Picky restaurant operator starts his own farm
Running a successful eatery means being able to source good ingredients. That challenge prompted one picky restaurateur to start his own farm on Chongming island, Xu Junqian discovers.
Bao Hua has three priorities for 2017: to open the fifth branch of his fine dining chain in Shanghai, to keep perfecting his signature red braised pork, and to build a running track for some 50 pigs at his farm in Chongming island.
The last task, the restaurateur says, is the foundation for all his work.
“You need the right proportion of fat for the right pork, and the right pork for the right everything on a Chinese table,” says the 51-year-old, who believes pork is as integral to Chinese cuisine as salt.
The founder and president of the Exquisite Bocuse restaurant chain, which offers Cantonese cuisine, is a former police officer who has found success in the city’s high-end food and beverage business.
In 2016, the restaurant chain generated about 180 million yuan ($26 million) in sales, up by 16 percent year on year, according to Bao. In comparison, the growth rate of Shanghai’s dining industry is less than 10 percent, with fine dining’s figure even lower thanks to stagnant growth since 2013, when the central government imposed a strict ban on luxury dining with public money.
Industry insiders and investors also say there is too much competition from luxury hotels and Michelinstarred chefs in China’s most vibrant food capital, but Bao dismisses that view.
“In fact,” he says, “I think Shanghai’s dining industry is far from being competitive.”
A native of Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, Bao had been a police officer for seven years before he went into trade in Shanghai “in response to Deng Xiaoping’s call”, as he puts it, and made his first bucket of gold.
He later emigrated to Australia and spent a few years of “retirement-like life there” — until his Chinese stomach summoned him back.
Food odyssey begins
In 2004, he bought the canteen of a five-star hotel in west Shanghai and turned it into his first restaurant. In less than a decade, it became popular with the city’s middle-aged newly affluent and the traditionally rich.
“The only reason that I got into the industry is ignorance. My only experience is being a diner,” he says. During his early years as a trader, most of his business was done at dining tables in Cantonese restaurants with folks from Guangzhou and Shenzhen, cities that had been among the first in the country to open up to the world.
A salesperson from Bao’s company notes that the restaurant’s most frequent customers recharge their prepaid cards as much as 1 million yuan each time.
“They eat like me, so they trust what I feed them,” says Bao, when asked how he’s won the hearts and wallets of some of the city’s wealthiest locals.
Immune to advertising and new food trends, his customers are as fussy about the integrity of what’s on their plate as its taste. They are also quite knowledgeable about such pricy ingredients as abalone, sea cucumber and truffles.
“The picture for bao shen chi du (shorthand for the four most precious ingredients of Cantonese cuisine — abalone, sea cucumber, shark fins and fish maw) is very different from what it was 10 or 20 years ago,” Bao says.
“Today people, or at least my people, order them because they actually enjoy them,” he says. “In the past, when I was treating my business partners, I ordered them simply to make my dinner look expensive.”
Sales of the four seafoods, which he personally sources from Hong Kong every month, represented 30 percent of the bottom line at his restaurants last year.
The right pigs
In order to get the best stock to help highlight the flavors of bao shen chi du, Bao had been looking for pigs and chickens in the nearby Yangtze River region for the stock for two years. Then he visited a private pig farm in Jinhua, Zhejiang province, a city that is famous for its cured ham.
Because of the distance, what he called the best pig farm he ever visited could not be his regular supplier.
So Bao invested in a pig farm on nearby Chongming back in 2015, and one year later a chicken farm about 5 kilometers away on the same island. Chongming, one of the country’s largest islands, is an unpolluted back garden treasured by many Shanghai natives.
He also decided to “copy” from the best — using a local black-haired breed of Chongming, with a fat-to-lean meat ratio that is very close to Jinhua’s breed. His pigs are bred in stables where they are nurtured for six months, then they roam free-range for another six months, getting exercise on a daily basis.
The investment has also led to a byproduct — the red braised pork that ordinarily would be a weird fit in a Cantonese restaurant.
“I don’t really care. Neither do my customers,” he shrugs.
What he cares about right now: The cement running track for his pigs, which he thinks will produce the perfect leanness he wants.
Building that, however, is just part of the challenge. He still has to convince his farm manager that the track actually makes sense — Bao jokes that his staff has been suspicious about his sanity ever since he demanded that they build a mud slope for his pigs to climb up every day. That was his first — but inadequate — effort to give them a workout.