|
Interviews
Tuesday, 02 February 2010 02:02 Written by JFK Miller Simply Choon
But winning over the locals was tough. The restaurant, though popular with foreigners from the get-go, nearly folded within the first year because of its lack of local patrons. Back in 1999, Shanghainese tastes were not as global as they are today. “Chinese people couldn’t take Thai food because the combination of sweet, salty, spicy and sour was something they weren’t used to,” Choon recalls. “A whole string of Chinese publications wrote about us and more than half hated the food. They weren’t shy about saying it either, basically saying it was horrible.” “One reporter took a spoonful of tom-yam soup and spat it out all over the table right in front of me and said it was the worst food he had ever tasted.” But the business survived, Choon says, thanks to being in the “right place at the right time with the right product,” and a healthy serving of luck. “I tell you, God up there must have been hearing my prayers because in September of 1999, the Shanghai government started to encourage locals to travel, so they issued passports very easily and guess the first country they went to, because it was the only country that gave them visas? That’s right, Thailand.” “And as with every overseas trip, your big first foreign country, you always come back with fond memories and food is one of them. So suddenly I had this big group of locals who had gone to Thailand and they came back wanting to try Thai food and then it just got better from there. If we’d opened one year earlier, we may not have had the money to survive.” The restaurant is now a popular local favorite, with Shanghainese accounting for a large part of the business. Awards have flowed, including, for the seventh consecutive year, the popularly-voted best Thai restaurant in this magazine’s Annual Food & Drink Awards, as well a place in Zagat’s Shanghai Top 20 restaurants. While well-known food critic Jiang Liyang says that restaurants serving foreign cuisine must modify their dishes to suit Shanghainese tastes in order to win a local following, Choon takes the complete opposite view. “Our menu hasn’t changed in 10 years,” he says. Even back in 1999 when the restaurant struggled to gain a local following, Choon resisted the urge to change what he describes as “the DNA of what Simply Thai is about.” “I can’t sell a product I don’t believe in. I’ve always wanted an authentic Thai restaurant, not fusion or comfort food, but food that I like. And I think we’ve delivered that in the sense that yes, some people like it more spicy or whatever, but the main premise is that it is real Thai food made by real Thai chefs. And I realized that I can’t do it without the Thai chefs because if you leave it to Chinese chefs, they will eventually change it.” Patrons liked what they saw. The Simply Life shop sprung from requests from diners to buy fittings and decor items, like the restaurant’s wall hangings, side tables, candles, incense, crockery and glassware. The first Simply Life shop, situated a short distance away from the original restaurant on Dongping Lu, opened for business in late 1999. “Back in 1999 there were no lifestyle shops, no gift shops, no such thing,” says Choon. “We had customers coming in to the restaurant saying, ‘Can we buy your candles?’ ‘Can we buy this?’ ‘Can we buy that?’ Back then, what was available in Shanghai was the type of candles and incense people used for praying at temples, while decorative and fragrant candles and incense for the home were nowhere to be seen. When people ask you so many times, almost every day, it got me thinking, ‘There must be a market for this.’ So that’s basically how it happened, and, voila, Simply Life was born.” Choon says the lifestyle shop’s success lies in providing value for money and listening to customers. “What we’re trying to achieve is to offer something unique to buy as opposed to all the cheap stuff you see. I never set out to be a luxury or high-end store. I don’t want to be known as that ‘expensive shop,’ although unfortunately some people have labeled us that. What I offer is value for money. I will use this example: You pay 100 kuai and you get a 100 kuai worth of value back. That’s relative; you know everybody has their own gauge in terms of the value of something. I give you something unique, something of better quality and I give you a guarantee and I can give you a brand name on top of it. That’s what I’m trying to achieve.” These days Choon takes a backseat in the business and has been given the honorific title of Chairman (“whatever that is,” he jokes) only involving himself to the extent he wants, which is mostly on the creative side. The rest of time he spends traveling around the world or just “walking the streets, enjoying life.” “I’ve achieved what I wanted to achieve and I’ve come away very happy and it has even gone past what I wanted to achieve. I wanted to create a name, a brand. But everything has been opportunistic. I never had a grand plan. Some people are like, ‘Oh, you must have planned all these things,’ but no, it just kind of happened.”
Bookmark
Email this
Hits: 351 Comments (0)
 Write comment
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The brand is now a genuine Shanghai success story: four Simply Thai restaurants, with plans to open more; two Simply Life stores; and The Party People catering service for corporate clients. The group also owns Sichuan restaurant Pinchuan. The “dream,” as Choon puts it, is to take the business global. But for the time being the focus for expansion is within Shanghai, where the group feels there is still a lot of scope. Choon, a Singaporean by birth but now an Australian permanent resident, wants the business to be accepted as a local brand. “I’m not Singaporeaning or Australianizing it,” he says. “I’m a Chinese brand with foreign characteristics. That’s the beauty of it being Shanghainese.”
Show/hide comments
Show/hide comment form
