble, where doctors speak dozens of languages, appointments can be made by phone, and the staff can handle everything from a newborn to near-death, is expensive. Olabegoya was paying 15,000 RMB a year for private medical insurance, the key that unlocks this bubble, when his accident happened. Top-level insurance, which might include medical evacuation by air to another country in case China can’t treat you, can cost several times more. 

It’s not that we doubt the skills or knowledge of doctors in China’s major cities; many of my friends use the public hospitals for routine medical procedures. But when something goes really wrong, we want the comfort of being able to communicate (if our Chinese isn’t good enough) or the reassurance of a shared cultural background and shared medical expectations (even if our Chinese is good) — if we can pay for it.

Olabegoya, a chef with a decent income, could afford it. So the day of the accident, he held his neck wound closed with one hand and drove the scooter with his other hand, his wife on the back in her wedding dress, to Beijing’s United Family Hospital.

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When it opened in 1997, almost twenty years after its American founder, Roberta Lipson, moved to Beijing, United Family was the first foreign-invested hospital in China. Today, it has hospitals in Beijing, Qingdao, Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and a medical center in Bo’ao.

UFH’s original Beijing hospital has more than 25 medical departments, including 24-hour emergency facilities and operating rooms equipped to handle surgical trauma, heart attacks, strokes and brain hemorrhages. Three of its four emergency medicine physicians are American. Its nurses speak fluent English. And it’s just one of several international healthcare operators in China.

In 2023, Singapore’s Parkway Pantai (百汇医疗) opened a 450-bed Shanghai hospital, following Jiahui Health’s (嘉会医疗) 500-bed international hospital a few miles away, funded in part by the Singapore government’s investment firm and a private equity company. In Shanghai alone, other options include Global Health Care (全康医疗), DeltaHealth (上海德达医院), Raffles (莱佛士医疗) and Columbia (哥伦比亚中国).

They are not aimed only at foreigners — the few hundred thousand foreigners in China are not nearly enough to support them alone — but they are almost always the first stop for foreigners in a medical emergency. 

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Olabegoya was quickly rushed into surgery. Doctors sewed his neck back together with 47 stitches. The rough cut stopped just short of his carotid artery and jugular vein, but now infection from the dirty string, among other complications, was a serious risk. The hospital kept him in intensive care for two days before discharging him. It took him three weeks to recover. Insurance paid the 160,000 RMB bill. He calls himself blessed to have had insurance.

Two ragged lines circle his neck, from his Adam’s apple outward. Doctors offered cosmetic surgery to remove the traces of that day but he keeps the scars as a memory.

They never found the person flying the kite.

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Olabegoya’s first instinct was to go to a private hospital, where he knew he would be treated immediately. He worried that, even with a slit neck, there might be worse injuries at the public hospital and he would be stuck in line.

It’s impossible to second-guess someone in his situation, but as we spoke, I wondered what might have happened if he hadn’t had insurance, or if he had gone to the closest public hospital instead. So after talking to him, I began asking around among my friends for people who had been in a similar life-or-death situation but chose a different path. Mark came forward. 

Mark abhorred The Bubble. An American professor at a university in northern China , he started studying Chinese as a teenager. He has lived in China on-and-off since the early 1990s and teaches Chinese students, in Chinese.

“Six months ago, if you had called me an expat, I would have objected strongly to the suggestion,” he told me recently. “I never wanted to have anything to do with expats… I’ve always idealized the idea of working with Chinese academics as equals.” He speaks derisively about The Bubble, about the foreigners in Sanlitun who don’t speak any Chinese.

A few months ago, that all changed.

A routine health check at a private hospital, an unexpected gift from his partner’s employer, found traces of a recent major heart attack — a heart attack he didn’t even know he had had. His initial bemusement and disbelief at the diagnosis faded quickly when, after being transported to one of the country’s top public cardiovascular hospitals by ambulance, the disinterested doctor told him he needed immediate, life-saving treatment.

But the doctor wouldn’t provide the treatment. In order to receive it, he would have to be checked in to the hospital. When he asked when there would be a bed available, the reply rattled him to his core. “I’m not a fortune teller,” Mark recalls the doctor answering before brushing him off for another patient.

The casual rejection from the doctor left him feeling utterly helpless and disillusioned. Fearing for his life, “there was no suggestion of trying another Chinese public hospital,” he told me. Mark and his Chinese partner quickly evaluated their options, and chose a well-known international hospital, where he received life-saving treatment. He did not have private insurance and the hospital fees came to 150,000 RMB. He paid out of pocket.

Mark is no stranger to the Chinese medical system. In his early days in China, he volunteered as a translator at a public hospital on the east coast. Now in his fifties, he speaks better Chinese than the vast majority of the foreign residents in China, is completely integrated into society, and has some social prestige as a professor. He always assumed that if he encountered a truly life-or-death situation in China, he would be okay.

He has no illusions that things would have been easier in America, where, without insurance, an emergency like this could have bankrupted him. Mark is still unnerved by the first doctor’s indifference but says, “in a way, thank goodness that it happened in China.” He knows he is privileged by “unusual resources” to be able to afford the type of treatment he received.

He goes to public hospitals for his follow-up care. He has made a full recovery and continues to teach.

Like Olabegoya, I was a chef when I came to China in 2005, working at a five-star hotel in Shanghai. I was young and the salary was low but the job included fancy health insurance, which was a luxury to me — until then, working in restaurants in America, I had not had insurance for years. I used my new Chinese insurance sparingly but enjoyed every visit to the doctor, at a private hospital in Pudong, knowing that someone else was paying the bill.

I left that job the following year, and I was back on my own, uninsured. For the next several years, I avoided doctors and hospitals, and hoped that nothing serious would happen to me. The Chinese hospital system was too complicated and I was too embarrassed to ask a friend to translate for me; the private hospitals were far beyond my budget. When I got sick, and I did, often, usually with stomach problems, I spent hours in the bathroom and prayed it would pass.

I woke up one night in 2009 with a severe stabbing feeling in my stomach. It was one in the morning. My wife at the time was deep asleep and just nodded when I told her I was going to the doctor. I didn’t have time to explain. This was not food poisoning or a simple stomach problem. I couldn’t pray or shit this away. I took a taxi to Parkway’s 24-hour clinic, doubled over in the back seat of the car.

I knew I couldn’t afford it but the pain was sharp and deep and I was scared. I didn’t have the money for Parkway — I was living on a writer’s small salary by then, after changing careers — but neither did I have the patience or Chinese skills to deal with a public emergency room.

In the end, I don’t remember what the diagnosis was, but after several hours of intravenous medicine and observation, the stabbing sensation went away. It was painful but thankfully not serious, and now my biggest fear was the bill. What had I done? I wondered, and how was I going to afford this?

The total came to something like 6,000 RMB, about half my salary at the time. It hurt my bank account but I paid it. When I left the hospital, it was sunrise, and I swore, from that day on, I would stop praying my illnesses away. I needed insurance. When I asked for a raise at the media outlet I was working for to cover insurance — 1,000 RMB a month — and the owner refused, I quit on the spot.

In retrospect, I didn’t consider the public hospital system. I was spoiled by that first year of private medical insurance and private hospitals, and scared of the horror stories about Chinese hospitals that circulated through the expat community (and may or may not have been true). I didn’t understand how the system worked until many years later, when I had more Chinese friends and, for a few years, even dated a Chinese doctor.

Today, I have insurance and I use it regularly. I have a long-term relationship with several of my doctors, and the pharmacists at my clinic know me by name. I can still barely afford it — several thousand RMB a month now that I am aging into my 40s — but for me, it’s non-negotiable. I know my situation is privileged, and that there are great doctors at many of China’s hospitals. But healthcare is one Bubble I won’t step out of.  

“I understand why most foreigners leave the country for serious medical treatment,” Catherine tells me. “Medical terminology is difficult to understand in our native language, let alone in a foreign language.”

She is the rarest of the expat community — a wise elder. Catherine has been through three of the four major stages of life in her 38 years in China — birth, aging and the death of friends. Now illness shadows her. She has stage four, triple-negative breast cancer, which has metastasized and spread to her colon.

She is comfortable dealing with private issues in Chinese. She has an entire network of family and friends here and abroad who provide support to her and her family. She has stayed in China for treatment.

Catherine is an exception of the highest order. When foreigners get seriously sick in China and it’s not an emergency that must be dealt with on the spot, like Olabegoya’s freak accident or Mark’s heart attack, we almost always leave.

We hear about them after the fact. They disappear from our WeChat groups and our social circles, and rarely come back. For the younger generation, it might be mental illness that sends them home, like in the case of Abe.

