Fine Dining, translated as elegant banquet in Chinese, is also bluntly translated as "high-end dining" and "fine dining". It is an umbrella term that is all-encompassing. Old-school and grand French food, Japanese Omakase with an emphasis on handmade, and the newly popular creative cuisine without borders can all be classified into this term. If you don't know how to find a typical Fine Dining, check out the Michelin and Black Pearl lists.
As for their biggest commonality, it is probably - expensive. An ordinary meal of Fine Dining has different prices in different cities, but at least it is 500 yuan per person. In cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen, where every inch of land is at a premium, the price is even higher. One meal, even if you don't drink alcohol, you can eat two or three thousand bills per capita.
The expensive pricing is destined to prevent them from appearing in the public eye frequently. But this year, a number of Fine Dining stores have run away and closed stores one after another, which has aroused a lot of discussion, and the people who eat melons who talk about consumption downgrades every day exclaimed: "In these years, even the rich have no money?" ”
Text | Rao Tong language
编辑 | Yang
Operations | Puffs
From Fine Dining to Hunan restaurants
Some food lovers have summarized the "six battlefields" of high-end restaurants - Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, and Chengdu. In these economically active metropolises, there are many young people and many employment opportunities, and "making money" has become the first priority of living here. And when all aspects of life are closely linked to money, eating a meal can naturally reflect the trend of money.
Douzi, a 28-year-old Shenzhen native who works in an investment bank, has a good salary, and once liked Fine Dining very much, almost once a week. When eating the most, when Douzi searches for restaurants, he will even directly set the "price sort", starting from the high price. In her heart, expensive things, at least the quality is guaranteed.
But this year, her financial industry began to take a general pay cut. The expected year-end bonus was cut in half, and Beans consciously reduced the frequency of eating at high-end restaurants, and her feeling is that "money has become more valuable".
In the eyes of outsiders, the financial industry holds high salaries, but Douzi said that for money, everyone paid the price of "life and death". Cases are everywhere, there are peers who work all night and make an inconsequential mistake, "they will still be chased and scolded for 20 days". If the salary is high enough, eating an expensive meal is a comfort in high-pressure work, but now, the cost performance of work has been greatly reduced, every penny carries the taste of exhaustion, and unnecessary consumption is simply not spent.
Not only has Fine Dining eaten less often, but her consumption habits of beans are also changing, and in the past, she only bought Apple's original phone cases, wore genuine shoes and shoe flowers; Now, Pinduoduo is the better choice. She knows a lot of Hong Kong people, and she has also started to go to Shenzhen for more cost-effective goods, and the question she often asks has become: "Which mall is closest to Hong Kong?" When I go to the mall to eat, I even ask, "Where is Chef Fei?" ”
Choosing a location for high-end catering is what An Tuan is doing. In his opinion, cheap, big bowls of Hunan cuisine are quietly occupying Shenzhen. Due to the large number of migrant workers from Hunan, there have always been many Hunan restaurants in Shenzhen, but they have never been like now, and the takeaway platform is full of Hunan cuisine with the sign of "fierce stir-fry". A few years ago, the programmer friends around An Tuan would go to the nearby financial center on weekdays to have a Japanese-style Omakase meal, but now, "even the group building has changed from an izakaya to a Hunan restaurant".
▲ Cheap bowls of Hunan cuisine are becoming the new top stream. Photo / Visual China
The data proves it. According to Red Meal Big Data, as of September 2023, the number of Hunan cuisine stores nationwide has reached 15.6% of the total number of formal meal stores, exceeding the 14.7% proportion of Sichuan cuisine stores. Under the leadership of Chef Fei and other brands, Hunan cuisine has quickly realized chaining and spread all over Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. In the first-tier cities, there are more than 6,500 Hunan cuisine enterprises. In the difficult market environment, Hunan cuisine has achieved a reversal of multiple cuisines.
