IN person
Do you currently devote a lot of your time to restaurants? Not any more. There are rules for any start-up, as I know from personal experience. You need an idea, money and a team. If you are missing one of these things, then nothing will come of it. During the early stages, it’s hard to attract a strong management, unless the project is overseen by an established venture capital fund, of course. As a rule, the team you have to begin with is simpler, but is prepared to work. Later on you can get a stronger team, and then professionals should join the management - people who are able to expand the business. We have a management team like this working for us now, and it is perhaps the strongest team in London. And do Chinese do the cooking? Mainly, yes. They are incredibly hard-working and resilient people, but they have their idiosyncrasies. If you set them specific tasks, they do everything and they always give the maximum effort, to the point that they sometimes even take offense at our incentive system aimed at achieving maximum production. Are the dim sum ingredients imported from China? The majority of ingredients are available locally. There are also special fillers, additives and spices which can be imported from China, but as the Chinese market in London is very large, you don’t have to go anywhere to buy many of these products. What are the strengths of the dim sum concept? Dim sum is a very convenient kind of fast food, but at the same time it’s healthy, as it uses rice dough, and most of the products are steamed. It’s also very delicious and diverse. We have had people come from Hong Kong and Thailand to offer their services, and when they tried our cuisine, they said that we were selling highend food, which they sell in their best restaurants. But this food is still adapted to European taste. Firstly, we do not use the kind of artificially modified taste ingredients that are used in China. Secondly, pork lard is added to all real Chinese dim sum to make them juicier. We replaced lard with vegetable oil, which is much healthier. We have excellent cocktails, although traditionally they are not combined with Chinese cuisine. The cocktails are particularly popular with our women customers, who make up 60% of our customer base. Our customers typically represent the 25-40 age bracket. Do Chinese customers come to the restaurants? They say it’s a good indication of quality if people come to a restaurant which serves their own national cuisine. Yes, and they are mainly young people. Our restaurants, which are always bustling and lively, generally don’t appeal to the older generation of Chinese – it’s not their culture. People also come with their families; children love dim sum. Every time I’m in London I go there, and my family also likes to eat there. When I first came to London, I saw a lot of younger people who were clearly well educated, stylishly dressed, working in wonderful offices, and already used to a certain standard of living July - August 2010
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Photo provided by Ping Pong
where I wanted to buy the building formerly owned HSBC bank before they moved into the neighbouring building. But I was not allowed to change the sock shop on the ground floor into a restaurant, “because socks should be sold there”.
Ping Pong in Hampstead upstairs
but not yet earning enough to eat at expensive restaurants. And I thought, why not create a place where they can come and enjoy the feel of an expensive restaurant, but at an affordable price? We joke that our goal is to “Zararise food” – in other words, to do with food what Zara did with clothes, selling “haute couture” models at affordable prices. And in fact, this is an enormous segment, because there are not that many top managers earning tremendous sums of money. But the group of people who are prepared to spend a limited sum of money but want quality is very large. We call our restaurants premium casual dining. For Ping Pong we produce furniture in Switzerland from natural oak. The tree is cut across the trunk, creating an incredibly beautiful surface, especially when covered with dark lacquer. A group worked on the brand with slogans such as “little steamed parcels of deliciousness”. When the first restaurant opened on Great Marlborough Street, people were initially frightened away by what we were doing. They looked into our restaurant from the outside and didn’t come in, because they thought it was expensive. And it did look expensive: large beautiful tables, wooden engraved panels, original wallpaper with photos of steam and the phrases in Chinese printed on them create a special atmosphere: ‘Straight to the point’,‘An opportunity comes once and only once’, ‘Extravagant’, ‘Love at first sight’. If people were initially frightened off because the restaurant seemed expensive, the reality came as a pleasant surprise for them. Today we have an international chain. The restaurant in Sao Paolo is extremely popular, and to get into Ping Pong in Washington you have to line up. This also happens in London at some restaurants on certain days, even though there are 12 of them. The 13th restaurant in London and the 16th in the world will open soon on Liverpool Street. Will it be Now from Ping Pong? The takeaway format is very widespread in London, so there will be a lot of competition. Yes, Now is the concept of takeaway&delivery, and we think it will be successful, because many people in offices don’t have the chance to go out during lunch break, or they order food at home in the evening. We changed the format to the concept of Chinese street food: bright neon signs, a cobblestone floor, wooden counters, and only 10 places. It all looks as though you’re at a market, but at the same time the quality is very high.