Abe was an acquaintance of mine who was convinced that a popular Japanese tonkatsu restaurant was selling sex services from the kitchen between the lunch and dinner shifts. When he brought up his theory in a taxi one day, we all laughed at him and moved on. When it became clear he was serious, we backed off and changed topic. That was the first sign something was wrong. A few months later, Abe disappeared back to America, supposedly diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

For the older generation, it might be heart problems or cancer, like in Catherine’s situation. Her case is not as dramatic as a slit throat or a silent heart attack (though just as, or even more, serious); she has had time to consider her options. She could have easily flown to Hong Kong, Bangkok or even the U.S. (though her insurance doesn’t cover her there). But she stayed in Shanghai. Her roots here run very deep.

Catherine moved from the U.S. to China in the 1980s, first teaching English and learning Chinese in an inland province, before a life in the manufacturing industry. She traveled the country by bus and slow train in the 1980s from Heilongjiang to Xinjiang and Tibet, gave birth in the early 1990s in a Chinese public hospital, had a successful career in Shanghai and, after several decades in China, has aged into semi-retirement.

Catherine has good private insurance, but returning back to the U.S. would have been extremely difficult. Like most healthcare insurance sold to expats, Catherine’s insurance plan covers treatment in every country in the world except the U.S., where medical costs are extremely high and the billing system complex. In China, it covers the majority, if not all, of the fees at both public and private hospitals, and she receives treatment from both types of hospitals for her cancer. She does not have additional insurance for the U.S..

Neither is she scared by second-hand information about the pitfalls of Chinese hospitals.

“I've been working in Chinese hospitals for 25 years,” she tells me, sponsoring and supervising surgeries for orphan children with issues like cleft palate, spina bifida and heart valve problems through one of the non-profit organizations she works with. “I've seen the medical establishment here change and evolve over a long time, and I am aware of and pay attention to medical developments.”

She brings up her son’s birth in 1994, a 25-hour ordeal that ended in emergency surgery but left her with a good impression of Chinese doctors.

“The doctor had been doing this for 30 years and delivering, like, 20 babies a week,” she recalls. “It was great that I had a woman with that experience.”

Her cancer treatment takes place in a mixture of public and private hospitals, in and out of the Bubble — she is a highly educated and advanced consumer of healthcare in China, and knows how to find the right doctors at the right public hospitals, has the social connections to get access to them, when to do her own research, and when to reach out to specialists in the U.S. through tele-medicine.

She has connections overseas, with doctors and medical specialists in America who are able to offer second or third opinions, and help direct her care here through her team of Chinese oncologists and surgeons.

Catherine’s experience in the system, coupled with her relentless research and self-advocacy, has been paying off. Her diagnosis cannot get worse but she still has treatment options. The color has returned to her face and she is upbeat throughout our long conversation. Her doctors, at both the public and private hospitals, are optimistic about her future.

Aging

The older we get, the less China knows what to do with us.

Charles came to live in China for the fourth time when he was 52. He is a classic British gentleman and has run five-star hotels around the world for decades. Now 68, he has spent the past 16 years managing a prestigious hotel in Shanghai often used by the city leaders and high-ranking visitors.

Charles is active in the city, exploring its bars, restaurants and cultural offerings, and has a wide range of friends of all ethnicities and ages. He travels for fun in China and around the world, visiting wine regions. His apartment is very obviously a home and he cooks often for himself and friends. His mind is sharp and he is engaged with life.

But he shouldn’t really be here. He is too old.

*

Foreigners must be at least 18 years old to work in China. There’s no agreed-upon upper limit. Whether we must retire at 55 or 60, like Chinese citizens, is an issue for the courts. For now, Charles is protected by his green card.

In 2004, China began issuing permanent residence to a highly select group of foreigners. The threshold is high: we must have invested at least $500,000 USD in a Chinese business for three consecutive years; be married to a Chinese citizen; make a “significant contribution” to the country; or possess skills that are especially needed.

Charles has permanent residence. He is one of the few to possess it. By 2020, less than 17,000 of the green cards, recently re-branded “five-star cards” for a new design, had been issued. (In contrast, the US issued more than two million employment-based green cards in the same time frame.) The card gives him all kinds of benefits — no visa or work permit required being the biggest one — in line with what the government provides for its other citizens. But it puts him in a gray area when it comes to work.

When China began ushering in a wave of expats in the 1990s and 2000s, it didn’t expect us to stay. Our visas were always conditional and short-term, and when we got old, we just left. It made sense. China does not need more people, and especially people with escalating health problems. We didn’t ask to retire here, which if you are not married to a Chinese citizen, isn’t possible anyway; unlike many southeast Asian countries, there is no retirement visa in China. 

But the longer we live here, the more that’s going to change. Some of us have begun taking to the courts when labor laws say we should retire, according to law firm King & Wood Mallesons (金杜律师事务所). On the internet, others talk about how to recoup the 8% pension tax we pay from our salaries every month — a pension it’s possible to draw, after 15 years in China, but highly unlikely we will use, given the visa and health care realities.

The root of the inconsistency, according to the law firm, is that “The Regulations on the Management of the Employment of Foreigners in China provides that in China, the minimum employment age for a foreigner is 18, but there is no explicit provision to specify whether they shall be bound by requirements of the Chinese statutory retirement age.”

That question is left to the provinces or municipalities, and it's the gray area, along with his green card, that allows Charles to stay in China and continue working many years past the official retirement age. No one, not his human resources department, not the entry-exit bureau, has told him he can’t.

“Each year I get a one-year contract — and that’s because I want to — and it expires in summer,” he tells me. “Generally, in spring, they ask ‘Would you like to extend it?’. We just go through the process. So I’m assuming it will be the same process. I don’t see why not.”

Charles is old enough to be my father, the oldest friend in my social circle. He represents a possible path for my own future in China, and those of us who might stay longer than anyone expected — though none of my friends plan to retire in China. Talking about it with them feels ridiculous; leaving is assumed.

But then, we didn’t really plan to be here this long in the first place. Most of my friends came in their 20s, like me, and are now in their 40s, also like me. They came for adventure or work, and for myriad reasons, have made a life here. Many left in 2022, to Singapore, to North America, to Europe, but several have stayed.

They have been through the birth stage of life and now raise their children here, as second-generation expats. For the most part, they have settled down and moved into middle-age.

I met many of them through the music and nightlife scenes, and when we once cared about what DJ’s were playing in what club, now they talk about school fees and babysitting schedules.

But for many, their time is short. Wary of the public school system, they send their kids to international or bilingual schools, where school fees can run more than 300,000 RMB per year — for kindergarten. Without the support of an executive-level salary package, the school fees are what eventually drive them to leave China. The minute a foreigner has a child in China, the hourglass turns over and the sand starts falling. By the time their oldest child is ready for proper school, it’s time to leave. 

I don’t have kids, or any plan to make any, and so I remain here in Shanghai, watching my friends and their children slowly age out of China. 

*

Charles’ children, born in Africa during his time there, are both expats in their forties, one in Asia and one in Europe, with their own families. His marriage has run its course; now separated, his wife lives back in the UK.

Alone and with few bills, Charles doesn’t need a pension. We don’t talk about it, but at the time his green card was issued, the minimum salary requirement for an eligible employee was 720,000 RMB per year. He does just fine. Not that he wants to retire anyway. “I will keep on working. Not because I have to, but because I just enjoy what I’m doing.”

We tally up the years he’s spent working in China, starting in the late 1980s: more than two decades. He was in Hong Kong for the handover, in Shanghai for the Expo. “There’s so much positive happening in China now,” he says. “Those are moments in history.”

If he has any regrets about his forty-plus years abroad, or growing older in a foreign country, he does not let on. “It was a great way to see the world but at the same time to experience people,” he reflects. “I’ve always enjoyed history and geography, from an early age. Those two coupled together — what better job to have than working in this business.”

Mentally, he feels ten, fifteen years younger than he is. He does annual health checks in Thailand but goes to Chinese public hospitals for the type of routine medical care that his age demands: colonoscopies, prostate checks. He has lived away from his home country since the late 1970s. For him, home is wherever he is at the moment, and he doesn’t feel a need to go back or slow down, no matter the age.

“I live alone,” he says. “One day I’m going to wake up dead. I put it to the back of my mind, as I think all of us do. That’s why I’d rather be doing the things I’m doing, whether it be traveling, going on trips, seeing parts of China, parts of the world.”

He has considered the end as far as drafting a will and making a list of his computer passwords. “You can’t do anything about it,” he tells me. “Do you want to? If I look at my age and I look at other people of my age, am I envious or jealous of what they have?”

“No,” he says firmly. “I’ve done all the things I want to do.”

Charles has no concerns about the possibility of dying in a foreign country. “In 12 days’ time, I will be 69,” he tells me. “I have been blessed with my life experiences so far. Long may they continue.”