Money is more valuable, so it has to be spent in a visible place, and people's evaluation criteria for food and beverage are changing. Wei Hang attributed the reason why he was no longer obsessed with eating Fine Dining at a high frequency to "reaching a certain age and stage", understanding the laws of the market, and only willing to pay for the ideas and businesses he agreed with. To some extent, this similar mentality has contributed to the prosperity of Hunan cuisine, which is highly stir-fried, and the ingredients are fresh and full of wok, bringing people a sense of satisfaction and worthiness, perhaps no less than high-end catering.
Hunan cuisine brands are also trying their best to enlarge the label of "freshly fried". The front of the restaurant, the walls, and even the chef's clothes are all "freshly fried" propaganda boards; Chef Fei and Lan Xiangzi, a chain of Hunan restaurants, have moved transparent kitchens into the store, so that diners can see the "fried" part to the greatest extent. Even the plates of popular dishes have been replaced with the shape of a pot. More importantly, the price per capita is not more than 100, which makes Hunan cuisine quickly become a "down-to-earth" representative in the restaurant.
▲ Chef Fei's pot-shaped plate. Photo / Dianping
In the lively contrast of "freshly fried" in Hunan restaurants, even if the high-end restaurant is made on the spot, it also reveals a sense of "calmness". Some time ago, a video of a high-end restaurant in Shanghai sparked widespread discussion. At the table, the waiter with black gloves selected a lettuce in front of the diners, broke and shredded a leaf, mixed in the sauce, and made a plate of salad on the spot, priced at 188 yuan. Under the video, netizens commented: Lettuce is worth 8 yuan, and the remaining 180 pieces are all ceremonial. ”
But these days, fewer and fewer people are willing to pay for this sense of ritual.
A high-end restaurant that can't be opened
Late at night, 24-year-old Michelin-starred chef Wu Feng counted the number of guests booked for the next day.
"There are only 4 people in the lunch market, and there are more people in the evening market, so there are only 11 people, and the attendance rate is still not high." The restaurant he works at was three Michelin stars a few years ago, but this year it was downgraded to two stars because of a lack of innovation. In comparison, the restaurant pricing is not expensive, with an average price of about 1,400 yuan per person. Wu Feng said that his restaurant is "the cheapest in the Michelin", so he can still have some customers and will not face the fate of going out of business.
If business is not good, Michelin must also reduce costs and increase efficiency from ingredients. A few days ago, the chef finalized a new menu that will be launched, and one of the dishes is chicken wings inserted in the garnish. Wu Feng was dumbfounded when he saw it - chicken wings can be called the cheapest meat ingredients, it can appear in night market stalls and fast food restaurants, but it is out of place when it is served by a Michelin restaurant for 1,400 yuan. Wu Feng predicted that there was a high probability that it would cause complaints from diners and industry insiders.
Diners who are willing to spend a lot of money on a meal are keenly aware of the anomalies in many high-end restaurants.
Most notably, there are fewer customers – a large number of restaurants that were not booked a month in advance are now available on walkin. The dining experience is also greatly reduced, and a Japanese restaurant that Douzi used to go to has a low-cost single set meal that can attract traffic, but the ingredients are not as good as before, and the fish fillets are soft and lying on their stomachs, "suspected to be chilled". On social media, some people also found that the set of tableware used by high-end restaurants was not updated in a complete set after it was broken, but silently changed to a similar style, which was placed in a Michelin-starred restaurant, "It's a shame to say it".
Degraded service, deterioration of menus, and reduced customer flow...... Under multiple difficulties, a large number of high-end restaurants have successively announced that they are not operating well, going out of business or running away.
In April this year, Opera BOMBANA, located in Parkview Green in Beijing, closed - this restaurant specializing in Italian cuisine, founded by three-Michelin-starred international celebrity chef Umberto Bombana, in the description of the outside world, it has never lacked a sense of literature and art, high-end, Marilyn Monroe-themed decoration style, is a dream-like existence in the eyes of the middle class. Later, because it held a high-round homecoming banquet, it became a place for celebrities.
▲ Opera BOMBANA的告别信。 图 / Opera BOMBANA公众号
Almost at the same time, TIAGO, located in Beijing's Wangfu Central, KOR Shanghai on Nanjing West Road, Shanghai, and Shanghai Yuzhilan, which consumes nearly 2,000 yuan per capita, have all closed down one after another. Compared to the grand opening of the house, they left in a hurry. Just like Opera BOMBANA, it was even shown a "debt collection letter" by the property where it was located, saying that it owed the rent of the shopping center and might resort to the law.
