As Confucius might have said: he who wants to make a buck had better please the masses. And more restaurant companies are striving to do just that-with a new generation of ethnic eateries aimed at the budget-minded and middle-brow. Italian-style dinner houses seem to hold the widest appeal. General Mills, Inc., the folks who brought us Hamburger Helper and Red Lobster, was the first major company to enter the ethnic-food arena with its fast-growing Olive Garden chain (fiscal year 1992 sales from its 320 stores: $808 million); Brinker International’s Macaroni Grill and Spageddies have also joined the fray. After testing China Coast in Orlando, General Mills hopes to score with the Asian concept, too. But not everyone is pleased by the mass-market approach to cuisine. Sniffs Andrew Dornenburg, a chef at Arcadia, a top-ranked Manhattan restaurant: “What we’re seeing is the homogenization of the American taste buds.”
Chefs may call it “homogenization,” but the restaurant industry likes to think of it simply as “Americanization.” The concept dovetails nicely with the return to what the trade calls “casual dining”–sit-down restaurants where the children are welcome Dad doesn’t need a tie, and the dinner tab doesn’t rival the gross national product of Albania. The idea is not particularly new-chains like Bennigan’s have been doing it for years. But it is being rejuvenated by recession-strapped babyboomers who want both inexpensive ethnic food and a high-chair for the toddler. “They come away saying, ‘Maybe that isn’t the best Italian food I’ve ever eaten in my life, but I sure got my money’s worth’,” says General Mills spokesman Craig Shulstad. Indeed, sales at sit-down ethnic restaurants totaled $8 billion in 1991, a 10 percent increase over the previous year, says Technomic, Inc., a Chicago market-research firm. In almost all other categories-with the notable exception of prison food–food-service growth in the United States was relatively stagnant.
But before you can grow an ethnic restaurant chain, it has to play in Peoria. Just ask General Mills, which wrote off its first venture in Chinese cuisine seven years ago when it failed to come up with a money-making menu. That venture, a buffet and take-out chain called Leeann Chin, did well in its native Minneapolis. But the company decided to abandon the take-out business, which they figured was best left to smaller, more nimble operators.
To protect China Coast from a similar fate, General Mills planners have left no tea leaf unturned. The company is about to enter the third year of testing its first China Coast restaurant in Orlando, where the tourist-dominated population represents a cross-section of America. A second China Coast opened in July in Orlando, and a third is due by the end of the year. Next spring General Mills plans to launch two new units in Indianapolis.
To oversee the operation, the company brought in Terry Cheng, a Chinese-American chef with a background in food biology. Cheng’s first task was to collect menus from Chinese mom-and-pop restaurants across the country to determine which foods were most familiar to American customers. From those, she created the first of six test menus, designed to divine which Chinese dishes would be greeted most warmly by the typical American palate. Questionnaires and taste tests helped Cheng zero in on, for example, too spicy noodles or bland stir-fry. In one experiment, customers were asked to compare China Coast with a highly rated local restaurant and then rank each establishment. When queried about which they preferred, most of the respondents said they favored the chow from the local restaurants. But when Cheng had them sample dishes from both kitchens, they overwhelmingly favored the General Mills cuisine. Cheng’s conclusion: “The biggest problem we were facing was people’s perceptions.”
More confusing still, customers tended to speak one way and act another. While they defended their allegiance to light, healthy entrees with a zeal that would make the surgeon general proud, taste tests showed most folks ordered foods highest in fat, sugar, salt and sauces-artery blockers like egg foo young and spareribs. Customers insisted they yearned for authentic Chinese cuisine but invariably ended up eating old American favorites like moo goo gai pan and fried rice. (Among the poorest sellers: traditional dishes like Lo Hon Tofu, salt-and-pepper shrimp and curry-laced Singapore noodles.) “Chinese people talk about ‘authentic’ Chinese food and they’re talking about chicken feet, jellyfish and bird’s nest soup,” says Cheng. “Our customers talk about authentic Chinese food and they’re talking about egg rolls and sweet-and-sour chicken.”
The result of Cheng’s inquiry is a menu about as long as the list of emperors in the Ming Dynasty. The opening page plays to customers’ health concerns, assuring them that the cooks use no MSG and that waiters would be happy to describe the day’s American dishes “if anyone in your party would prefer” them. To create the right ambience, the eight-page list even offers a map with brief descriptions of the regions of China and perquisite sketches of panda bears. And in the back, there’s a glossary of Chinese noshing: (“Mein:” noodles, “Moo Goo”: mushrooms and “Gambei:” Bottoms Up!) Among the accompaniments: a “Bok Choy Bloody Mary” and a mysterious dessert dubbed the “Great Wall of Chocolate.” (Translation: chocolate cake.)
The company has taken similar pains to inject Chinese flavor into the atmosphere. In the beginning, planners added plants and some Chinese artifacts. But customers begged for more. So they went heavy on the bamboo and lanterns, decked the walls with Chinese-language scrolls and planted a giant paper dragon in the company pickup truck outside. It’s sometimes tough to find enough Asian waiters and waitresses in Orlando, so your flaming Bo-Bo platter may be served up by a blue-eyed blond rather than an Asian. But now, instead of bow ties and aprons, servers wear authentic-looking Chinese jackets.
How will the fortune cookie crumble for General Mills’ new venture? Industry watchers predict the company could have another winner in China Coast. “They’re going to literally track Olive Garden,” says Michael Bartlett, editor in chief of Restaurants & Institutions, a trade magazine. Like Italian food, “Chinese has lots of noodles in it,” he says. “The rice is inexpensive, and it can be heaped in many ways to give the impression of abundance.” If the gamble succeeds, some speculate the packaged-goods company might bring the chain concept to such uncharted ethnic cuisines as Greek and Middle Eastern, which would be easier to mass-market than, for example, French cuisine.
But that may have to wait a few years. If Olive Garden is any indicator, the company will have substantially more tinkering to do before it rolls out China Coast nationwide. General Mills spent five years and about $28 million before its developers nailed down just the right mix of bread sticks and spaghetti sauce at Olive Garden. (It took them that amount of time, for example, to figure out that chunky tomato sauce played in California but not in St. Louis, and that Rhode Islanders were partial to veal saltimbocca.) Coming up with the perfect egg roll could be even more tricky. Meanwhile, China Coast may face at least some competition from a group of newcomers to the Chinese restaurant business-take-out chains with names like Hop Too and Wok Fast. To maintain its lead in the fast-paced world of ethnic restaurants, it seems, that’s exactly what General Mills will have to do.
OK, SO IT’S NOT MOM’S
NEWSWEEK asked Ming Chung Hu of Orlando’s acclaimed Ming Court restaurant to sample dishes from China Coast and rate them on a scale of 1 to 5.
Not quite like his mom’s, but pretty good.
“Even if I was starving, I wouldn’t eat it.”
Not crispy and dull in appearance.
Not bad, but a little too much sweet, not enough sour.
Seems more steamed than fried.