Death

Wu Qiong was conflicted. She had just picked up the American man’s ashes from the crematorium and was at the airport in Wuhan, the remains stashed in her carry-on suitcase. But she desperately had to use the bathroom. She debated what would be worse: leaving the suitcase outside the toilet and it being stolen; or potentially disrespecting the man’s memory by bringing him into the restroom with her.

“This is probably the first time you’ve been in a women’s toilet,” she remembers telling the suitcase as she wheeled it into the bathroom stall. The man, who had terminal cancer,  had died on Wudangshan while making a final, international pilgrimage. “Turn your head,” she said. “No peeking!”

That was her first case, in 2012, but not the last time she spoke to ashes. In her early years working for Roseates, a small agency that specializes in the repatriation of human remains from China, she used to ask the ashes if ghosts were real or not. She figured they would know. Wu has collected so many bodies of foreigners from across China that she has lost track of many of the specific details. Often, she would have to spend a night in a hotel room with the remains while waiting for a morning flight.

She wasn’t scared, she told me — death is not taboo for her — but she did want to settle the question. “If you are there, show me,” she would challenge the ghosts. She never saw one.

*

Wu, now 39, has helped repatriate the remains of foreigners who died mountain climbing in Tibet, been there to assist after a woman fell from the 22nd floor of a high-rise in Suzhou while trying to climb in through an outside window, and seen the results of a young Russian man whose body decomposed on a couch after an alcohol-related death. It happens more often than we imagine, up to five times a day, estimates the founder of Roseates, and the logistics are complex.

Since 1995, foreigners who die in China cannot be buried or have their ashes scattered on public land, except in extremely rare circumstances for people who have made a “special contribution” to the country. Instead, our embassies are tasked to contact the next of kin, who often then hire a company like Roseates.

Founded about 15 years ago by Belgian Wilfried Verbruggen, who Wu calls a father figure, Roseates’s services involve handling “the hospital, the Emergency Intervention Team, the hospital morgue, the Forensic Medical center, the funeral home, the crematory, the Public Security Bureau at local-, district- and city level, Civil Affairs, the Notary Public, the China Foreign Affairs, the Funeral Association, the local hearse company, the Quarantine inspection, the airport Customs, the cargo agent, the airline handling agent, and the consignee,” according to its website.

Verbruggen had been in the “import/export business”, as he called the international funeral director industry, back in Belgium, before a second career selling earth-moving equipment in Europe and Africa. But after moving to China in the 1990s, he reluctantly went back to repatriation of human remains after an embassy asked him for a favor. He has been handling death in China for a long time.

Verbruggen and Wu work in the Death Bubble.

*

Death in China is a highly regulated business, with fixed prices for services — but not always for us. According to China Daily, the official price for embalming in China was 300 RMB in 2015 for Chinese citizens, but, Wu tells me, foreigners may pay inflated rates, particularly in rural areas where officials are not familiar with the process or regulations.

A typical repatriation, including embalming and airfare, can total six figures. I asked Wu to estimate what it would cost to get my body home to the U.S. if something happened to me — 120,000 RMB to the Atlanta airport, she told me. My family, in Miami, would have to figure out what to do with my body from there.

Not everyone can afford the steep bill, even when Roseates’s handling fee is just a tiny fraction of that high cost. Wu tells me about a case in which a young man from an African country was stored in the morgue for more than two years while his family back home raised money for the repatriation and the funeral. In another case, a deceased photographer’s embassy, unable to locate any of the man’s family, sold his expensive camera and used the proceeds to send his body back to his home country.

In an average year, Verbruggen, Wu and two other Chinese employees handle between 120 and 140 cases, less than one in ten of the foreign deaths in China, according to Roseates’s own estimate. Germany, the United States and the UK are the top destinations, though the company has sent bodies to more than 80 different countries.

Handling so much death, across all of China, Verbruggen recognizes quality and value, and Shanghai is the only city to have both, particularly in the professionalism of the embalming and the workmanship of the coffin, which in other cities or provinces might be nothing more than an unlined shipping crate designed to look like, but not function like, a real metal-lined coffin. “Shanghai is the best place in China to die,” Verbruggen says.

*

Verbruggen, in his mid-70s, passed the company to Wu in 2023 and retired to Chengdu with his family. His own health issues, and the 24-hour/7-days-a-week demands of the job, gave him too much pressure, Wu told me. 

Wu considers her job a mission, a service to the families of the deceased, who have lost their loved ones in a far-off, foreign country. She hopes to continue in this work for the rest of her life. That could set up the potential situation of Wu or her colleagues having to carry her former boss’s ashes back to Belgium, should he pass away in China. (Verbruggen told me that if he dies in Belgium, he’d like to be buried, but if it happens in China, he wants to be cremated.)

It’s an awkward question to ask, but Wu puts me at ease. “We hope Wilfried lives another ten or 20 years, but we have to be realistic,” she says. “I could still be working then.”

For his part, Verbruggen is not too concerned. “Where I die, China or Belgium, is not important,” he says. “Just hope not to die in a hospital!”

*

(A version of this article originally appeared in Chinese on 正面链接. It was edited by 于蒙, with illustrations by 陈禹, and visual design by pandanap.)

Qinghai’s Noodle Industry is Massive. This Man Started It.

Han Lu steps out of the Buick and into his past. The village of Upper Woliga is silent and empty but for a red construction crane and a cow grazing an overgrown patch of land. We have driven to this remote corner of Qinghai province, two hours south of Xining, to see the tiny settlement that Han left more than five decades ago, pioneering a path out of poverty that tens of thousands of residents would later follow. Han was migrant zero, the trailblazer of the Noodle Trail, and it would take him not just out of the high brown hills and deep ravines of Hualong County, but propel him out of China and turn him into a local noodle celebrity.

Today, more than 1/3 of the county's 300,000 residents work in the hand-pulled beef noodle industry. If you've eaten la mian in China, the odds are high you've had a brush with Hualong's noodle workers, spread out over nearly 350 cities across the country. The sign might say "Lanzhou" but the staff is often from villages like Upper Woliga in Hualong, where little but buckwheat and potatoes grow in the thin air of the Tibetan plateau. The county alone — to say nothing of Lanzhou and Gansu — is responsible for 32,000 shops across China, and its la mian industry worth approximately 20 billion RMB.

Han, 68, is dressed in a dark blue tracksuit, with a white hat matching his clean white trainers and white chin beard. He has an athletic bounce to his step and an easy smile as he walks us down the road to see the site of his childhood home. The village is dotted with crumbling mud-walled homes, like the one he grew up in, among the newer courtyards, built with noodle money and topped with glassed-in terraces.

Life was grueling, he'd told us the night before; of the 12 children his mother gave birth to, only six survived, and the remaining six didn't have it easy. By five years old, they were in charge of taking the family's cows, sheep and horses out to the grassland to graze. He left school at age seven, when the classes, following the political trend of the time, became study sessions of Mao quotes. By the time he was ten, he had already been drafted into a village production team, doing the work of an adult. Electricity wouldn't come until the end of the 1970s.

Han's father was a cultured man, having graduated from the Whampoa Military Academy started by the region's Muslim warlord, Ma Bufang, and though life made him a farmer, he still listened closely to the politics of the day, picked up on a tiny radio. A young Han Lu followed along, and picked up the habit with his own small radio. He was a teenager, sent 800 kilometers away to Yushu to work on a road construction crew, when the radio brought news that would change his life: the Gang of Four, a political clique that followed Mao's death, had been smashed. His construction crewmates didn't understand the bigger meaning but to Han the signal was clear. The market economy would come back; he could do business. After a year and a half on the road crew, he quit. There was no explicit permission to travel and sell but, then again, no one stopped him. After the political turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s, Han felt that for the first time in his life, there was hope.

In those early years, he tried it all. He sold cordyceps picked in Qinghai to traders in Guangzhou. When he was robbed in the Guangzhou market, he began shuttling military uniforms between Lanzhou and Yushu. He sold "foreign socks", an 80s trend. Finally, he realized there was a strong market for ration stamps, which were being phased out in Qinghai but commanded a premium in Tibet. He went to Lhasa.

Han, like many people from Hualong, is a Hui Muslim and during those trips to Tibet, he couldn't find anywhere to eat halal food. Always on the lookout for new business opportunities, he decided he'd solve the problem himself. He would open a restaurant, which back then meant buying a large tent to set up on the side of road. Beef noodles from Lanzhou had become popular in Xining, so Han hired a noodle cook from the Qinghai capital, packed up his young family (now married with two children) and opened Lhasa's first la mian shop. It was 1983.

Yingke Halal Noodles didn't last long. By 1985, Han was back in Xining, searching for a new way to make money. He drove a Soviet Lada taxi. He mined for gold in today's Kekexili Nature Reserve.

