Revisiting 慶春樸門
Updates from my favorite vegatarian restaurant
We went back to QingChunPuMen (慶春樸門) yesterday, revisiting the Michelin Guide recommended vegetarian masterpiece that we’d blogged about a year ago. I’d extol the food again, but there’s not much new to say. It’s excellent! Each of the plethora of dishes available are fantastic, and the tasting we had of the many dishes I’ll never get to sample were zesty, healthy, and full of contrasting textures and flavors.
The Quinoa Ma-Po Tofu really highlights their creative use of new materials to achieve texture and flavor effects that are fully vegetarian and not mere “meat mimicry.” The vegetable soup was also a hit with the kids and us.
I thought again about whether this business model could work in the US, and I literally can’t imagine this working. The restaurant is gigantic, yet intimate. They have partitioned the spaces in such a way that the several great rooms are the sizes of typical large restaurants, along with medium and private rooms that provide a panoply of space options. They are bespoke, with minimalist designs, accented with stone, wood, and intimate lighting.
Spending this amount of money on decor and space in any city of the US would be ruinously expensive. Part of the magic of this business is that it can leverage both economy of scale and scope, using specialized labor/production to serve a very high flow rate of customers without rushing them and ruining the luxury feel of dining here.
It’s almost like mass produced luxury food…
The supply chain this would need is also extraordinary - high quality vegetables at high volume every day of the week.
IF you could pull this off, you would need a city center with great traffic flow and parking. The prices would need to be much higher (we paid <40 USD for 3 adults and 2 kids.)
If you reduced the scale and volume, could you do a boutique version? Possibly, but the reduced flow would reduce total revenue for your labor, and then you’d be back to normal Michelin models in the US with high cost, low flow and all the fragility that model confers.
If you ever get to try this restaurant, it's something else. Three years now, and I am still convinced that I could eat at this restaurant every week and not get tired of it. I would love to think of a US compatible model and bring it over.