The buffet is essentially a second-rate ingredients to make a first-class appearance, with the visual instead of taste, with the category instead of quality.
Recently our college classmates in the discussion in order to commemorate our lost youth, decided to go back to school on May 1 to open a reunion.
When discussing the plans for the reunion, some students proposed to go back to eat a buffet of class favorites.
I suddenly remembered that these years I seem to eat less and less buffet.
The kind of “help the wall into help the wall out” the extreme operation is obviously not suitable for my body at this age, as for “eat back to the capital” this kind of magic idea is even less likely to produce.
After all, it is a virtue to recognize one’s own aging in due time.
In the past few years, most of the news about the buffet is not good news: earlier, there are Pizza Hut salad bar closed, taking away a jungle belonging to the masters of the nine-story tower.
In recent years, there are money leopard collapse, once the king of high-end buffet, owed a buttload of debts and ran away.
And last year, the restaurant industry to resist waste, the first to bear the brunt of the self-service model.
Recently, to “eat the buffet” known for the big appetite of the king of the net red bubble dragon suddenly passed away, many people in the comments section of his last dynamic message: “May there be no buffet in heaven.
It feels like the buffet is aging, just like me.
Buffet is a business about desire, it started in the 1990s, the era of the budding consumer desire of Chinese people.
In 1990, Pizza Hut opened its first Chinese store in Dongzhimen, Beijing. Back then, Pizza Hut was not the mediocre Western fast food restaurant it is today.
For the first decade or so, it was a symbol of high class, a representative of American family restaurants, and synonymous with high-end Western food.
Even in Beijing, Pizza Hut was undoubtedly a high-spending restaurant, where customers would walk into the restaurant fully dressed, carefully pick up a knife and fork and “learn” how to eat Western food, eating pizza like gold.
After entering the Chinese market, Pizza Hut soon introduced a 25 yuan salad buffet.
You can take a bowl to the salad bar to fill the salad, but the limit is only once, which has aroused the desire of countless gods to win and lose.
They declared war on the tiny salad bowls by “building salad towers”, using various construction techniques to build a nine-story demon tower out of vegetables and fruits, and uploaded their construction plans to community postings, becoming a famous challenge on the Internet in the early years.
So much so that the price of the salad buffet went all the way up to $32, and was finally cancelled in 2009.
On the other hand, outside of foreign fast food, hotels have become an important driver of the buffet trend.
With the introduction of Western-style hotel management, the hotel’s expensive buffet restaurant has become the first impression of Chinese people on the buffet: upscale, foreign.
For example, the Pudong Shangri-La Hotel in Shanghai opened in 1998, its buffet restaurant Garden Café, which is now the Yi Coffee, the buffet per capita is 60 yuan.
In 1998, when Shanghai’s per capita monthly salary was more than 1000 yuan, it was very high-end.
And in 2003, the money leopard from Taiwan, the buffet of high-end luxury culture to the pinnacle.
That year, the money leopard into Shanghai. Legend has it that people who ate in the early years will be deeply shocked by its scale and luxury, it deeply implement the “big is justice”, the average business area of stores up to 7,000 to 8,000 square meters, a store decoration costs alone, to spend tens of millions of yuan.
If you can’t imagine this area, you can imagine the average area of those ordinary food and beverage stores in shopping malls, and then multiply it by 20, it’s almost the same.
The Golden Jaguar also serves more than 400 kinds of dishes every day, from sashimi to French foie gras, from steak to Haagen-Dazs, Chinese and Western food, Japanese and Southern dishes, all of them.
What do you mean by “grand”? This is “grand”!
Equally imposing is the pricing, the high price of 238 yuan per person, in the buffet field is unprecedented.
You know, in 2003, Shanghai workers per capita annual income of only 22,000 yuan, the average monthly salary of less than 2,000 yuan. For ordinary people, spending one-eighth of their monthly salary to eat a meal is indeed too extravagant.
But surprisingly, Money Leopard was a big success in mainland China.
The first store in Shanghai opened to long queues and was highly sought after by Shanghai residents who loved the taste of food. Money Leopard soon expanded to Beijing and other cities, where it was also a big hit.
At the time, eating at Money Leopard even became something to brag about.
By 2010, Money Leopard’s national turnover was close to $900 million and it received close to 5 million customers annually.
When Money Leopard was sold by its founder in 2011, the brand value reached 1.5 billion RMB. At the most, there were 29 stores nationwide, making it one of the top high-end restaurants in China.
There were factors of the time when buffets became popular in China in the 1990s and the beginning of this century.
China’s food stamp system, which was not abolished until 1993, meant that China emerged from a history of food supply scarcity.
It was exactly 10 years from the abolition of food stamps to the emergence of the money leopard. It has also been just 10 years since Chinese people were able to open up their appetites.
When people have just come out of scarcity, the most important thing they want to do is to possess material things with a vengeance. The “quantity” and “variety” of material consumption are more important than the “quality” and “individuality”.
In such an environment, the priority of satisfying the needs from nothing to something must be the most in line with the trend of the times.
