The man who is, arguably, Britain's most successful restaurateur sits on a
high stool watching the customers at his latest opening. He wants to see
what's working and what isn't. Not just whether the punters eat Penang prawn
noodle with more gusto than they do the smoked chicken fen pi, but whether
it's working ergonomically, aesthetically.
I overhear a conversation with a young female manager. Alan Yau is saying:
“They're too big, they'll just have to go, they don't look right.” The
manager says: “I thought that as soon as they came in.”
So I wait, quite excited, expecting to watch a couple of obese tourists thrown
out for ruining the lines of the stark, square room - then I realise that
they're talking about the chilli sauce bottles. The manager clears them away
sharpish and the communal tables that Yau first introduced to Britain with
Wagamama 16 years ago are returned to their monastic plainness. He says he
hopes that people will think of British boarding schools while sitting at
his tables.
We're in Cha Cha Moon, off Carnaby Street, Central London, where customers are
served fairly simple dishes of Szechuanese and Cantonese origin. Behind them
there's a crowd of bustling Asian chefs in a stainless-steel beehive of a
kitchen. The food is excellent and eyebrow-raising, as you'd expect from a
Yau restaurant - but the shocker is that every dish costs £3.50. “The same
price as the yakisoba ramen was when we opened Wagamama,” Yau says. So it's
a gimmick - just for the first month? “Not at all. It's a laboratory, a
test-bed. I'm going to hold those prices for at least a year, because it's a
great way of perfecting a dish. I need the volume of custom to expose the
mistakes.”
I ask him which of the 30 or so dishes will most damage the Yau bank balance:
he decides that he must be losing most on the Singapore char kway teow
because the ho fun noodles that come with the clam, Chinese salami,
fishcake, chive and beansprouts have to be flown in from Hong Kong. That's
what I'll be having.
As we talk and I eat, Yau watches the customers intently. But they don't watch
him. This is because, unusually in celebrity-ridden restauranteering, he is
unknown beyond friends and peers. He is shy, serious and rarely gives
interviews. His is a name that the international restaurant business
breathes along with Nobu, Ramsay and Ducasse, but he wouldn't like to go on
TV, despite the offers: “I don't have the personality. I wouldn't enjoy it.”
Yet his Tottenham Court Road restaurant, Hakkasan, is one of only two Chinese
restaurants in the world with a Michelin star (his Soho dim sum teahouse,
Yauatcha, is the second). He and the chefs that he employs have not just
reinvented the tired and debased Chinese cuisine we knew in Britain, but
sent a message of inspiration to all Chinese chefs.
Yau is one of the few who came up with an eating-out concept worthy of the
word “revolution”. Wagamama, which he opened in Bloomsbury in 1992 when he
was 29, not only introduced the British to the joy of slurping Japanese
noodles, but also to the Spartan chic of no-nonsense “turbo service” and the
communal tables. Not everyone enjoys Yau's ideas for getting people to eat
fast - or “raise the restaurant's energy level”, as he says. While
applauding the dim sum at Yauatcha, the Times' Giles Coren wrote that the
service made him feel like sawing off his foot.
Wagamama is now a 90-outlet global franchise (Yau is no longer involved).
Hakkasan, branches of which will shortly open in Miami, Istanbul and Abu
Dhabi, is the opposite of canteen dining - a glossy restaurant designed to
echo a lacquered old Shanghai brothel. Here you can pay £40 for shark-fin
soup and the shellfish shumai come anointed with goldleaf. Reservations for
the Hakkasan are traded on the futures market.
Joe Warwick, the restaurant business writer, says: “What puts Alan ahead of
the Ramsays and the Robuchons is that he operates across the genres and
concepts. London's full of noodle bars and dim sum places because of him.”
With 20 chefs in the kitchen and no dish costing more than £3.50, Cha Cha Moon
cannot, Yau admits, make money, even though it is now serving 1,000 people a
day, just a few weeks since its launch. In the trade it has always been said
that Yau, bless him, never makes money. He has had his ups and downs. He was
squeezed out of Wagamama in 1997 by the private-equity people that he'd
bought in to fund the chain's expansion. But in January this year he sold a
controlling interest in Hakkasan and Yauatcha to the Abu Dhabi Government's
investment arm for £31 million. He remains CEO, in charge of rolling out the
restaurant franchise in the Middle and Far East and Florida. But in his own
portfolio he retains a Japanese restaurant in St James's, Cha Cha Moon and
his three canteen-style Thai restaurants, Busaba Eathai. The sale of
Hakkasan and the cash injection, he tells me, will “clear the decks for the
next thing”.
