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 Is it BIG NEWS when companies that are working on outdated business models or that have been outcompeted go out of business?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.