Even in Shanghai, where there is no shortage of consumer myths, the number of high-end restaurants is not as high as before. According to the big data of red meals, compared with May last year, the proportion of restaurants with a per capita unit price of more than 500 yuan in Shanghai has decreased from 1.44% to 0.8%, a decrease of more than 900 at once.
In Shanghai, Yuanzi, who is doing investment work for high-end real estate projects, began to worry about not being able to recruit good brands. Due to the reduction of the number of shops to choose from, the garden has an additional job: "First persuade investors to be willing to invest." However, she has contacted many chefs she knows well, and one of them told Yuanzi that several investors who have contacted her before have changed their minds this year: the environment is not good, and the plan to open a store should be put on hold.
The hands of investors have indeed become tighter. A restaurant investor once told the Daily People that now, their criteria for investing in restaurants have become "only looking at the unit price of customers" - only brands that meet the three conditions of low customer unit price, can enter the sinking market, and have made a profit can get opportunities. Otherwise, "even if you make a profit, no matter how high the unit price is, we will not invest". This means that the brand is not replicable and its performance is not sustainable.
In the cash-flow industry of catering, the loss of customers has an extremely rapid impact on restaurants. The high-end restaurants that have not yet reached the end of the mountain are still trying to maintain the dignity they deserve, and how to retain the exquisite shell at the moment when the cash flow is exhausted has become the most difficult thing at the moment.
Wu Feng said that although the chicken wings were served, according to the old rules, the chef still had to "tell a story" to the chicken wings. In order to make this season's menu more distinctive, they chose a famous painting as the background for each dish: if there is shrimp in the raw material, they put a picture of Qi Baishi's "Shrimp"; The main color of the dish is blue, and Van Gogh's "Starry Night" is put on it; As for the chicken wings, placed in front of Picasso's "Rooster", the value finally seems to be much higher.
While high-end restaurants themselves are struggling in a whirlpool of cash flow, the "illusion" it once weaved for the middle class has also been shattered.
Rough "Dream Making"
A food blogger once described the rise of high-end restaurants as "creating a dream" for the middle class by creating a meal. And those who are willing to set foot in these restaurants, deep down, may be looking for a similar feeling, which is the illusion of "standing at the top of the chain of contempt at this moment".
After all, in all kinds of "show-off consumption", compared with tens of thousands of luxury bags and a luxury outbound trip, a meal of 1,000 yuan per capita is the cheapest one.
The beginning of "dreaming" is a long waiting process, which should give a sense of ritual and a sense of being valued to diners. Unlike ordinary restaurants, which pay more attention to attendance and turnover rates, Fine Dining, which has a high price, prefers a reservation system - at its hottest, it takes half a year just to get a seat. More niche, such as some Japanese restaurants with special ingredients, there is no contact information on social platforms, and you can only "old customers bring new customers", if you have not set foot in this store before, then there is a high probability that you will not even be able to find the reservation entrance.
Walking into the store, the decoration, tables, chairs and dinner plates should play a role in "deterring" diners. I can't see the brand in hard decoration, so I work the tableware. Hermès tableware that can be recognized at a glance is the most "superficial" one, and some restaurants use British bone china, known as "crossing the ocean to serve you", which must be used in sets, and if one is broken, it must be replaced with all.
▲ High-end catering has worked the "atmosphere". Photo / Visual China
The ingredients on the plate must be loud enough. This includes, but is not limited to, Australia's black gold abalone, Italy's white truffle, Russia's king crab, New Zealand's king salmon, and caviar. One diner complained that the chef brought out a plain-looking roast duck and poured some caviar on it, and the value of the dish immediately doubled.
Another way to better raise the price of a dish is to tell a story. Just like Wu Feng's restaurant pairs chicken wings with Picasso's "Rooster", every dish that can be served must have a mouthpiece, showing the chef's inspiration and thinking. Wei Hang, a researcher in the catering industry, has heard the story of "a young chef chasing ducks when he was a child", and the most frequent ones are "commemorating his grandmother" and "the discovery of the chef's style...... All kinds of recurring story templates always confuse her while eating.