Always fashionable, he got into the clothing trade, which took him to Fujian province. Again, he couldn't find halal food. Returning to Xining, he decided to try noodles again. He sold the furniture, the family's winter clothes, everything they had. He pocketed 7,000 RMB and the family left, this time for Xiamen, where no one from back home would know if he failed.

They arrived late and spend the first night at the train station, waiting for morning. When daylight came, Han didn't waste any time. That day, he scouted and rented a location for 3,000 RMB. He spent another 3,000 RMB on three tables, stools and kitchen equipment. Xibei Halal Noodles opened the next day. Han had picked up the noodle-making process from the cook in Tibet. His wife made the soup. Two relatives who came with them washed dishes and handled money.

Their first day of business brought in 70 RMB. Han did a quick calculation. They had been open for 12 hours but the revenue wouldn't be enough to cover their costs. The next day, and every day after that, business improved. Allah had given Han the ability to pull noodles, he told me, and now it was paying off. They began making 200, 300 RMB a day as customers in the southern city returned over and over for this novel type of northwestern noodle. This time it would work. He brought his father to Xiamen. He called cousins, and cousins of cousins, and friends of cousins, and before long, the beginnings of the modern Hualong noodle network were starting to form.

Han may not have been the first person to open a beef noodle shop outside of northwest China, a government official in Hualong County would later tell me (apparently others had gone to Shanghai), but he was the first one from Hualong to be successful on the East Coast. From Xiamen, overseas Chinese investors brought him, his family and his noodle shop to Indonesia and later the Philippines. By the time he returned to Qinghai in 2001, settling in Xining and opening yet another beef noodle shop just steps away from the city's revered Dongguan Mosque, he was a local hero. (Han's shop, Zhenya Beef Noodles (震亚牛肉面), is still open in Xining on Dongguan Avenue.)

Today, there is a mock shop modeled on that first Xiamen store in the city's Hand-Pulled Noodle Industry Service Center, part of a massive government building in Hualong, and Han Lu is first among the profiles of successful noodle businessman displayed on the walls. He is, according to the government, the first to "go out" of Hualong and his Xiamen noodle store created the blueprint for all others to follow.

The noodle industry is so crucial to Hualong that, apart from the extensive official exhibition and a dedicated service call center, the county's website gives the hand-pulled noodle industry its own prominent position on its homepage.

Once known as among the poorest areas of China, with few opportunities to leave, Hualong is now synonymous with hand-pulled noodles, and the county government has established "embassies" in more than 40 cities across China to help their noodle-makers deal with the practicalities of doing business and living far from home. In noodles, at least, Hualong is everywhere.

Unspoken in all of this is the fact that, as Han told me, there were no beef noodles in Hualong when he was growing up. They came from Lanzhou to Xining in the late 1970s, and spread from there (with his help). While Han was scrupulous about naming his restaurants in Lhasa (Yingke Halal Noodles; 迎客清真面馆) and Xiamen (Northwestern Halal La Mian Restaurant; 西北清真拉面餐厅), later generations found it a lot easier to borrow the established reputation of Lanzhou, and just call their shops (something something) Lanzhou La Mian, a practice that's both common and heavily looked down upon by people from Lanzhou (and Gansu in general) and the older generation of Hualong businessmen. While Lanzhou invented la mian, most people in the industry agree that Hualong entrepreneurs were responsible for first spreading and popularizing it across China.

We stopped for homemade yogurt at a roadside stall on our way back to Xining. Two women in black head coverings tended the stall, in what felt like a remote corner of China. Surely they would be surprised to see two big white guys (me and Graeme, the photographer) pop out of this van on a Saturday afternoon in Hualong. But no. As if to demonstrate the reach of the noodle industry, they both turned out to be noodle wives, having returned to their home county so their children could attend school, after years of living across China: Tianjin, Guangzhou, Nanjing, nine years in Shanghai.

Their husbands were away, still working and sending money home, and, perhaps charmed by Han's personality and status, one of them invited us into her home for tea, and, it turned out, an impromptu meal. That week had been Eid al-Adha (古尔邦节), and some believers still followed the tradition of slaughtering a sheep for the holiday. Sure enough, a plate of sacrificial lamb came to the table, with several other dishes and purple-skinned cloves of raw garlic.

For a county with a reputation as religious, conservative and not particularly friendly to outsiders, it was a generous display of hospitality, made possible by a simple dish that Han had pioneered, that these women's families had prospered from and that we all had in common: la mian.

***

Photos: Graeme Kennedy

I Went Bowling to Honor My Chinese Food Hero

It's Qingming but I don't have a tomb to sweep. So this year, I decided to honor Yuan Mei, an 18th century poet and gourmet, by visiting the old site of his pleasure gardens and tomb in Nanjing. Yuan wrote about food (once), in his classic Sui Yuan Shi Dan (随园食单); I write about food. Yuan was rigid in his beliefs about cooking; I am a stubborn, demanding bastard. Yuan was a hedonist; I am a hedonist. It seemed obvious. Except for the fact that he is a Chinese poet from Qing-era China who has been dead for more than two centuries and I am an American ex-chef in modern China, and so far, still alive, we are almost twins.

In order to beat the crowds, I dropped into Nanjing last month for a day, chasing his legacy around the city: a rundown office tower and neighborhood, a restaurant inspired by his writing, a bowling alley. I bowed to his statue and lit incense and candles at his tomb. I hoped he was listening.

*

Yuan Mei was born in Hangzhou in the early 1700s and was a smart kid. In his 20s, he passed the national imperial examination and earned the jinshi (进士) rank. Instead of staying in the capital and having to study Manchu, he took posts as a county-level government official around Jiangnan, and wrote poetry on the side. By his late 30s, he'd had enough of government. With the money he earned from his poetry, he bought a dilapidated garden outside the Nanjing city walls, and named it Sui Yuan (随园), the Garden of Contentment. The only thing left on the huge property was a former tavern.

Yuan devoted the rest of his life to fixing the place up, building more than 20 pavilions over the next four decades. He spent his time teaching, writing poetry, entertaining and being entertained in the houses of the region's elite. He caused scandal when he dared to invite young, single women into his home to teach them, instead of going to their homes, where things could be more "supervised". He was a champion of women (and also, perhaps, a collector, with five wives and a number of concubines) and an unabashed pleasure-seeker. His poetry made him famous (it's in today's Nanjing Museum) and wealthy, but what interests me is his food writing.

There were restaurants at the time Yuan was around but the real fine dining, the good stuff, happened in the homes of the elite, where families employed high-level private chefs. Yuan toured many of them as a guest. When he found dishes he liked, he'd send his own private chef to his host's house, to study and record the details. After obsessing like this for most of his adult life, he finally compiled and published Suiyuan Shidan in 1792.

Food was still a "low" topic to write about in Yuan's world, and in discussions of his legacy, it always comes second to his verse. But as a record of what the region's most talented chefs made, and the food wisdom of the day, the Suiyuan Shidan is unparalleled. Much of it still holds true more than two centuries later. His poetry may be brilliant but I'd rather read his observations on bamboo shoots. That's just me.

For one, Yuan's book is a very detailed snapshot of how a certain class of people in Jiangnan ate hundreds of years ago. He captures a moment in China's food history when food was seasonal and regional, and expressed more about its nearby geography and habits than modern menus do. We may not eat this way completely, hundreds of years later, when our supply networks span the entire country, or even the world, and greenhouses grow fruits and vegetables in previously off-limits seasons. To have a record of who produced what, where and when, is invaluable. His admiration for mother nature is still instructive today, like his 60/40 rule: 60% of a great meal comes from chef; 40% belongs to the ingredients.

Here was a man of impeccable social standing, championing the lowest class of workers, and holding them up for praise and respect. The Suiyuan Shidan was like a pat on the back to chefs everywhere

Yuan was not the first person in China to write about food. But he was perhaps the most respected, through his poetry, and that reputation made Suiyuan Shidan into what many consider the first great book pulling together Chinese cooking knowledge.

On a deeper level, "the veneration of earthly pleasures is the closest thing Yuan Mei had to a religion," author Nicole Mones wrote in her forward to a 2019 English translation of the Suiyuan Shidan. "Without doubt, he had little time for Buddhism, which taught that sensual joys were dissolute; neither did he respond to Confucianism, which dictated that poetry should be for moral instruction, not personal expression — the opposite of his own ideas."

Three hundred years later, this rings true to me.

*

I can't say Yuan would be happy at the current site of his beloved garden, but he would at least recognize its dilapidated state. What once was a 120 hectare estate beyond the city walls is now an address in downtown Nanjing: 140 Guangzhou Lu.

Or at least that's where I started on my Yuan Mei journey, at a grim office tower named Suiyan Dasha (随园大厦). Gold lions sit out front of the entrance but there is little worth guarding. A restaurant, motel and bar all sit abandoned on the lower floors, the shuttered Suiyuan Bar at least sort of in line with Yuan's abandoned tavern building. (Though, like me, Yuan was a sober hedonist, and did not drink alcohol.)

