SE Asian cuisine favored by Chinese palates, taking bigger place at table

After years of development and marketing, Southeast Asian cuisine has entered a rapid growth stage in China, but numerous niche areas remain to be tapped to further exploit the full potential of the sector, experts said.

Sarawak, Malaysia-born Jasmine Kho is the founder of MULU, a Beijing-based food and beverage group with various Southeast Asian subbrands. In 2012, when she first established MULU Hutong, a Nanyang-French sub-brand in the international metropolis, very few had tasted Malaysian curry and Sarawak laksa — two classic dishes from her hometown.

Now, 11 years on, steady streams of Southeast Asian food fanatics have to make reservations a week in advance to get a taste of Sarawak dishes. During COVID-19, she also established a street food style Southeast Asian sub-brand and a Michelin-recommended Thai sub-brand.

Southeast Asian cuisine entered China in the 1990s and is now in a development spurt. Guangzhou-based retail service provider Windata said that in 2021 in China, store opening and closing ratios of Thai restaurants — a linchpin representative of Southeast Asian cuisine — surpassed one, which means the pace of Thai restaurant openings was greater than closings.

In terms of geographic location, Southeast Asian food has been quickly penetrating first-tier and "new first-tier" cities, such as Beijing, Guangzhou, Hangzhou and Chengdu, with Vietnamese, Malaysian and Singaporean cuisine ranking among foodies' favorites, a report from Chinese online service provider Meituan showed.

Meanwhile, according to the report, during this year's Labor Day holiday, consumption of exotic food and beverages, which includes Southeast Asian cuisine, skyrocketed, with year-on-year growth surpassing 30 percent. Specifically, searches for "Thai cuisine" on Meituan during the holiday surged 303 percent on a yearly basis, ranking first among all exotic cuisine categories.

"Taking advantage of the psychology of consumers seeking novelties, Southeast Asian cuisine has entered the Chinese market successfully. The development of the Southeast Asian tourism industry afterward has further allowed more and more consumers to know and appreciate the food better," said Zhu Danpeng, an F&B analyst based in Guangzhou.

"Currently, Southeast Asian restaurants, featuring Thai, Malaysian and Singaporean cuisine, have developed differentiated business positioning strategies, and pay attention to meeting consumers' social needs with diversified scenarios, and their per capita consumption prices are polarized," said a report from F&B observer canyin88.com.

"Southeast Asian food is one of my favorites. I often take my family to such restaurants on weekends. We three spend between 200 yuan ($27.4) and as high as 2,000 yuan per meal," said Yuan Xiaochen, a 35-year-old Southeast Asian cuisine fan in Beijing.