For restaurants, it is indispensable to sell a meal for more than 1,000 yuan, and these configurations that can make the restaurant "look expensive" are indispensable. Speaking of which, Wei Hang commented slightly jokingly: A lot of Fine Dining has become a stack of advanced elements, you can say that it is a fill-in-the-blank question, or you can describe it as a "one-stop service".
However, the logic of "dreaming" has touched many middle-class and young people who are willing to pay for the experience. During the three years of the epidemic, many wealthy people and international students were unable to go abroad, which gave birth to the outbreak of high-end restaurants in China. Prices at some restaurants have taken off like a rocket, with the original 500 yuan per capita rising to 1,000 yuan a year later, a momentum that Wei Hang describes as "like a currency depreciation." ”
During that time, around Shanghai Nanjing West Road, within a kilometer range, there were many high-end restaurants such as Xinrong Ji, Jingxi Hui, Rongfu Banquet, Luyuan Moose, Jingcaixuan, Chinese Cuisine Touzao, Upstairs Huiguan, Gongyan, The Pine Songjian and so on, with a unit price of about 1,000 yuan.
▲ New Glory Record. Photo / Dianping
In such a grand situation, some people who have spare money in their hands also have the ambition to open a restaurant. Fine Dining has become their first choice, and the basic model is to recruit famous chefs from Michelin or old Western restaurants and partner with them. There are also some young chefs who have studied abroad and returned from Le Cordon Bleu, who have pondered the idea of "chef restaurants", which emphasize creativity and novelty, and have become the best place for young people to experience consumption.
Whether it's a chef, a shopping mall, or an investor, everyone has a high concentration of enthusiasm for new business formats. For them, Fine Dining isn't just about making money – high-end restaurants have a higher value for their existence, such as accumulating contacts and entertaining friends. For example, for high-end restaurants, the owners (in the real estate industry, the real estate projects that provide shops are called operators) are not only welcome, but also willing to take shares, in addition to sharing profits, but also to meet the daily needs of customers.
In such an environment, it is not uncommon to see a large number of rough catering teams that only emphasize "dreaming". Some people from outside the industry have joined in, and they have no professional knowledge, so they can simply copy the "one-stop" store opening model. There are also some high-end restaurants, although the business is not bad, but because the team is formed too quickly, there are problems with finance and human resource management, and it is more likely to thunderstorm in difficult times.
The Chengdu "Hin" restaurant that Wei Hang frequents is an example of this. In May of this year, it was suddenly revealed that one of the founders had fled with money, leaving behind a large amount of supplier payments and unpaid overtime wages for employees, and was forced to be involved in the "bankruptcy army" of high-end restaurants, which surprised fans.
Sancai, one of the founders, told Daily People that not all of the people in the team were from humble backgrounds, and they also stepped on the wind in those years, before that, Chengdu did not even have the concept of high-end restaurants, just called "private restaurants". In order to join the battlefield, Sancai, who was a designer, hired a chef and pulled a few partners, and although they were not familiar with each other, the team was quickly formed.
When it first opened, the per capita unit price of Hina was about 400 yuan, which is not cheap in Chengdu. But after two years of the epidemic, business is getting better and better, and they first raised the price to 500 yuan, and then to 700 yuan, but it is still difficult to find one.
It wasn't until the partners ran away that the three finally realized that in the past few years of opening the store, the restaurant has not built a mature and process-based financial system, and the "blind trust" partners can take money at will, not only embezzling public funds for many years, but also collecting money and promising to help some employees' families pay five insurances and one housing fund, "but after collecting the money, they did not help to pay."