In the lobby, the management waved off my questions about the site's glorious past. "This place doesn't have any history," they said. Outside, car horns blared from a traffic jam. Temporary walls and worker dormitories lined the intersection, the site of a metro station under construction. The past might have been illustrious, and the future will definitely be more convenient, but the present is far from peaceful.

Buying into the Suiyuan these days costs about 40,000 rmb a square meter, according to a resident who has lived in the neighborhood next to the big tower for more than 50 years. The address is envious — 9 Suiyuan, for example — but the reality is rundown. Low-rise, walk-up apartment buildings are woven together with thick electrical cables, and the working-class neighborhood has seen better days. I search Dianping for nearby restaurants. The grandly named "随园食府" restaurant turns out to be a ghost kitchen doing cheap delivery. The KFC on the corner is busy. Fried chicken sandwiches at Yuan Mei's house — is there no God?

*
A short drive away and an unmarked gate leads into the landscaped grounds of a Republican-era house. Signs with Yuan Mei's poetry line the walkway into Wu Ji Suiyuan (五季随园). Many restaurants in Nanjing borrow the Suiyuan name, some even cooking dishes inspired by his book, but only one has intangible cultural heritage status, and that's what's for lunch.

Ni Zhaoli (倪兆利) started the restaurant on Yuan Mei's 300th birthday, and now, several years later, she is touring us around the rooms. Yuan's poetry is all over the place, blown up into huge characters on the walls of private rooms, decorating fans, and on fabric couplets at the door of the kitchen. A painting of the original layout of Suiyuan sits at the entrance; framed pages from the first edition of Suiyuan Shidan hang on the walls. Everything seems to have a connection to Yuan or be part of Nanjing's intangible cultural heritage. It is elegant, historical, thoughtful, a fitting tribute to the old man.

Over lunch, Boss Ni tells us how a charter from the adjoining university to promote traditional Chinese medicine turned into a restaurant themed on health. Ni, a Beijinger, was tasked with the job, and remembering her university reading of the Suiyuan Shidan, decided to incorporate the longtime Nanjing resident's food philosophy into a health framework. After all, Yuan lived until he was 82 — he must have been on to something, right?

The restaurant is based on an ancient text's (the 黄帝内经) idea of five seasons in a year — an extra one squeezed between summer and autumn — and themes its set menus around seasonality and the number five: five menus per year, five types of fruit on a fruit plate, five colors of noodles, five small bites as appetizers.

Ni, like Yuan, is not a chef herself but has had a hand in developing the restaurant's signature dishes, like a finely diced eight-treasure tofu or young jiucai shoots stir-fried with snails and crunchy luhao.

But Ni is not a traditionalist, pulling recipes straight from Yuan's book and serving them as-is. She believes that without innovation, cultural heritage loses its relevance and dies — it needs to stay modern to be alive. That explains why, on set menus that start at 500rmb per person and go up from there, there is a cold bite of foie gras on toast, or braised beef served kind of a like a steak, with jus and a single marinated tomato. It's why one course was a kung pao prawn, why a separate poached abalone was dressed with Sichuan chili oil, and why she has a Cantonese soup chef from Jiangmen in the kitchen.

After lunch, Ni sends us off to a large statue of Yuan Mei not far away, facing Guangzhou Lu.

As we walk from the restaurant to the statue, I wonder what Yuan would make of this mixing of regions and cuisines. Ni is careful not to say that what she serves is Suiyuan cuisine, a category she thinks is too broad to have much meaning. Instead, it's Wu Ji's take on Suiyuan cuisine, their interpretation, their attempt to balance Yuan's philosophies with their own health mandate, and then balance that with what they think customers in Nanjing will accept. Updating Yuan Mei for the 21st century, while still trying to honor his memory, is hard.

*

Before he died in 1798, Yuan asked his family (including his first son, born when Yuan was 62, and named 阿迟）to keep the garden intact for thirty years, with the huge inheritance of silver he left. They succeeded, well beyond the thirty years, but in the 1850s the Taiping Rebellion came to Nanjing. Yuan described the garden as being next to a small mountain, and the Taiping were so thorough in destroying Yuan's legacy that not only did they tear down his house and pavilions, but they flattened the mountain and turned it into fields, according to historical sources.

They didn't get his tomb.

The tomb survived for the next 100 years but the turbulence in the 1960s was not friendly to the memory of a historical, imperial hedonist. Yuan's tomb was pulled down, and, eventually, built over. Today it is the Wutaishan Bowling Alley, 9 Lasa Lu, home to the Jiangsu Province Bowling Association, and my final stop on my tour de Yuan.

It's a Saturday afternoon and the lanes are busy. Couples on dates, old dudes practicing their roll, and families are all throwing balls down the lanes when I arrive. I squeeze into my bowling shoes, grab a 10-pound ball and do a little stretch. This game is for Yuan.

My muscles are tight and the first balls pull left, into the gutter. This is not how I wanted it to go. I need to make Yuan proud. I take a few deep breaths and find a rhythm, leaning deep into the release. The ball travels down the center of the lane. Nine pins fall. I clean up the last one, recording a spare. I do it once, twice, three times. My score climbs higher but there's not enough time in the game. I finish with an 87. Yuan will have to understand. I was rushed, I was nervous, it's been a while since I bowled. Please, dear Yuan, accept my excuse.

I give the shoes back and head outside. Two chairs and an ashtray mark the smoking area. An old bald man is pulling on his cigarette. I've brought something for Yuan and I reach into my backpack to retrieve it. The two candles are small and red. I put them in the ashtray and light them first. The bald guy looks over. I pull out a bundle of incense and light it with the flame from the candles. The bald guy looks away.

"Yuan Mei. Do you know him?"

The old man glances at me but doesn't speak.

"This used to be his tomb, right here, the bowling alley," I say.

The incense is starting to smoke.

"En," he says. He puts out his cigarette and walks away.

The woman who rented me the bowling shoes comes out next and asks what I'm doing.

"This used to be Yuan Mei's tomb! Suiyan, Yuan Mei, the Suiyuan Shidan!" I say.

"Right... Who?", she asks.

The photographer is taking pictures. I'm worried we are going to be kicked out.

"Just don't include the bowling association's sign in the pictures," she says, and goes back inside.

A minute later she comes out with her phone in her hand. She has found Yuan Mei on the internet.

"This guy?", she asks. "You are commemorating him?"

She is friendly, more curious than annoyed.

"Yes," I say. "We're almost done and then we'll go."

Satisfied, she leaves us alone on the steps. I came to honor Yuan Mei, and if I can't find a grave to sweep, or a garden to sit in, then this square ashtray outside the bowling alley on the site of his tomb will have to do. But the smell of incense is getting stronger and the smoke thicker.

I don't want to cause an international incident.

I blow out the candles and smush out the incense. I hope it's reached Yuan, wherever he is, this little tribute from one hedonist to another. His garden might exist in name only, but, for me, at least, for a few smoky moments, Yuan Mei is not gone.

***

Photos: Graeme Kennedy

How Many Famous Chefs Have Failed in Shanghai? Let's Count.

Shanghai is open for business again, and the chef world knows it. At least three high-profile international restaurants are planning to open this year in our city, from chefs Bjorn Frantzen, Yoshihiro Narisawa, and Esben Holmboe Bang.

How will they do? Judging by the last 20 big-name international chefs who have tried to cash in on their name / fame / stars in China (listed below), they have about a 50% chance of success.

I've listed as many international chefs as I can remember, in alphabetical order, and my assessment of their business skills. Let's walk through the graveyard!

*

Alan Wong
Wong gambled that what was missing in Shanghai was upscale Hawaiian food. True, we did not have that before Wong opened at Shanghai Centre in 2015, spending two million US dollars on the fit-out. If nothing else, it was a unique and bold bet. But it was wrong.

Success? For the construction contractors, perhaps.

Alvin Leung
Hong Kong's "Demon Chef" demonized the Bund for a short while with neo-Chinese cooking. His bad boy shtick fell flat in Shanghai and he ended up in a rent dispute with his landlord. Despite being a short flight away from Shanghai, he hasn't tried again since.

Success? Demonically no.

The Cerea Family
The Italians who brought Shanghai Da Vittorio, robbery disguised as a restaurant. Impeccable service, elegant dining room, model chef and a 988rmb Egg "a la Egg". Insanity, alive and well.

Success? Insanely.

Christian Le Squer
For a time this Michelin guy was the face of a cake delivery company in China. He never opened a restaurant here — and probably earned much more in the process.

Success? Good for his bank account, good for his reputation. A licensing victory.

