South Beauty - the newest Sichuan cuisine fad in China!
Dear Steemit Friends:
In today's edition of Miss. Delicious, we'll be wetting our appetites to a restaurant called "South Beauty". From it's name, those of you who understand Chinese (俏江南) will guess that this restaurant serves "Jiang Nan" style food. Well, what exactly is Jiang Nan you might ask? Well, it refer's to the regions of China immediately South of the river Yangtze.
As the name would suggest, the restaurant primarily features dishes from south of the river Yangtze. However, it's first restaurant was actually opened in Beijing. In the year 2000, the first restaurant of South Beauty, opened its doors in the CBD (Central Business District) of Beijing. By 2002, the restaurant was so profitable, that it had expanded by a further 80 stores outside of Beijing. It positioned itself as a the "Louis Vuitton" of the restaurant business.
With such a grand plan, let's go inside and see if they have what it takes to take on the restaurant business and become the "Louis Vuitton" of restaurants in China. It will be a challenge for South Beauty to retain it's quality and assertion of fine dining if they hope to expand to 500 restaurants across China. No doubt, it will feel like a fast food chain with so many branches.
Still, with Sichuan food back in style, it might have the broad customer base and general appeal to make it happen.
In fact, the mask used as part of the South Beauty logo, is a mask from Sichuan Opera. This is a style of opera that many Chinese people still enjoy to this day, and combining this with the Sichuan food delicacies, I think they're doing a good job maintaining consistency of their image.
Since Sichuan food favours the hot and spicy chilli styles, it's dishes are usually a deep and rich colour red. South Beauty have taken note of this and decorated their restaurants in this "Chinese Red" colour as their principle colour theme.
Deep red lanterns, giving just enough light to show off the traditional landscape paintings.
One section of the decorations within this restaurant particularly interested me. It was the calligraphy wall. Not only are the characters beautifully written, they also remind me of some ancient classical museums with calligraphy. Surely we're at a restaurant and not a museum?