Temple of Heaven

The Temple of Heaven, maybe a better name is Altar of Heaven, was built in the 15th century and used by the Ming and Qing dynasties in annual ceremonies of prayer to Heaven for a good
harvest.

There were tons of people there that day. After being in the city for a month or so it was nice to get out in the open park area surrounding the Temple.

Relocation

After our first couple weeks in Hatsune, Alan’s original and widely popular Japanese restaurant, he split us up and we moved to different locations at some of his more recent venues. Matt and I were sent to The Village at Sanlitun, a posh, newly built shopping center located in the northern part of the Chaoyang District. The Village is one of the coolest shopping centers I’ve been in. There are little courtyards surrounded by multiple stories of shops, boutiques, and fabulous restaurants (of course); there’s even a movie theatre underground. The Village has all the common Western stores like Nike, Apple, Starbucks, The North Face, plus a multitude of other boutiques in every corner of the complex. People are bustling through the place all day everyday which is great for business.

Alan recently opened two restaurants in The Village, a new, hip Hatsune and a Chinese restaurant that focuses on cuisine from China’s Hunan province called Karaiya Spice House. Matt has been working over in Hatsune for the past two weeks and I’ve been looking over Karaiya. Hunan food is very spicy and often referred to as the spiciest of all Chinese cuisines because there are several native peppers that come from this province. I’ve had the pleasure of eating dinner there and everything was delicious. The signature Mandarin Fish was incredible. The dish comes out, full fish, with spread filets each covered in a different pepper: one hot and one really hot. Also, the hot-pepper bullfrog, stir-fried with peppers and a few veggies, was delicious. Bull-frog is very flavorful, between textures of fish and chicken.

The general concept behind this restaurant is smaller portions reasonably priced so that the customer can try a variety of things on the menu. It’s also fairly different from Alan’s other restaurants in that it’s the first with Chinese cuisine and it’s very quaint and traditional. Most of his other restaurants are edgy, cool, and fashionable according to their respective theme, and while Karaiya is very well-designed, it’s not as “out there” in terms of decorations which makes for a nice contrast.

Migrant School

This past Saturday our group visited a local migrant school. It was quite an experience. Besides Beijing’s affluent Chaoyang district there’s another bloc of the 1.3 billion people (and counting) that are often overlooked: Migrant workers. Also known as the “floating population” of China, they have flooded into big cities from the countryside throughout the past half-century looking for work to send money back home (one of the many surrounding provinces).

We were given some readings concerning China’s rural vs. urban situation, a problem that plagues many developing nations. As we drove north, on one side you could see the Summer Palace area, a popular tourist destination, and on the other began the impoverished migrant communities. Our bus eventually trudged through an alleyway littered with trash and multicolored puddles of stagnant water. A man on a bike with his little pudgy-cheeked boy came and led us back to the school. We eventually learned that the school’s principal started teaching in 1989 and has been forced to move locations several times by the State, the last time because of a light-rail system implemented by the government.

The school itself was only one-story and made of bricks. Classrooms surrounded the square breezeway or yard on all sides. As we walked through the entrance you could immediately hear the buzz of excitement and laughter coming from each classroom. For many of these children I was probably the first foreigner they had ever laid eyes on. Once again, the language barrier was a bit of an obstacle, but as soon as the kids were given the green light to kick around the soccer ball or use us tall American guys as basketball hoops, the frenzy of a Chinese elementary recess began. For a while it seemed as though every one of them had just chugged a Red Bull; they were on full throttle and we felt like celebrities.

We all split up into smaller groups and followed a couple of the children to their homes. The level of poverty that they live in was something I had never experienced before. Plenty of people have read about it in newspapers or magazines but to actually see it first hand really touched me. This one girl, her parents, and 2 grandparents all lived in this tiny, maybe the size of a college dorm room, one room apartment. They didn’t even own it either, they had to pay 800 RMB a month; which is very expensive for migrant communities. The girl’s family makes soy milk for a living, and they sell their products around their community. They came there a few years ago.

These migrant communities are so interesting because they are full of people from all over, many different provinces, who have their extended family back home where they eventually plan on returning.

The link below will take you to photos of that morning spent with the migrant school children. The Peace Sign was quite popular that day.

http://picasaweb.google.com/jhhoward87/MigrantSchool02?feat=directlink

Let's Get Cookin'

-NOTE: For my internship I am working for Alan Wong, owner of Hatsune Restaurant Co, Ltd. where he owns 7 restaurants in Beijing, including Hatsune, his first and most successful restaurant, a 5-time Best Japanese Restaurant Award Winner for Beijing. Me and 2 other CEI students will spend the next 7 weeks learning the ins and outs of the restaurant business from one of the best Restaurateurs in Beijing.-

Hello, Hello. My first week of the internship has been good. The first day we met with Alan and talked for an hour or so just to get an idea of what we both wanted to get out of this internship. We worked in his first and best restaurant, Hatsune, a Japanese restaurant that he opened about 9 years ago. The food there is amazing. He treated us to lunch on Tuesday and it was delicious. The rolls were beautifully put together and they tasted soo good. Monday we worked in the seating area of the restaurant and observed the waitresses (fuwuyuans) and the managers keep everything in order. I helped calm down this older American guy who was complaining for basically no apparent reason (my first experience with customer service). He was frustrated that nobody spoke very good English, but as soon as he saw me (a familiar face perhaps) he immediately calmed down and was happy. The next three days we worked back in the kitchen which was much more interesting. Hatsune has 4-5 stations, Sushi, Cold (salads and desserts), Stir-Fry, Tempura, and a Seafood broiler.

There are about 20-25 chefs in the kitchen, so that should give you a better idea of how cheap the labor is in China. But it's truly amazing to watch them cook and prepare all the food. They ONLY use their hands, a very sharp knife, and long chopsticks to cook everything. Any kind of shredded lettuce or chopped scallions are done by hand in a very meticulous fashion. Working back there was tough; you get to witness the culinary magic that these chefs can produce, but you have to suffer each time the dish is taken away to the people who actually ordered it. Luckily, the guys in the kitchen are nice enough to give us a nibble here and there.

It is really funny interacting with the restaurant staff. They hardly speak any English and, of course, I hardly speak any Chinese. So the communication level is very low, mostly hand gestures, smiles, and laughs. But they are extremely nice and hospitable to us 3 Americans who are mostly just in the way. They probably don't know or understand why the hell we are there, but they still put up with us and are extremely nice.

Thursday after we worked lunch back in the kitchen we went up to Alan's office where he gave us his first "lecture". He really wants to teach us the ins and outs of the restaurant business and we set up our work weeks to conclude with a weekly lecture. This week he started off with the basics of the business side to opening up a restaurant. He talked about the % of his revenue that goes to different aspects of the business: 30% materials cost, 15% staff+benefits (salaries), 20% rent, 12% miscellaneous, and the remaining 23$ or so is his profit. He really had it down to a formula and he explained that rent was extremely important because it was the only real fixed cost. The more business a restaurant does (revenue), the more the rent percentage goes down, and the more profit he brings in. He called this formula his "Business Recipe" and helped us really understand the basics to a successful restaurant. He said the difference between a restaurant in China vs. the U.S. was the staff costs and rent costs are usually flipped. He said that 85% of his staff comes in untrained, which I thought was very interesting considering what I had witnessed during this past week. Some of his original staff from Hatsune still work for him today, but Alan has helped them grow and given them more responsibility...(they're no longer frying rice in the back kitchen).

I'm extremely excited to head into my 2nd week of work. Monday we will be at Hatsune but after that Alan will place the three of us at some of his different restaurants.