Daniel Boulud
Boulud opened in Beijing's Legation Quarter just ahead of the 2008 Olympics but was too light and fluffy for the down-to-earth residents of the capital. Six years later, it was gone.

Success? Should have come to Shanghai.

Eric Pras
Pras took over the three-star Maison Lameloise in France from the Lameloise family in the late 2000s and then opened a spinoff in an office building: the 68th floor of Shanghai Tower.

Success? A one-star in the clouds of Lujiazui, still in business today.

Gray Kunz
The Middle House installed Kunz's Cafe Gray Deluxe as its "western" restaurant when it opened in 2018. Kunz himself passed away in 2020 but the restaurant bearing his name continues on.

Success? Judging by the high scores on Dianping, yes.

Jason Atherton
Atherton was supposed to be the next generation of star chefs to run things in Shanghai. He started off strong at Table No. 1 (closed) and The Commune Social (open) but then ran into a mess at The Shanghai Edition hotel, where he may or may not be involved anymore (it's complicated).

Success? Yes and then no.

Jean Georges Vongeritchen
JG was a pioneer, bringing his molten lava cake to Shanghai about 20 years ago, and then expanding into Italian food with Mercato (still open) in 2012 (and failing with a Korean grill) — all in Three on the Bund. Incredibly, he is still going strong in a city where most restaurants live as long as a fruit fly.

Success? Indisputable.

Joel Robuchon
Robuchon is the KFC of the fine dining world, a chain restaurant cashing in on Asia. Robuchon himself passed away in 2018 but his business interests live on in every intricately dotted plate, four-figure bill and palmier from the bakery.

Success? Profitable, even in the afterlife.

Marc Meneau
Like Mattagne, Meneau's name was affixed to a restaurant on the Bund no one ever heard of (in the Wanda Reign hotel) that customers never flocked to. He slipped in and out of Shanghai like a rumor.

Success? That's between him and his accountant.

Martin Berasategui
Mr. B took over the heritage house in Xujiahui park in 2009. He showed up for the opening party and never came back. His lack of commitment was obvious; he sold his name for cash. There was no closing party.

Success? More like a one-night stand.

Mauro Colagreco
Colagreco scooped up Michelin stars for his European garden restaurant, where he grew most of what he cooked. How was that ever supposed to transplant to Unico at Three on the Bund? Oh. It didn't.

Success? Unico worked as a club for a time. The restaurant never grew roots in Shanghai but that didn't stop him from expanding to Nanjing (Le Siecle, also closed) and Beijing (Azur, still open).

Nicolas Le Bec
Lyon's loss became Shanghai's gain when Nicolas Le Bec took over a garden villa on Xinhua Lu in 2014. He still cooks there night after night.

Success? Michelin snubs him but Shanghai loves him. Success.

Niko Romito
Modern cooking from this Italian star, famous for his bread as much as a 450rmb neo-lasagna. He's linked up with the Bvlgari hotel group to become a small chain of his own (Dubai, Beijing, Paris, etc).

Success? Shanghai loves a painful check and Romito is a financial sadist — the perfect match.

Paco Roncero
Roncero was involved in Xintiandi's Estado Puro early on. Is he still? I don't eat in Xintiandi enough to know.

Success? I haven't heard the Spanish chef mentioned in years, but the restaurant is open and busy, so if he's still getting royalties — yes.

Pierre Gagnaire
Gagnaire, like Meneau, went into a luxury hotel but with much better results. His restaurant at The Capella is still going, with the son of the great French chef Alain Chapel in the kitchen.

Success? If you count Michelin stars, yes. It has one.

The Pourcel Brothers
French twins who opened Sens & Bund in Bund 18 in 2004. Their Michelin stars were a draw for a few years, and they cashed in at the 2010 World Expo's French pavilion. But they were too early, and too absent, and now they are gone.

Success? For a short while.

Wolfgang Puck
A 1980s phenom in California, Puck showed up in Shanghai with the opening of Disney. He tried to leverage Disneytown's success into a followup location in Puxi. But without Disneytown's captive audience, or anything special from the kitchen, he drowned in Xintiandi's constant churn.

Success? Limited to Pudong (still running).

Yannick Alleno
After opening in Beijing, Alleno tried fine dining, and then a bistro, in a Changning mall. Shanghai shrugged.

Success? Closed in 2019.

Yves Mattagne
Another Michelin star who took the China cash in exchange for slapping his name on a failed seafood restaurant (2008), at a private club on the Bund.

Success? His restaurant was gone within a year.

***

Illustrations: Cheesecake

The Diplomatic Bastard: Why This Tiny Restaurant Matters

Halfway through dinner at Bastard, a Shanghainese friend began laughing at the dishes and their prices. He has plenty of money. He had just signed a restaurant consulting contract worth 50k a month — a side business to his real job, good for a little pocket money — but paying 38rmb for two pieces of fried tofu made him laugh in disbelief.

Another friend, not from China, told me he's only gotten angrier since eating at Bastard, calling it just a "mish-mash of different Chinese flavors."

A third, this time not a friend, said directly they would never eat Chinese food from a Western chef.

Bastard has, among the people I know, been controversial. The name hints at it, a low-key middle finger to people looking for a more traditional type of restaurant. Some people don't like it.

I love it.

When I came to China, a while ago now, I was a young line cook stuck in the fine dining world. I figured I'd stay for a year or two, maybe jump to Jean Georges for a while, and continue my slow climb to chef elsewhere.

China shook me out of that. It made me want to learn again, but not about spherification and sous vide techniques. It made me want to learn about Chinese food. I quit the (western) kitchen so I could do that, and, in my way, I've been doing it ever since. There was no textbook or professional school back then that could help. There still isn't. I gleaned what I could from restaurant meals, chef chats, and, as my Chinese improved, from a few Chinese-language books. But back then, and even today, there's a real lack of professional-level resources.

I pulled restaurant criticism from my left pocket while trying to stuff as much Chinese food knowledge as I could into the right pocket. I developed an idea that when evaluating food, the only thing that mattered was on the plate. It served me well, guiding me around traps like the decor (whether terrible or luxe) or reputation (whether terrible or legendary).

But it's not always true.

Michael J. and Jiro H. came into the restaurant industry later than I did, when they were already into their 20s. They had both been to college for other things before going into a kitchen and restaurant operations, respectively.

After Hong Kong, they moved to Shanghai, where Michael was the chef of Canton Disco at The Edition Hotel, at the time part of HK's Black Sheep Group. He had learned at the side of chefs in Black Sheep's Ho Lee Fook kitchen.

He tried — and failed — to break into traditional Cantonese kitchens, which weren't so enthusiastic about teaching their techniques to a white guy from Poland who didn't speak Cantonese.

After some moving around, leaving Shanghai and coming back, they decided to put their own money into realizing an idea they had been talking about for six years.

Bastard is their first restaurant, a mish-mash of Chinese flavors and regions, mostly Cantonese and Sichuanese. (When I put the "mish-mash" insult to Michael, he laughed and said, "I agree.") It's dark inside, far down a lane in Jing'an, kinda hard to find the first time.

If the soul of Canton Disco was about luxury and glamour, inspired by the wealth of 1980s Hong Kong, Bastard's soul is cyberpunk, DIY, the Kowloon Walled City. The music — Talking Heads, Can — is a little loud. The seats are crowded. The menu is not long and the dishes are mostly on the small side. It's easy to order the whole thing. They describe it as modern Chinese food.

I'm not even going to talk about what's on the plate. The dishes on their first menu are not nearly the most important thing about the restaurant. So this is not a dish-by-dish "review".

It's beside the point.

Michael Janczewski has gone farther than any of the other chefs, not just adding Chinese ingredients to a western cooking philosophy, but opening with a fully Chinese menu. At this point in his kitchen career, he's been cooking Chinese food longer than he cooked western food. But he's not Chinese and it's inevitable that he's going to be questioned about that.

I didn't have to look far for criticism, which they are not above, but I couldn't find much about their idea of the place, and how they see it. They don't spend much time on marketing.

So I sat down with Michael and Jiro and asked.

"There's an idea of what a Chinese restaurant must look like," they told me. "But we wanted to change this idea or perception of Chinese food and how it looks, and do something you don't expect."

"It's dark in Bastard, it's more colorful, more vibrant, hipster-ish. It's not the same stuff," they said. "There's different ways of having fun with Chinese food. We are here to say you don't have to do it the traditional way. You can do it your own way. Express yourself."

"Sometimes guests will ask me if the chef is from Sichuan," Jiro told me. "When people ask what food we serve, I say mod-Chinese food, but I think they're quite confused. This genre and the idea challenge the public — not just that it's a foreign chef doing Chinese food."

When I talked with Michael about the food philosophy, and what difference and similarities there are between global cuisines and global chefs, he kept it simple. "Taste never lies," he told me. It is, for him, another low-key middle finger to the approach of weighing down food with techniques and sometimes forgetting that "food is just food — don't overthink it."