In an era full of desires, there must be an outpouring of consumption.
So the late 1990s began to produce a large number of first-time consumers. The first air conditioner, the first private car, the first PC, and the first commercial house in many people’s homes were all bought at that time.
The buffet also satisfied people’s strong desire for material possession, and at such a specific moment, the buffet provided the freedom of eating that the Chinese people had not enjoyed for thousands of years in the past with the most extreme operation.
It stepped on the rhythm of China’s consumer society, a true son of the version.
And in almost the same era as Money Leopard, a large number of restaurant brands have emerged.
Xiang’e became the first domestic restaurant company to be listed on the main board in ’09, known as the first restaurant stock.
There are also South Beauty, which is famous for its fine Sichuan cuisine and business meals, Little Sheep, the king of national catering, as well as Xiao Nan Guo and Su Zhe Hui.
These brands constitute the golden decade of Chinese catering and have developed extremely rapidly.
Since the 2000s, China’s formal dining market has soared. From 2007 to 2012 alone, the market tripled in size.
I’ll be sure to tell you about the rise and fall of the brands that represented China’s golden decade of food and beverage when I have time.
Maybe I am not old enough (in fact, poor), whether it is Pizza Hut in the 90s to wear formal clothes, or the 00s high-end self-service money leopard, I have not caught up.
Most of my generation’s memories of buffets come from inexpensive restaurants.
In 1998, another pizzeria named Goodluck opened in Beijing’s Wei Gongcun, featuring a 39 yuan pizza buffet.
Many students may not have heard of good Lungo, you can interpret it as a “poor man’s version” of Pizza Hut.
In the environment of 1998, 39 yuan a buffet, although still not “cheap”, “everyday”, but for young people who occasionally want to spend a little upgrade, is already the price to bite the bullet can be accepted.
Especially in Wei Gongcun, surrounded by colleges and universities, students from Central University for Nationalities, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing Foreign Studies University and Beijing Dance Academy are the quality audience of Hollongo.
In my opinion, students, especially boys, are the most important base for affordable self-help.
When I was in school, the boys around me were basically all hungry, plus they played soccer and football with a lot of exercise, so a meal in the cafeteria was at least six or two to start with, with no cap.
This unlimited refill of the affordable buffet, for boys to speak of the temptation is too great.
When I was in high school, there was a beer house next to the school, as long as 38 yuan a person, the selling point is the unlimited supply of sliced beef and lamb.
Back then, as long as the next day and friends about to eat buffet, hate to start the day before noon empty stomach not to eat.
After going to college, the buffet barbecue across the street from the school is the spiritual home of our group of boys. The price is quite fair, less than 40 yuan a, unlimited time.
Although the meat is not fresh, every time you eat the same night to turn into a jet fighter, but does not stop us every month to make the pilgrimage to offer.
Now that I think about it, eating buffet is not the usual food, rather than eating the winning heart. With the idea of “eating back”, enter the restaurant and food to win or lose.
The buffet restaurant is not so much to do with food and beverage, but rather to play short business. It is to make money by shorting your food, expecting that you can not eat back.
This is very much like the sales in the gym, will go to great lengths to instill in consumers, do a membership card a year or a few years later you will have the same fit body as the coach.
But most people are buying a card for a moment, lying at home every day, card for three years, the same place.
There are also airlines with the heart to fly products.
When you buy the heart to fly, you imagine that most of the Cang Shan Erhai and desert solitary smoke. But really want to use, many people are either too lazy to fly, or the boss dragged to fly up, or found simply can not grab a seat.
Far from it, the buffet is the same, you come in with the imagination of the pool and eat the goal of the restaurant, and finally the stomach does not leave from the heart we are always prone to overestimate their spending power, and easy to underestimate the restaurant owner’s grasp of human sexual desire.
Here I want to talk about the “shorting” business model, the underlying logic paradox.
When the profit model is “shorting”, it will tend to provide less and worse services to users. The less and worse the service, the more profit.
So go to the buffet, you can hardly eat the real “best” food and “best” service.
Many tens of yuan buffet, indeed, you can eat meat dishes, and fish, pork, beef everything to eat to the full.
But most of them are the cheapest meat dishes, such as beef and lamb rolls and so on. The drinks are also brewed sour plum soup or juice and so on.
The more advanced buffet, you can indeed eat a lot of fresh food and seafood steak and other ingredients, but only in the category of advanced.
For example, the Japanese sashimi, different parts of the fish taste and price differences are very large, you are basically unlikely to eat in a 100-plus buffet restaurant to particularly good parts.
In addition, a consumer who does not understand the chain restaurant is difficult to imagine, when a large number of goods, the general color of the abalone and lobster prices can be much cheaper.
It must be admitted that our tongues are not so spiritual, the vast majority of diners can only eat the seasonings put more or less, can not eat the ingredients good or bad.
Service downgrade to create profits is more hidden. I have seen a lot of buffet restaurants will make some slightly more expensive food into “freshly cut”, “freshly grilled”. It looks a lot more advanced than the display, but in fact the experience is particularly bad.