Which is? “I want to make Chinky good again,” he grins. “I have a concept of a
chow bar, a basic Hong Kong eating place. We'll bring back the chicken chow
mein and the special fried rice. Even chop suey. It's unfinished business
from Wagamama. This place [Cha Cha Moon] is only halfway there. It's a
prototype.”
Yau's roots lie in the classic British Chinese takeaway. He came to live in
Britain from Hong Kong in 1975, at the age of 12, and during his teenage
years worked in his parents' Chinese restaurant in King's Lynn, in Norfolk.
It was a hard time: the Yaus were the only non-white family for miles and
there was racism at school and in the restaurant. “We had no choice,” he
told me when we first met four years ago when he was trying to open a
Hakkasan in Hong Kong. “If you were Chinese you had to get into the
restaurant business. And the Chinese are willing to make enormous
sacrifices. The family paid a huge price.”
It was behind the takeaway counter in King's Lynn that he developed his sense
of how the industry could work. “Of what you could do with food and how you
could give it to people in a way that would change the way they thought
about it.” He went to university in London and read politics and philosophy,
but by his mid-twenties he was back in Hong Kong training as a manager in
McDonald's. He wanted to find out how fast food worked. “I think I've only
really learnt that now,” he says. “It's taken until now, intellectually. And
I have a concept that I think can compete with McDonald's and Burger King.
I'd like to finish my career in fast food. I like it because it's
democratic, you can reach serious amounts of people.” So what is the
concept? He smiles. He won't say more than: “It's new. It's very simple. As
it has to be. One single dish product.”
I wonder what makes Yau function. I can see the drive that the King's Lynn
years must have given him and I can understand his passion to reinvigorate
the food of his birthplace. He's more than passionate about his menus, on
what is wrong and what is right in food. He is a workaholic. He rewrites the
menus in bed, “downloading” ideas that he has stored in his brain while on
his incessant travels. This annoys his Turkish wife of 15 years, Jale (she
works in the Hakkasan head office). He was in Moscow last week, advising on
Turandot, a mega-retaurant being opened by Andrei Dellos, the man behind the
city's Café Pushkin.
As we talk, a complex device above us on the bamboo-latticed ceiling gives a
“prrfft!” and emits a cloud of vapour. I ask Yau what it is and he says:
“I'm very pleased with it - I wanted to do something about the humidity,
make it more...special. Give the atmosphere an opacity, a drama when you
look across it.”
And to make it more tropical, like a humid outdoor restaurant in South Asia?
“That too - I wanted to use the humidity to change the dynamic...”
Later I tell a friend who knows Yau about this. My friend says: “Are you sure?
I heard they put that humidifier in because that bamboo was cracking. He
does take the piss sometimes.”
SPOT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE MENUS
1978: What you got for an £8 meal in a high street Chinese restaurant
Chicken and sweetcorn soup
Spring rolls (bean sprouts, small
pieces of meat, carrot)
Prawn balls with sweet and sour sauce (heavily battered, very small pieces of
fish, with a scary and astringent orange sauce, sometimes with pineapple
bits)
Chicken chop suey (bean sprouts, bits of meat and vegetable. The Mandarin
words for chop suey means bits and pieces. Chicken chow mein appeared to be
the same thing, but with free noodles)
Bamboo shoots or water chestnuts (wok-fried in fish sauce)
Prawn crackers
Special egg fried rice (some carrot, onion and a meat of your choice)
Fried “seaweed” (actually cabbage)
Chips
Tinned lychees and ice-cream
Tea
2008: What you get for a £16 meal at Alan Yau’s Cha Cha Moon
Spring rolls (cloud ear fungus, carrot, Chinese chive, cabbage, dried shrimp)
Taiwan beef won ton soup (braised beef, mooli, preserved cabbage, mustard
green, won ton noodle)
Singapore char kway teow (Chinese salami, fishcake, clam, beansprouts, egg,
ho fun wide noodles)
Chinese chives with garlic
Salted lemon Sprite or Hong Kong milk
Tea