The middle class doesn't eat it
At the age of 30, Wei Hang felt that he couldn't eat high-end restaurants anymore. In addition to the high price, there are also more and more similar dining experiences, which really can't meet the exploration of novelty and creativity of the earliest Fine Dining. Wei Hang has eaten a lot of times, and he can tell the selling point of these restaurants with his eyes closed. In her observation, "the more expensive and cheaper ones are still open, and the ones that are not up or down are not easy to do." ”
During the years of searching for Fine Dining, Wei Hang remembered a niche restaurant in Shanghai vividly — two young people who had returned from studying abroad and opened a shop with an average price of about 600 yuan. A year or two ago, in Shanghai's high-end restaurant circles, this was already a very low price, because "the owner wanted to make a kind of daily fine dining", increase the frequency of middle-class consumption, and make "people with a little money, but not so rich" willing to enter the store.
But in the first half of this year, Wei Hang learned that the store was not operating well and was closed. To some extent, this is a reversal of the manager's failure to target the customer base – the middle class is not the most loyal customer of high-end restaurants.
The garden is also aware of the differences in the operating conditions of different high-end restaurants. Among the real estate projects she has participated in are some high-end neighborhoods full of luxury stores, and the audience in these neighborhoods is people with a real capital base, and the unit price of nearby restaurants has "risen instead of falling". On the contrary, restaurants with an average price of about 500 yuan per person have seen a drop in the unit price because fewer people are willing to open a bottle of wine with a meal — after all, in these restaurants, a corkage fee of several hundred yuan is charged.
▲ Picture / Visual China
However, in recent years, there have been fewer high-end restaurants available for the garden to attract investment, especially about 2,000 yuan per capita. In order not to let the vacancy rate in the business district be too high, she had to choose some restaurants with an average of about 500 per capita to report to the authorities.
But just a few years ago, this was not the case. Yuanzi remembers that during the epidemic, due to the blowout of many high-end restaurants, established shopping malls such as Shanghai Henglong, IFC, and Beijing Guomao all had a great say and were able to choose brands among large-scale projects. The requirements for restaurants have become higher, not only to be delicious, but also to have "spiritual and cultural connotations" - to provide emotional value to different customer groups, for example, if there is already a Spanish meal in the mall, it must be Italian food.
The garden's situation may also have something to do with the new choices of high-end restaurants. In Shenzhen, An Tuan found that high-end business districts with a monthly rent of 150,000 yuan, such as Shenzhen Bay No. 1, are no longer a battleground for high-end restaurant owners. On the contrary, more niche creative parks and buildings with more free design styles have become the "new favorites" of high-end restaurants. Although the location of these places is not the best, it is better because the rent is cheap, and it is in line with the tone of the restaurant, so it can also make a lot of turnover.
In addition to site selection, high-end restaurants have also begun to put down their "shelves" and stride to the "affordable route". On social platforms, the 398 yuan "poor ghost package" launched by Xinrongji has almost become a marketing model for reference. Young people are keen to enter the store to eat steamed rice cakes for 28 yuan, wagyu tarts for 38 yuan, order an original steak for 88 yuan, and get another bowl of rice.
▲ Xinrongji "Poor Ghost Package". Photo / Screenshot of Xiaohongshu
There are also many high-end restaurants that choose to open cheaper side lines. For example, Haihuihai, a high-end catering brand that once created a Michelin three-star restaurant Chaoshangchao and a Michelin-starred restaurant Lu Shanglu, in the new consumption environment, the latest action is to open Northeast cuisine, with an average of only 250 yuan per capita. There is also a black pearl list resident Hui cuisine brand Mengdu, the new store is only within 200 yuan per capita, but the price has been reduced at the same time, the style has not decreased, and even art exhibitions will be held in the store.
In Wei Hang's eyes, what is more valuable now is the food itself, and she is still willing to pay for the craftsmanship of some excellent chefs to taste their new menus, regardless of the price. More time, Wei Hang prefers to study "localized" local specialty restaurants – as an industry researcher, he can get a lot of enlightening information from them. And the price of 200 yuan per person in this kind of restaurant can already make most people eat very heartily, making people feel that the money is not spent at a loss.
(Intern Guo Siwen also contributed to this article)
Resources:
1. "Per capita consumption of two or three hundred" Xiaokuan Guest House
2. "The number of stores and turnover are both cut in half!" High-end catering ushered in a major reshuffle? 》Red Meal Network