These stalls will always be a long line, and often have to wait at least ten minutes, and I do not want to wait in line will have to stay away, to the next Sheng fried rice to eat.
Now that I think about it, this is not a limited supply.
There are also many Japanese buffet has turned from “self-take” to “a la carte”, you will find that you order the first round of single dishes will be particularly fast, after wanting to add dishes, the waiter will seem indifferent, or even if you order, the food is also extremely slow.
Also want you to eat the first round of the second round, dragging to you slowly produce a sense of satiety, will not be added to the dish.
According to the 2019 annual report of Star Buffet, a well-known American buffet restaurant chain, the company’s ingredient costs account for 31.7% of turnover. This figure basically applies to most buffet restaurants, where the cost of ingredients mostly stays at about 1/3.
So for most normal people, it is simply nonsense to eat down a buffet restaurant. The boss is not afraid that you can eat too much, you are afraid that you do not come to eat.
But the world will change, and so will the desire.
As time enters the 2010s, the general environment of Chinese restaurants has changed a bit. The competitive environment has suddenly become fierce.
A large number of mid-range and even civilian restaurant chain brands began to appear.
A series of new brands started to take off, such as Green Tea and Grandma’s in Hangzhou, Seabed Loh for hot pot, Xibei for Northwest cuisine, and Spicy Temptation for Sichuan cuisine.
This group of new players not only have the same decent decoration and service, but also thanks to the industrialization of catering, these new chains can ensure that the taste of the dishes is unified at a not too bad level, but the prices of the dishes are far lower than the old high-end restaurants.
They do not like to open thousands of square feet of super stores like the old players, but open a few hundred square feet of standard stores, with a controlled cost to quickly expand to occupy the shopping district.
The year before is just a mall occasionally see a store, a year after the store is open all over the city.
Secondly, “eating well” is no longer a problem for everyone, “eating well” has become more important.
For the mass market, a very obvious change is that people eat more professional.
For example, crawfish, coconut chicken, grilled fish, shabu-shabu, small seafood, eel rice …… as long as there is a feature to do well, you can open a chain of stores.
Dedicated means professional, which means better taste.
Large and comprehensive but what features are not outstanding buffet, at this point in time has become the industry crushed by the wheels of the times. (Please share your treasured restaurants in the comments, and I’ll go back to eat them one by one.
The most important thing is that diners have become smart.
The buffet is essentially second-rate ingredients to make a first-class appearance, with visual instead of taste, with category instead of quality. First let the consumer head cool, feel to take advantage of the bargain, in order to attract a lot of traffic, with traffic to share operating costs.
With the desire of diners from “eat full” to “eat well”, buffet is not so sexy.
In 2011, the founder of Money Leopard sold Money Leopard to private equity fund An Mo Shen for 1.5 billion yuan.
After the professional manager took over, he immediately launched the expansion in second-tier cities. The number of stores was expanded from 18 to 29 in one go. No good operation economy, obscene development.
The result is that the money leopard from profit to loss only took two years, and a loss is hundreds of millions of dollars. 2015, the money leopard and was sold, a 60% discount jump price of 253 million, shrinkage shrinkage to six relatives do not recognize.
The next story is familiar to everyone, crazy shutdown stores, shrinkage of the front, a large layoffs. The building is empty, the boss ran away, executives disappeared, a pile of bad debt.
Today, big and comprehensive restaurant brands are gradually giving way to segmented restaurant brands.
Self-service no longer exists only as a category, but more like a generic model. Hot pot, Japanese food, seafood and other big categories can be made into buffet, and some places even appear to sell only oysters a category of buffet brand.
Therefore, as the future of the self-service in the style of wine pools and meat forests gradually decline, but will be an era of “everything can be self-service”.
The era of foolishness and money has passed, and the era of big self-service has also passed. Just like my youth, also holding the wall step by step away.
Perhaps the buffet is like our youth, rough and unrestrained, filled with undisguised desire.
When we grow up, we will become rich to eat fine restaurants, eat Michelin, eat black pearls, but also will learn to maintain health, drink sugar-free drinks, eat salads and light food.
This is how you grow up, learning to live in moderation, hiding your desires, and finding the optimal solution for “being good to yourself”.
But whenever I have the opportunity to go to the buffet, I will still have the mentality of “eating back” and will still “help the wall in and help the wall out”. Even if my intestines are far from the 17 or 18-year-old fighting force.
The taste of the buffet, is the taste of youth. It’s the winning heart of eating down the restaurant, the absurdity of starting to starve the day before, the good heart of eating less fresh meat and still feeling happy, the crazy time with friends.
I began by saying that buffets are a business about desire. In fact, all consumption is about desire. Some people sell the desire for beauty, some people sell the desire for health, some people sell the desire for deliciousness.
The precious thing about the buffet is that it provides a time and space where everyone can put down their posture and open their desires.
What pleasure can be as good as five steaks, two lobsters and unlimited refills of Coke?
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