Daniel Garst

Homegrown food offers the best value for money

By Daniel Garst (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-01-31 07:53

One of my most interesting foreign friends in Beijing is a German woman named Marianne. Despite being quite well-off, she lives among ordinary Chinese folks, renting a flat in a plain, 1980s-vintage six-story complex, that has been completely remodeled into a tasteful blend of East and West.

This space provides her with a comfortable environment for one of her passions: designing furniture. And when she's not doing that in her spare time, Marianne is out and about searching for new and unique Chinese culinary adventures in Beijing.

On a recent evening, she took me to one of her favorite finds: a unique hotpot restaurant specializing in fish. Although I had never seen this place reviewed in the new restaurant listings in expat magazines, they served the best hotpot I have ever eaten in China.

This dinner out illustrates two basic realities about eating out in the capital. First, finding a unique and great dining experience often requires some old-fashioned shoe-leather exploration. Second, Chinese restaurants remain hard to beat for those expatriates who seek something unique and want to get the best value for their money.

Regarding the second point, our dinner that evening was not cheap by Chinese restaurant standards - the 250-yuan tab paid for more than a dozen plates of thin fish filets for dipping, shaved lamb, vegetables and some beers. However, a comparable meal at one of Beijing's numerous top-flight foreign restaurants would have cost us at least 100 yuan more.

However, most of my Chinese friends now tell me that dining out in Chinese restaurants is less and less of a bargain. Like all Chinese people, they obsess about food and stretching their money; the two dozen I polled on this matter complained that the cost of eating at restaurants had risen by 20 percent during the past year. And whenever I talk to cabbies, they all grouse about how expensive the snacks they buy at food stalls for breakfast and lunch have become.

Of course Beijing's foreign restaurants are also raising their prices. Indeed, last Friday when I opened the menu at a favorite Belgian restaurant, the first page announced that they were charging 10 percent more per dish, their first hike in eight years, because of the rising cost of food, rent and labor.

And notwithstanding the complaints of my Chinese friends about the rising expense of dining in homegrown establishments, these places are in a much better position than their foreign counterparts to deal with the cost squeeze on restaurants.

The recent spike in food prices is a case in point. Unlike foreign restaurants, Chinese places typically don't use expensive specialty food, such as gourmet cheese and the like. And as one foreign restaurant owner that I know put it: "The Chinese are geniuses at keeping their food overhead low."

In fact, he and other people I know complain that their cost-saving methods often border on the unsanitary. However, I have dined for years in Chinese restaurants and have never become sick - the same cannot be said for the food in my company's canteen.

Because their core clientele consists mainly of ordinary folk, rather than affluent loawai and rich locals, Chinese restaurants need not locate in high-rent districts to be near their customers. And the scruffier diamond in the rough type restaurants can do just fine in lower-rent areas.

Finally, with their mainly Chinese clientele - Marianne and I were the only foreign diners that evening in the hotpot restaurant - they have lower labor overheads than their foreign competitors.

They need not employ waiting staff who can speak English and command the foreign language wage premium. According to my acquaintance, Peter Kende, who owns a Budapest Hungarian restaurant, these waiters get paid much more than their non-English speaking counterparts.

Thus, even with their rising prices, Chinese restaurants will continue to offer terrific value, especially when compared with more expensive upscale foreign dining establishments.

Moreover, when it comes to Chinese dining, Beijing literally is a movable feast, ranging from hot Sichuan and Hunan fare to Yunnan's fungal and insect delights - yes, I've feasted on bee larvae in one of the latter restaurants. So, as is the case with most things about living in China, the old adage "When in Rome, do as the Romans" applies to dining out in Beijing.

(China Daily 01/31/2011)