Moveable Feasts

By staff reporter PENELOPE COLVILLE

WHETHER you are nostalgic for your own culture or keen to experience another, food, it seems, is the sensual conduit to the comforts of home or to irresistible adventures abroad. Two Beijing-based culinary entrepreneurs are remarkable just for their longevity in the art of providing taste bud tours. Restaurants come and restaurants go in China, so expats know not to get too attached to a place because this time next year it may have vanished. An estimated 150 to 200 new restaurants open in Beijing alone every year, and only half survive, so they know what they're doing.

Canadian Paul Astephen has managed to ride out all cuisine fashions with his American Steak and Eggs diner in the south embassy district, by bringing a little bit of home into the lives of those so far away from theirs. The Hutong, a cultural education business, does the reverse. They train anyone enamored of foreign cuisines how to prepare those dishes properly in their own domiciles. Both culinary adventurers and the occasionally homesick are eating well in Beijing.

Astephen appears to be a natural, a real foodie but without the pretension. In a city that offers every cuisine in the world, the hunger for home cooking is an obsession that inspires innumerable restaurant reviews in the lifestyle magazines of the capital. Essentially this Red Star chef succeeds because he understands his Western compatriots are on a perpetual urban safari – stalking the best burger, pizza or cheesecake in the city. Customers haunt every new joint with a Western chef or try native attempts at Western dishes in the hope they will discern what only their taste buds can confirm or deny – a mastery of the foods they were raised on.

By contrast, "Chinese people eat with their eyes," Astephen ventures, explaining, "Chinese baked goods are gorgeous looking but dry; the pies stand up straight, but to me a pie should leak a little." Astephen, now 63, came to Beijing on a visit with his better half, Chinese Canadian Yang Yang in 2003, just as the city went into lock down with the SARS epidemic. The rest of their China tour was cancelled. Astephen decided to open a diner here because when he went out to get a steak they were only served in hotels at astronomical prices. In his opinion, honed over years as a chef and manager of both high end and family venues in Canada and the U.S., the steaks weren't all that great either. A few months later his new diner was deluged with customers in search of the tastes of home-style cooking. The Astephens were dug in and have been now for nine years.

Business skills are as important to his success as his kitchen magician work. The successful restaurateur used his spare time to run a large cafeteria to Western standards for Chinese interests, making it instantly profitable. When the cafeteria was taken over by Chinese management, its profits plunged. It's all in the details – of both what you offer and how you prepare and price it. For his own diner he trains his Chinese chefs and kitchen staff carefully in the art of combining ingredients and following techniques critical to achieving an authentic North American flavor. Good carrot cake is made with the right molasses, only gluten-heavy flour is used (the rarer and considerably more expensive choice in China), and then there's the essential twist of soaking raisins before adding them to the batter. His blueberries are imported and therefore frozen, so no extra liquid is used in pies because that invites a reliance on starch to hold the filling in place and produces an inferior taste and texture. The simplest cuisines are likely not that simple you have to conclude, and while Astephen's quality control considers appearance, it emphasizes flavor.

Once an army cook, then a district chief for Howard Johnson in Quebec, and later a fine-dining chef in Canada's mountainous resort area of Banff, the master does a masterful job of a patty melt, a steak, an English breakfast, and an array of omelets and desserts. Expats whose families have gone home for the summer make up a "holiday widowers" contingent of regular customers who miss the ministrations of their better half. While other eateries fail, Astephen has opened a second diner in the foreigner-thick Beijing suburb of Shunyi, but when asked if being a restaurateur in China is easy, he'll admit it isn't. He still goes into the kitchen to "follow up." Apartment prices in the city are so high now he houses all his new Shunyi site staff in a spacious, renovated, 8 room courtyard house he wouldn't mind living in himself. He invests in his people and works hard to keep them. In a market where restaurateurs complain they can't keep staff because they are in such high demand, he has one staff member who has been here for all the nine years he has been open. Knowing the importance of one's native cuisine to one's soul, he encourages employees to cook their own Chinese favorites. And he is still a student; when he hired someone from Hebei Province who, it turns out, made the best jiaozi on earth, he learned to make the dish himself.

On the public side of the kitchen doors, another complication is that the concept of "good" service can be quite different from country to country; in the West, less is more, but in China, more is more. Attentive ministrations in China include wait staff standing over you while you peruse the menu or multiple servers hovering near your table throughout the meal, both situations that make Westerners uncomfortable. In some star hotels in "second tier" cities, your plate can be whipped away from you before your fork returns to it after the last bite, creating the impression you may as well be eating at a truck stop. Astephen teaches his wait staff to watch and wait. Looking at how high a person lifts their coffee cup can tell you if they should be offered a refill; if the head is thrown back, the cup is nearly empty and only then should they be approached. Not satisfied with his efforts to institute non-intrusive service, he installed devices at his tables that allow you to press a button when you are ready to order, have some water, or get your bill.

In a developing country, regulations of all types, or the lack thereof, can create murky territory. He noted that between his first and second restaurants for instance, health regulations and inspections had tightened up. Development of the property your restaurant is in means you can be wiped out; one sandwich shop he knows of got 48 hours notice of closing. That said, Astephen enjoys the "Wild East." He's done business in India and says other than China and India being the rising powers of the globe, there is little comparison. A good businessman, he finds much to admire in the way the Chinese government operates, observing, "The administration runs the country without a deficit." For two years he worked a catering operation contract west of Calcutta, and observes, "The government here cares about the people; you don't see thousands sleeping on the streets like you'll find in India. In China, even small villages have running water."