I also wanted to hear their perspective on the criticism I've heard myself or read on Dianping, and give them a chance to respond.

Dianping: Shanghai has plenty of fake western restaurants, but now it finally has a fake Chinese restaurant.

"Well, I guess we are a pioneer of the genre! They say it's good, it's not the easiest, to be a pioneer, but at least we are first!"

Some people: It's not original.

"If it's not, let me know another restaurant that serves this kind of food, point it out, I'm happy to go there... Getting char siu, listening to Psycho Killer, having a highball — that doesn't happen in every other place."

My friend: It's way too expensive for what it is.

"I can say that about many other restaurants that serve western food. But people seem to look down on Chinese food unless it's fine dining. We care about the ingredients that we are using, and sorry, those are not the cheapest. That's the only way to justify it. I agree, you can get a char siu on rice anywhere for 58rmb but where is this pork coming from? You don't know. Here, we are using Iberico pork and it comes with a higher price tag. So for people who care about the ingredients, just even the produce, they know that."

A prominent food world person: I'm not eating Chinese food from a Western chef.

"But he's eating French food from Chinese chefs? It's not even a criticism for me. I had plenty of these comments when I was running Canton Disco. It was expected. This is just being racist — it's not even a criticism. Very backwards. You don't necessarily have to be Chinese to cook Chinese food. Food doesn't always have to stick to tradition. There's as many ways to do something as there are people."

***

I support Bastard because I support western chefs learning about and experimenting with Chinese food. I see myself in Michael and Jiro, back when I bailed on the Western fine dining world and started to look at China as the teacher.

It's not just them.

I support the guys at Yaya's and now Paulo de Souza at The Merchants and Blake when he was cooking at Oha Cafe and Yann Klein at Maison Lameloise and anyone else who is trying to learn from China.

(It matters equally that there are younger Chinese chefs who are experimenting with Chinese cuisines, and here I'm thinking of Zou Mingyang at the Oha Group and even Zhang Yi (both women! yeah!), who recently won the San Pellegrino China Best Young Chef Award.)

Do I like all their food, every time? Do I like all the business models? No, I don't.

Bastard really speaks to me because it's most my style. I like the Talking Heads and dark alleys more than white tablecloths and tedious garnishes.

But this is bigger than that.

These chefs matter even more in the global climate we are living in, as other countries and people turn away from China.

It matters that there is a dialogue between western chefs and China, that they are investing their time and their money into trying to understand the country and its cuisines, and, in an era of de-coupling, that they are engaging.

It just happens to be through a restaurant.

***

Photos: Elsa Bouillot

Should You Open A Restaurant? Yes! No! Here's Why!

You love food. You go to restaurants all the time. You worked in one during summer vacation once or maybe for a year or two.

Your friends come to you to ask where they should go for dinner, and ask your opinion on whether a place is worth trying. They ask you to order when you go out together. And now you've got a little extra money in your savings account, one or two hundred thousand rmb. It's not enough to buy a house and it's not collecting much interest. Maybe you should take the plunge and invest in a restaurant?

Maybe you've got even more than that, a few million, still not enough to buy a house in downtown, but enough to try out the food and beverage industry on your own.

So many restaurants are busy, aren't they? How much does the food on the plate cost, after all, compared to what they are charging for it?

Plus, it seems like everyone else has opened a restaurant. Why shouldn't you?

Well, don't let me stand in the way! I think it's a great idea, a grand idea, maybe the best one you've ever had!

I just have a few small questions first! I'm sure they won't stop you. Don't think twice!

*

Do you have a background in restaurant management? Years of experience? If not, how are you going to know when things are going well or going bad, and how to fix them?

Do you have a connection to a landlord who will give you a great price on a great property? If not, are you prepared to compete for the opportunity to pay high rent?

To get an idea of current prices, I spoke with Federico Rossi of Reco Real Estate, who handles a lot of properties in Xuhui and Jing'an. He told me that for streets in the central areas of the former French Concession (Anfu Lu, Wukang Lu), you can expect to pay 25-28rmb per day per square meter.

That's about 150,000rmb a month in rent for a 200 square meter restaurant.

For "secondary" streets or projects from big state-owned developers, you might be lucky and pay 16-18rmb per square meter per day. Oh, and you'll need to pay a three-month deposit up front, even on a three-year lease.

Do you think you will open in a nice mall? This is a dream. Nice malls don't gamble on first-time restaurant owners, and malls that do accept people with no track record are usually not nice.

How big of a space can you afford? Have you done the math to determine how many seats you can fit in there at one time, and how much each person needs to spend to make you profitable?

What price level will your restaurant be at? If it's not expensive, then you need volume. Do you have the space for that? Do you have the operations for that?

If it's expensive, then you need a very good chef. Do you have one? If not, how will you get one? Why will they work for you and not someone else?

Do you even have the ability to recognize a great chef? "They worked in a five-star hotel" is not an answer.

Do you have the budget for a good designer? I got a quote from one many restaurants use (and I like): about 250,000rmb for a 200 square meter restaurant. And that doesn't include the acoustic, kitchen or engineering consultants, much less the project management and construction costs. (The design fee can be significantly less or more depending on the designer.)

How long of a lease are you going to be able to get? Can you make your investment back in that time -- and profit? It's not uncommon for an untested brand to get no more than a three-year lease.

Why does Shanghai need your restaurant? There are already more than 100,000 restaurants in Shanghai, and endless variations in every category.

Where are you going to open? If you're downtown and want a streetside location, you are going to pay alot.

If you're not downtown, is your business model adapted to the neighborhood? Is your restaurant going to be so outstanding that people will cross the river or go to a district they don't usually go to? How are you going to achieve that?

If you want to be downtown but can't afford a prime location, how are you going to attract customers to a second floor, or a fringe area?

What's your actual profit going to be? Look at your investment, and then do the math from your percentage of profit, from the profit margin, from the actual revenue. How much do you think you will actually make?

Do you know that net profit, even for successful restaurants, is usually around 3-5%? (EBITDA will be higher but that's a little complicated for this stage.) Sure, some restaurants are making hundreds of thousands of RMB per month, but for every restaurant that is reliably profitable, many restaurants are just getting by — even ones who look or are full all the time.

What's the end goal of your investment? Do you want to be involved in day-to-day operations? If not, do you have a strong general manager who you trust? Won't steal from you? Will handle the restaurant as if he or she owns it, but will work for a reasonable salary?

If not, how are you going to find that person? Are you prepared or do you have the time to step in and try to do it yourself? Would you even know how?

Maybe a delivery-focused business would solve some of the problems. Location, size, service. Good idea! But do you want to give away 25% of your gross revenue to the delivery platforms? Can you still profit, or even make money, after losing a quarter of your sales?

Are you going to invest alone? Do you have millions of rmb to potentially lose? If not, how many other investors will there be? One of the top reasons restaurants fail is that the investors don't get along at some point. Of course, everyone was friendly and positive at the beginning, easy to get along with.

But opening a restaurant involves hundreds — thousands — of small decisions. Will we have tablecloths? What's the budget for plateware? Can we afford a dishwashing machine? Should we buy it or rent it? Which POS system will we use? Do we expand to a second restaurant?

It's inevitable that as the investors go through these questions, there will be disagreement. Someone will want to do it cheaply. Someone will want to spend. Conflict is guaranteed.

Will all of the investors be reasonable, rational and have high EQs? Will they be able to navigate the conflicts without making it personal? Can they all compromise? What if they are not equal partners? Who will lead? These are not questions you can prepare for. You only get the answers once the issues arise and you learn that other people are hell.

How are you going to attract staff? Providing housing and meals is a good way to attract people, but are you ready to become the manager of a dormitory, and all the problems that brings, as well? What will you do when your employees, who live together, get in a fight? Don't show up for work? Damage the apartment you've rented for them or disturbed the neighbors?

Are you good at: human resources, accounting, China marketing, interpersonal communication, explaining the minute details of how food tastes and why, keeping a positive attitude in the face of daily problems, leading a team, knowing when chefs are taking kickbacks from suppliers, Dianping promotions, taking criticism whether it's right or wrong, drinking with customers, working with people who might not have a high degree of education, listening to a thousand different opinions and picking out which ones are valid, compromise, not sleeping much, navigating bureaucracy and being comfortable with the unknown?

Can you afford to lose all the money you will be putting in? Wouldn't you rather give it to me?

Read all the questions and think you have all the answers? Then you're either crazy, brave, foolish or brilliant (maybe all four), which means...

Congrats!!! You're ready to open a restaurant!

