Global face of stinging taste

The plain-speaking owner of one of the country's most popular restaurants tells Ye Jun why she thinks Sichuan cuisine is set to take flight

Zhang Lan, founder of South Beauty, favors banning bird's nest, abalone and shark fin soup. She believes most people who can afford these popular Cantonese offerings are businessmen trying to bribe government officials with expensive meals.

"The rise of Cantonese cuisine depends on corruption," she says.

The plain-speaking 52-year-old is known to offer a refined version of Sichuan and Cantonese cuisine.

Twenty-one years ago, Zhang was a student in Canada who, at one point, held down six part-time jobs, which included everything from washing dishes to carrying and cutting big chunks of beef.

"I was so tired by the end of the day that I had to lift my legs onto the bed with my hands," she recalls.

Now turning South Beauty one of the country's most popular restaurants, Zhang values those experiences.

"They are responsible for my current peaceful and balanced state of mind," she says.

Inspired by her life overseas, Zhang got involved in the restaurant business after returning to China. In 2000, she founded South Beauty Group, which opened the chic SUBU in Beijing in 2007, and the luxurious Lan Club in Beijing and Shanghai in 2006 and 2008, respectively.

Last year, the group was rated by the China Hotel Association as one of the top 10 Chinese restaurant brand names, and ranked alongside the likes of Quanjude and Xiaofeiyang.

South Beauty currently has 45 restaurants in 15 cities, which Zhang says will expand to 56 or 57 by the time the Shanghai Expo opens in May.

Sichuan cuisine dominates the menu of South Beauty. Zhang says it was a deliberate choice, as "Sichuan foods appeal to people all over the world".

While the cuisine of this region has always been popular, those engaged in the food business were poorly educated and poorly trained, Zhang says.

The food, although tasty, was regarded as cheap and mostly available in hole-in-the-wall eateries.

"Sichuan cuisine is a time honored one encompassing hundreds of dishes and flavors," she says. "What I did was to marry it to a rich family, and now I want to introduce it to the world."

The first thing Zhang did was give the cuisine a face-lift, both in terms of appearance and presentation. Targeting businesspeople, the restaurant initially drew flak for its high prices.

"There is no better business meal than a Chinese one," she says. "I want to change the world's impression of Chinese food as unsafe. To do that, I first need to change Chinese people's impression of the cuisine."

Zhang says the reason people expect Sichuan cuisine to be cheap is because restaurant owners feed into the notion. But this has changed over time, she admits.

"People who used to say the restaurant was too expensive have started coming in to dine at South Beauty, which offers a good environment and service. Meanwhile, expats find SUBU and LAN Club up to international standards," she says.

Zhang says South Beauty's creative take on this traditional cuisine continues to be rooted in its culture.

She is not only a native Beijinger, but also belongs to the Manchu ethnic minority. Once a month, she visits a small eatery along Houhai Lake to devour boiled beef stomach strips, a traditional Beijing specialty, sometimes amid dust kicked up by a passing car. But she is equally comfortable in brand name clothes and Armani jewelry at formal Western-style dinners.

Zhang's group was designated Food & Beverage provider for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. It did such a good job that the Shanghai Expo invited it to open four restaurants inside the Expo. One is a fine-dining restaurant offering Sichuan and Cantonese foods. Another offers both buffet and a la carte, while a third LAN Caf has Western-style foods. The fourth is STEAM, a restaurant built around the concept of healthy eating. Her group has also been approached by the London Olympic Committee to be Food & Beverage provider for the 2012 Games.

South Beauty provides Chinese food on flights from China to France, the Netherlands and South Korea. Zhang says she is now trying to make it available on all major routes.

While many Chinese restaurant groups are rushing to get listed on the stock exchange, Zhang says she prefers to first get a strong foothold in the local market.

"If South Beauty gets listed one day, it will be when it is capable of paying back handsomely both big stockholders and small investors," she says.

The group's first overseas branch opened in central Jakarta on Feb 8. The restaurant's dcor includes a dragon made of colored glazed glass on its ceiling.

But, "I want to make the brand name known well domestically before expanding overseas," she says.

(China Daily 03/20/2010 page11)