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.