Text/Editor: Xia Youfeng
"Ten minutes to eat, two hours in line", is there really such an exaggerated restaurant?
During last year's May Day, the restaurant of the restaurant chef in Guangzhou Grandview Plaza staged a grand occasion of 12 consecutive hours of uninterrupted queuing.
At 4 o'clock in the afternoon, an hour before the start of the meal, there was a long queue outside the store that stretched for hundreds of meters, and the floor was densely packed with people who came to line up to eat the chef.
And this is not an exception, almost every weekend, there will be a "long queue" outside every Chef Fei store, which makes the counterparts next door envious of their drooling.
There are so many people in line that the waiter sticks a notice outside the door that "refuse scalpers to queue", and even takes the initiative to persuade customers to stop queuing.
It is not a well-known century-old brand, and the price is not cheap, it is just a Chinese chain restaurant that has been established for less than 10 years.
What kind of magic does Chef Fei have that makes customers so addicted that they would rather wait in line for hours to eat?
An outlier in the eyes of peers, opening a chain without pre-made dishes or takeaways
With its green signboards, green dishes, and green stools, I can't wait for the whole world to know that it is the "National King of Small Stir-fried Meat", and it is Chef Fei, an "outlier" in the Chinese chain restaurant brand.
Chef Fei's signature chili fried meat can sell 1 million copies a year, and this chili fried meat is not cheap, 68 yuan a piece.
You must know that Haidilao raised the price of potato chips that year, and was immediately chased and scolded by customers, and the stock price fell by 10%, forcing Haidilao to reduce the price and come back, and also issued an "apology statement".
If you want to ask the founder of Chef Fei, how did Fei Lianghui, who was born in the 80s, conquer the taste buds of diners, he can only say that he has a family history, and there is also a foil from his peers.
Fei Lianghui was born in Hengyang, Hunan, his father is a famous Fei chef in ten miles and eight towns, and Fei Lianghui, who was still learning to help under his father at that time, was at best a "Fei Xiao Chef".
It wasn't until 2003 that Fei Lianghui opened her first store in Hengyang, called Tongxin Catering, which is also the predecessor of today's chain brand Chef Fei Chili Fried Meat.
Fei Lianghui is different from others when he opens a restaurant, don't open a restaurant is how many dishes come and how to come, the menu is thick like a dictionary, Fei Lianghui thinks that this is not good, there are too many dishes, it will be complicated, and customers will not have a memory point.
Therefore, there are only a dozen dishes on the menu of Tongxin Catering, which Fei Lianghui is good at, and he does not pay attention to putting too many seasonings in his cooking, but uses the original heaviness of the vegetables and meat to impress customers.
The customers who came to eat also ate this set, and Fei Lianghui's Tongxin Catering soon made a lot of money.
Fei Lianghui guarded the first store for 10 years, and it was not until 2012 that he had the idea of wanting to be a chain, he first opened two more stores in Hengyang, and then opened it in Changsha.
At the same time, in order to test the market outside the province, in 2012, he also invested more than 2 million yuan to open a Hunan restaurant in Shanghai, but the store in Shanghai was a little "unadaptable", which made Fei Lianghui lose a lot of money.
However, Fei Lianghui was not discouraged, he firmly believed that Hunan cuisine was still very marketable, but he had not yet cultivated at home.
After that, Fei Lianghui temporarily put away his ambitions, and planned to manage his own one-third of an acre of land well, and the store did not expand too much, and his footprints were only in Changsha, Hengyang and Xiangtan.
Until 2016, Fei Lianghui wanted to specialize in one dish as a selling point, but there were many Hunan dishes, and he didn't know which one to choose, so he did a survey of 5,000 customers in the store and selected the most distinctive Hunan dishes in their hearts.
As a result, 97% of the customers surveyed said that when it comes to Hunan cuisine, the first dish that comes to mind is stir-fried pork with chili.
In December 2016, Fei Lianghui opened two new stores in Changsha, but this time it was not called Tongxin Restaurant, but "Chef Fei's Fried Pork with Chili".
The new name was conceived by Fei Lianghui after careful consideration, and the name directly refers to the ingredients, so that customers can know what it is selling at a glance, and it is easy to remember and easy to develop into a chain brand.
And it can be deeply linked to Fei Lianghui, and using him to endorse the brand can be said to be a multi-task.
But it's useless to just get a good name, customers come in to eat, and they have to cook delicious food before anyone buys it.
"If you want to do a good job, you must first sharpen your tools" Fei Lianghui also understands this, so he is quite attentive to the selection of ingredients.
He cooperated with the seed company to plant 900 acres of different varieties of chili peppers, and then tried them one by one, and finally selected screw peppers as the chili peppers in the chili fried meat.
After choosing the chili pepper, the pork can't be sloppy, and after picking it out, Fei Lianghui chose the "jumping champion" Tuhei pig in the pig, and the choice was the front leg meat.
The meat in this part is fat and lean, which is very suitable for stir-frying, and when stir-frying, there is a lot of oil, and the taste is thick and heavy.
And in order to supply to every store, Chef Fei directly started the "handmade system", and every time he opened a new city, he would find a buyer to find ingredients all over the city.
