Restaurant Business-Recent Local Trends and Practices

Local Trends of Restaurant Business

1. Pop-ups

Pop-up restaurants, also called supper clubs, are temporary restaurants. These restaurants often operate from a private home, former factory, or similar and during festivals.

Pop-up restaurants have been popular since the 2000s in Britain and Australia but they are not a new phenomenon. Pop-up restaurants have existed in the United States and Cuba.Diners typically make use of social media, such as the blogosphere and Twitter, to follow the movement of these restaurants and make online reservations.

Pop-up restaurants, like food trucks, are an effective way for young professionals to gain exposure of their skills in the field of hospitality as they seek investors and attention pursuant to opening a restaurant or another culinary concept.

Pop-up restaurants have been hailed as useful for younger chefs, allowing them to utilize underused kitchen facilities and "experiment without the risk of bankruptcy". By 2013, this restaurant style had gained steam and prevalence in larger cities thanks in part to crowd-funding efforts that offered the short-term capital needed to fund start-up costs.

It’s been in vogue in retail for a few years, especially in London and New York.

Hong Kong is no stranger to the phenomenon, with recent pop-ups ranging from American Apparel to Taschen Books.

Applying the pop-up model to restaurants has been catching on, and it takes whimsical dining a step beyond the private kitchen.

“I think we will definitely be seeing a lot more pop-up concepts in Hong Kong,” says Alan Lo, co-founder of the Press Room Group, which owns several restaurants including The Pawn and Classified.

“With rising rents, a shortage of space and increasingly curious consumers, pop-up concepts will take flight. They are great ways to dip your toes in the market and test one’s product.”

Classified

The Pawn

2. Fusion Being Redefined

The term “fusion cuisine” evokes visions of some neon-walled 1990s-era restaurant trying to be edgy by featuring stuff like wasabi-infused pesto.

But if you think about it, all cuisines have overlapped with others in some way over the course of history, and all have lent or derived some semblance of influence.

Noticeable of late is a disproportionate flow of influence from East to West.

“There is obviously more use of Asian ingredients amongst European chefs,” says Margaret Xu, owner and chef at private kitchen Yin Yang and executive chef at Cantopop.

“I see that Western chefs in Hong Kong are getting prouder to use some popular Chinese flavors in their cooking and therefore contributing to Hong Kong establishing its own style of Western cuisine.”

Fa Zu Jie

The French quail marinated in Chinese wine and served with cold sakura noodles is a unique delicacy.

3. Branding
People buy for the experiences instead of just buying a food in a restaurant nowadays. Why don't people go to Cafeholic or My Kafe but they go to Starbucks or Cafe Pacific? Because they know the brand.

Starbucks

4. Globalization

McDonald's offer standardized menu of food among its branches located in all over the world.

5. Shared Locations
a. Airport

Food court at Hong Kong International Airport

b. Shopping Mall

Food court in the Citygate outlet

6. Open Kitchen

the open kitchen in Simplylife 

7. Serve with wine
Caroline Chow, of Lan Kwai Fong Entertainments, which runs Kyoto Joe, Indochine, and several other Lan Kwai Fong establishments, notes that “wine has started to become a cultural habit for locals.” Think of it as a trickle-down phenomenon.

In 2009, Hong Kong overtook New York and London as the world’s largest wine market. Sotheby’s and Christie’s have each sold bottles of wine here for small fortunes. In May 2011, a buyer purchased a single bottle of 1961 Château Latour for US$216,000.

Hong Kong's new role as a literal funnel for fine wine owes everything to the government’s 2008 decision to eliminate duty on imported wines. Since then, nouveaux riches on both sides of the Shenzhen River have been eager to slurp down wine at an unprecedented clip.

Local Practices of Restaurant Business

1. High Rent = Marginalized Quality

This being Hong Kong, upward rent pressure features in two of our trends.

“High rent squeezes our ability to do anything very, very good,” says Paul Hsu, executive director of Elite Concepts, a restaurant group whose portfolio includes Michelin-starred restaurants yè shanghai and Nanhai No. 1.

“It marginalizes the quality of the operators and the restaurants because so much of your bill is paid on rent.”


2. Healthy Menu Design

• low calories
• low fat
• low carbon-hydrate
• traditional school of thought in Chinese medicine : certain ingredients can actively strengthen specific organs in human body

3. Food Safety & Public Health Issue
Customers concern about where is the food from and what are those food made with.

Man Ho Chinese Restaurant

4. Use of Technology
a. Social Media to Market the Restaurant

-like Facebook page to get the coupon
-promote in Twitter, Instagram
b. The Smartphone and Social Media Effect

Openrice, Hong Kong's online home of user-generated restaurant reviews, packs more clout for most of the population than either Zagat or Michelin, offering in-depth reviews of everything from the decor to the service.

“We even see customers taking out smartphones to help them make menu choices,” says Bridget Chen, partner of 798 unit & co. and Just-a-Restaurant.


Reference
http://travel.cnn.com/hong-kong/eat/top-hong-kong-restaurant-trends-600866

http://www.cnwinenews.com/html/201107/1/20110701173527115075_1.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop-up_restaurant