Self-taught chef cooks up good sales

The restaurant manager

When Li Zhiqiang was less than 14 he worked in a tiny noodle restaurant with only a handful of other staff cooking noodles all day. He was paid 50 yuan a month.

In the evening, he slept on tables in the restaurant - tables on which his noodles would be served the next day.

Now Li, 33, a native of Songlin village in Zhongjiang county, Sichuan, is the general manager of Daronghe La Defense, a swish restaurant in the provincial capital, Chengdu, whose owner employs 320 people. Li says his annual income is more than 1 million yuan ($160,500; 116,000 euros).

Li is the youngest of four children whose parents violated the country's family planning policy and were fined repeatedly for doing so, making it difficult for them to make ends meet.

"My family was one of the poorest in our village," Li, wearing a T-shirt, says in his clean, sparsely decorated office on the second floor of Daronghe La Defense's sprawling headquarters in Chengdu.

"On the sixth day of the (15-day) Spring Festival holiday in 1995, I had to leave the village for Chengdu with my 17-year-old sister. I had 25 yuan in my pocket. After I paid the long-distance bus fare, I had only 10 yuan when I arrived in Chengdu."

After standing for half a day near a spontaneously formed labor market in the city with countless job hunters from rural Sichuan, Li was offered a job in a restaurant cooking noodles and washing dishes.

He was keen to learn something about cooking, but was unable to do so, and he quit. He was then offered a job in a restaurant in the city's suburbs where he would receive accommodation and food but no wages for the first six months.

"My duty was to slaughter fish and snakes and wash bowls. At that young age killing snakes really frightened me."

In his three years in the restaurant, nobody taught him how to cook dishes or make pastry, he says. But he took every opportunity he could to observe cooking, pastry making and making mixed hotpot condiments.

"Once as I took notes on how to mix hotpot condiments, I was beaten and the paper was torn into pieces. The manager was afraid the recipe would fall into the hands of competitors."

But Li eventually distinguished himself as a chef and pastry maker. Chengdu Daronghe Restaurant Management Co Ltd opened Daronghe La Defense, its first restaurant, in 1999, and Li the self-taught chef started working there.

Eager to draw inspiration from fellow chefs in cooking new dishes, he also worked as a waiter in many upmarket restaurants in Chengdu.

"As a chef, it is quite easy to learn how a fellow chef has made a new dish by looking at the plate," he says.

Li had a strong sense of pride in always being punctual with work. Once, fearing he would arrive late, he took a taxi. But when that was caught in traffic he got out and paid a tricycle rider and then a motorcycle rider to get him nearer to work.

"When I reached the restaurant I was well in time. Had I been late I would have been fined 5 yuan, but the taxi, tricycle and motorcycle fares combined were more than 30 yuan."

In 2006 Li became the executive chef of Daronghe La Defense.

Chengdu Daronghe Restaurant Management Co Ltd has 32 Daronghe restaurants all over China and nearly 10,000 employees," says Liu Yu, assistant to the company's chairman.

"Its annual sales exceed 1 billion yuan. Li created many of the restaurant's best-known dishes."

One such dish is made of fish cooked with potato noodles, green capsicum, green peppercorn, ageratum leaves and leek.

"Since it was created in 2005 its sales have surpassed 10 million yuan in the 11 Daronghe restaurants in Chengdu each year," Li says.

Creating new dishes has been the best thing in his job, he says.

In 2012 he was appointed general manager of Daronghe La Defense, and he owns 10 percent of the restaurant's shares, he says.

At Daronghe la Defence he met his wife, Yu Jie, now 28, who was a receptionist there. They have two sons, aged 7 and 3.

In 2010, Li bought a 130 sq m apartment in Chengdu for 900,000 yuan.

Unlike many other parents, Li says, he plans to send his children to ordinary primary schools and high schools, rather than paying for private education, which he could afford. A boy has to rely on hard work rather than on his parents to succeed, he says.

"I would leave only 10 percent of the family fortune to my sons and might donate the rest if one day I have to make a decision about the family fortune."

Li says his generation of chefs was different from the older generation.

"Old chefs smoked cigarettes and drank liquor while cooking dishes. Cigarette ash would fall on pots. Chefs of my generation are more disciplined, and chefs of the newer generation are not as hard-working as those of my generation."

Chefs' working conditions have improved greatly, he says. When he was a starter, it was common to see kitchens flooded with water. As he trudged through it wearing cloth shoes his mother made for him, his feet became extremely white after he stood in the water every day.

"But kitchens in many restaurants are very clean. Chefs' leather shoes will never be wet no matter how long they work there."

Li says he does not smoke or drink, and his only hobby is fishing. As he has to work from 9 am to 10:30 pm every day, he can go fishing only once or twice a year.

He is confident about the future of his restaurant which is frequented by an increasing number of white-collar workers, he says.

"Last year, sales totaled 55 million yuan. My goal this year is 60 million yuan. Chinese are better off these days, and the catering industry is much bigger than it was 10 years ago. It is a good time to be running restaurants."

Ten years ago a chef's average monthly wage was 2,000 yuan, and now it is 5,000 yuan, Liu says.

Li dreams of stepping down as a general manger in 10 years. "As a chef, I dream of more time to invent more new dishes. I am a chef first and then a general manager."

huangzhiling@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Africa Weekly 04/25/2014 page7)