This toss was not in vain, Chef Fei's chili fried pork won the "No. 1 must-eat dish in Changsha" for three consecutive years from 2018 to 2020.
Also in 2018, Fei Lianghui won the Chinese Golden Chef Award, known as the "Oscar of China's catering industry", and in 2020, she won the medal of "National Fried Pork King" issued by the China Cuisine Association.
Taking advantage of these shareholders, Chef Fei began to go out of Hunan, from opening stores in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, to returning to Shanghai, and then to entering Beijing to catch up with "stir-frying", so that catering peers called "wolf".
And in the eyes of his peers, Chef Fei is really a complete "outlier".
When everyone was in the takeaway market, Chef Fei gave up this piece of fat and said that he would not do takeaway, because in Fei Lianghui's view, packaging would reduce the quality of the dishes.
Similarly, when other chain catering brands are expanding vigorously by franchising, Fei Lianghui said that he will not develop franchises now and in the future, and insists on opening directly operated stores one by one.
Chef Fei's approach really makes his peers scratch their heads, is there still a boss in the world who has money and doesn't make money? But they obviously underestimated Chef Fei.
Chef Fei's sets of "three-board axes" can only make customers feel that they are worth the money, and what really makes customers stand in a long queue willingly is because Chef Fei has grasped the pain points of today's consumers.
The peers who use pre-made dishes have instead made Chef Fei
Time goes back to more than ten years ago, when the core competitiveness of the restaurant still depended on the chef in charge of the kitchen, and whether the customer could make it come back after eating it depended on their craftsmanship.
However, the situation in the restaurant industry has taken a turn for the worse, and the chef has become a dispensable presence in the kitchen.
The popularity of pre-made dishes has made it easy for anyone who can't cook to become a "chef", and each restaurant only needs to hire a few caterers to easily make a "delicious meal".
According to the data released by the China Research Network, the scale of the prefabricated food market will reach 516.5 billion yuan in 2023, and the proportion of prefabricated meals of most chain catering brands is more than 80%.
Among them, the proportion of Shin Kung Fu and Yoshinoya's pre-made meals is 100%, not to mention the takeaway industry, and the use of cooking kits as take-out restaurants has become a norm in the industry.
It is not difficult to understand that using pre-made dishes to make products is not only much shorter than letting the chef stir-fry and cook them, but even the profit is two or three times higher than that of the latter.
However, this is not surprising that customers will like it, on the contrary, because of the long shelf life of pre-made dishes, not fresh, heavy oil and salt, etc., it is difficult for many consumers to swallow.
Today's popularity is just that many people don't know that they are eating pre-made dishes, or they know but don't have a choice, so they can only pinch their noses and eat them.
And Fei Lianghui just saw this pain point of consumers and gave consumers one more choice.
In this way, when consumers walk around the business district to get ready to eat, after looking around, they stand in front of Chef Fei and other chain restaurants and hesitate.
Some restaurants are "confirmed pre-made dishes", some are "suspected pre-made dishes", and Chef Fei's family is "non-pre-pre-made", so it is not difficult to see which one consumers will choose.
Consumers didn't have a choice before, because everyone used pre-made dishes, and it was the same for any restaurant they went to, but consumers didn't have a choice now because they didn't use pre-made dishes for chefs, and if they didn't want to eat pre-made dishes, they had to go to other people's houses.
When consumers eat out, what they value is nothing more than "comfortable eating" and "safe eating".
Chef Fei makes the kitchen transparent, customers can see Chef Fei's chef cutting vegetables and meat, and the freshly slaughtered pork on the day is hanging brightly, and the cooking process is seen, and customers are naturally relieved.
Moreover, Chef Fei can make customers queue up for a long time, and another point is to use the chef as a marketing point.
Unlike other restaurant chains, where chefs have a low presence, Chef Fei's chefs implement a "dish responsibility system", where each chef is only responsible for a few dishes, from washing and cutting vegetables to stir-frying.
Customers spend money on fast food but enjoy a dedicated chef service.
However, although Chef Fei's current development strategy is popular with customers, it is not very popular with investors.
With the increasing popularity of central kitchens, if you want to eat the dishes cooked by chefs in the future, you will have to pay higher costs, which will mean the compression of profits.
Moreover, an investor of Huaying Capital once said that one of the principles of investing in the catering industry is to standardize catering, to put it bluntly, it is necessary to use prefabricated dishes, and they will not invest in Chinese food with chefs.
How ironic, in the past, whether a restaurant was good or not depended on whether the chef in it was good or not, but now Chinese restaurants with chefs are not looked down upon by investors.
At the same time, Chef Fei's expansion model is very demanding for the chef team, and if there are not enough chefs, Chef Fei's stall will not be able to be opened.
So we can see that although Chef Fei has opened a fire, the scale is still not large, the expansion is slow, and the profit is not as good as that of the brand that uses pre-made dishes, and it is normal that it is not valued by capital.
epilogue
When pre-made dishes became the mainstream, the "handmade dishes" that Chef Fei really fried slowly became a rare delicacy.
Chef Fei can make customers willing to wait outside the door for hours, not because it is so delicious that "this dish should only be in heaven", but because people don't want to eat factory dishes that may have been prepared months or even a year ago.