(This article is intended to dissuade everyday people from investing in something they don't fully understand, and losing their time, money and energy to a notoriously difficult business. Of course, there are many other restaurant professionals who are able to juggle all of these problems and still come out profitable, and they are only a little crazy because of it. They deserve respect. The moral of this story? Leave the restaurant investing to the professionals. And give your money to me, instead.)

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Illustrations: Cheesecake

I Scientifically Measured KFC's New Soup Dumplings

KFC has launched a limited run of soup dumplings in China. They are now available everywhere except Hainan (Covid, probably) and... Shanghai.

So this holiday weekend, I did what any regular person who is just a little bit into soup dumpling math would do — I went to Suzhou to measure them with a scale and calipers.

If you're not following along, I started a project nearly ten years ago called The Shanghai Soup Dumpling Index, where I applied precise measurements to various soup dumplings from 52 different shops. In 2015, I published the results and got on TV because of it. I've been trying to live it down ever since.

But KFC pulled me out of retirement. It was never a question. As soon as I saw the ad, I knew it was happening.

The night before my Suzhou trip, I started packing. Scissors? Yes. Digital scale that measures to the hundreth of a gram? Yes. Notepad and pen to record the weight of the meatball and soup to the gram? Yes. Calipers? Wait, where were my calipers?

I dug around in my kitchen equipment. I found my portable refractometer for measuring sugar density, I pulled out my digital pH gauge for measuring acidity, and my instant read Thermopen for highly accurate temperature readings. But the calipers, the ones I had used for years to accurately assess the thickness of soup dumpling skin? They had gone for a walk.

I say this only because it led me to a discovery that, no doubt, will be useful to you at some point in your Shanghai life. Along with sushi, green groceries, and vibrators, you can also buy highly precise scientific calipers on Eleme and have them delivered to your house within an hour.

With my kit prepared, I took an early morning train to our sister city (soup dumplings only available from 6-10am) and stopped at the first KFC I saw. It was at the train station. Soup dumplings weren't on the printed menu but they were in stock.

I conducted a bit of due diligence on the cashier.

Were the dumplings frozen?

Yes, they were.

Were they steamed or microwaved to heat them up?

They were heated in an oven.

This was not looking good. I ordered three sets of six (15.5rmb each). Twenty seconds later, they were ready, on the counter, in the disposable aluminum trays that airline food usually comes in. This was looking worse.

KFC has said they have produced 12 million soup dumplings, or two million sets, and when they sell out, they are gone. I was under no illusion that they suddenly hired thousands of Shanghainese ayis and assigned them a spot in their countless locations across China (except Hainan and Shanghai), to wrap and steam soup dumplings to order.

Twelve million dumplings. That is something like the Gross Annual Soup Dumpling Industrial Output of Shanghai. It's a hell of a lot of dumplings. These would be factory made.

Still, when I opened the lid of the first tray of dumplings, I gasped a little. I have no animosity towards KFC in China. It has gotten me through many Chinese countryside meals and train journeys. It cracked the code of delicious fast-food congee and bought and perfected the recipe for Portugese egg tarts. If there is a way to industrialize a soup dumpling and maintain its integrity, KFC will be the one to figure it out.

The smell came first, a clear whiff of "generic" with wheaty undertones. But what happened to the tops? Instead of pleats, the most elegant feature of a soup dumpling, there were stamped grooves in a loose imitation of pleats. The dumpling wrappers were thick and soggy from sitting around in the heater, and despite the formidable width of the skin, one had managed to break.

As I began to measure, dissecting dumplings in a corner of the second floor, I understood that breaking hardly mattered; even when intact, these soup dumplings contained almost no soup (1.33g on average).

I moved on to taking the weight of the meat, a foamy ball that smelled like wet cat food. Finally, I took out my new set of Delixi calipers and it all fell apart. In 2015 Shanghai, a good dumpling wrapper would have been about 1.25mm thick, and a great one under 1.0mm. This was KFC's biggest failure: wrappers that averaged 2.49mm.

As my Shanghainese dining companion remarked, "That's not a soup dumpling. It's a mantou."

In KFC's defense, they are not the only dumpling shop to offer such a thick skin.

Before Nanxiang Mantou Dian in the Yuyuan Garden complex renovated, the soup dumplings on the ground floor take-away had mantou-like wrappers and only a trace of soup. They also sucked.

In Nanxiang itself, today part of Jiading district, the ayis still err on the side of pudge.

But as many Shanghainese have told me, it's no longer 1975. We have options now, and Shanghai wants soup dumplings that stick to the Shanghainese mantra: thin skin, a lot of meat, a lot of soup, and a savory taste.

As a soup dumpling, prized for draping a savory meatball filling in only the barest of wrapper, KFC's fortified skin is an architectural failure. Yes, we might understand it as technically necessary to serving 12 million dumplings across China and having them stay intact. This might be the best that the current world of food engineering can do, might even be the pinnacle of 2022 industrial soup dumpling technology. As an eating experience, however, it's disappointing.

There's a reason KFC won't bring these to market in Shanghai, the soup dumpling city, and here is the mathematical proof.

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A Loving Tribute to Chinese Food, From a Hundred Years Ago

This past week, I was reading old guidebooks to life in China from the early 1900s, and in one of them, a 1914 book by Peking University professor Isaac Taylor Headland, I found a fantastic chapter on appreciating Chinese food. Obviously a kindred soul, writing on a topic close to my heart, I felt the need to share these hundred-year-old words that still ring so true to me. I've picked out the best parts (including the picture above) and reproduce them below. —saintcavish

"When foreigners speak of Chinese food, they bunch it all in together, as though it were the same all over the country. It is decidedly not the same. 

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"When we who have been in China come home, folks talk to us as though we had nothing but rice to live on, and as though the Chinese existed on this one kind of food alone, and as though it was very poor living.  

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"In a city like Peking one can always buy beef, mutton — the best mutton I have ever eaten — pork, fish, and chicken, and in the winter time the Mongol market furnishes all kinds of game. 

"When the cold months come, great camel trains of Mongol men and women bring loads of frozen game, deer, wild boar, pheasants, partridges, Mongol chicken, rabbits, and everything that grows on the mountains and the plains. 

"Among the best of all this game is the wild boar, the pheasant, and the bustard — the former fed on only the cleanest food, and the latter equal if not superior to our best American turkey. 

"They have a red haw, about the size of a crabapple — an inch in dia- meter — which makes a sauce for bustard equal if not superior to our cranberries. These Mongols also bring large quantities of butter, sealed up in the stomachs of sheep, as we put up our bologna sausage, though foreigners, so far as I have known, have not been very good customers, perhaps because of the greasy and unbathed appearance of the merchants. 

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"The Chinese themselves use but little, if indeed they use any, butter, and they say of us that we carry about with us a butter odour. 

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"There are three kinds of food common to us that the Chinese, when they first come in contact with the foreigner, do not like. These are butter, coffee, and cheese. 

"I have had guests who would force themselves to eat these things when I knew that the very odour of them was offensive. I remember one evening I invited Professor Lu — a very large, corpulent professor — of the Peking University to dine with us. It was the first time he had dined in a foreign home. 

"My table boy had been with us for years, and I had never known him to be guilty of a smile while waiting at the table. During the dinner, when he passed the butter to Professor Lu, he was about to take half that was on the dish. The boy gulped, and suggested in a half-under- tone that we never used so much. Professor Lu, perhaps to justify his mistake, or perhaps to approve himself to his hostess, explained, also in a half-undertone: "I am very fond of butter." 

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"I have had Chinese friends say to me, "I can drink your coffee, and eat your butter, but I draw the line at your cheese." 

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"Many foreigners go to China and never learn to like their food. All I have to say is that, from the deepest depths of my heart, I pity them. They do not know what they are missing in life. 

"Let me confess here that you have to learn to eat Chinese food. I did not like it the first time — nor the first few times I tried it. But it is an undertaking that richly rewards the one who learns to do it well. 

***

"They have a way of baking — or cooking — large pieces of fat pork, covered with rice flour, which makes it one of the most delicious mouthfuls I have ever tasted. 

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"It would be impossible in a short chapter like this to try to indulge in any eulogy of sharks' fins, birds' nest soup, chicken soup, egg soup, or the delicious lotus seed broth that one gets at certain seasons of the year. 

"Those who do not know what birds' nest soup is will be interested to learn that there is a bird in the south that expectorates a kind of a gelatinous substance of which it builds its nest on the sides of inaccessible cliffs, where they are very difficult to secure. It is this that makes it so expensive. 

"Some of my friends to whom I have given this explanation, have expressed their sentiments by a peculiar curl of the lip and a twitching of the nose, and said they would not eat it if it were saliva. And then I called their attention to the fact that the bee —  but you may look up the composition of honey yourself — this chapter is about Chinese foods. 

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"My favourite Chinese food? Oh, I just take any kind and am grateful and happy."

    — Isaac Taylor Headland, 1914