China’s cleanest restaurants

A few days ago I wasn’t in the mood for Chinese and didn’t have much battery left on the ebike to take me far to get anything good.  So after work I wanted to go somewhere on the way home where I could get some non-Chinese food.  Luckily there was a new restaurant that had just opened on the road home so my wife and I decided to go there.  It was a massive fancy new building and I had always found it surprising how they had decided to build such a luxurious restaurant in a not so great location, and unsurprisingly I had never seen it getting much business.  I also knew that the food was not going to be anything great but I wanted to check it out.

I have been in Xuzhou over 2 years now and seen many places like this come and go, they open for a while, look pretty and serve a few customers and then as expected, shut down after a year or so.  So I always found it strange, why do places like this keep popping up, if they all seemed doomed to failure.  And why are they all doing the same thing, a nice environment with bad food.  Surely they would learn from their mistakes.

The photo here is of a tea house that opened near where I work.  This was a really fancy place, apparently they had spend the equivalent of a million pounds on the entrance alone.  With a massive screen that light up the little square at night with nonsensical videos and advertisements, and very funnily sometimes the BSOD (blue screen of death).  This place had a massive grand opening, looked amazing and was a very large place so must have had substantial investment.  I heard rumours that it was a very important person in Xuzhou’s son, and there were also rumours that it was a secret high end brothel.  Anyway after the opening nothing really happened there, you could see all the staff cleaning and standing by the doors waiting for the customers, who never came, and I mean never, I never saw one person who wasn’t dressed in uniform walk in or out of that place.  And considering this was the building next to the one I work at I was going there nearly everyday, and also the gym I used to go to was behind the tea house and to get there I had to walk past the kitchen, which had a glass wall so you could look in and I never saw any of the chefs doing any cooking, or anything apart from standing around and then cleaning if it was late.

So I was always perplexed at how this amazing place could do so poorly, especially as it may have been a certain person’s son’s place.  Surely he had the connections to make a place like that a success, a perfect place for business meetings which hundreds of people could easily be directed to.  But for some reason they weren’t.  And unexpectedly after a year or so the place shut it’s massive beautiful doors.  And I never got to try the tea there (which was apparently at least £50 a pot).

So during dinner I brought up the subject of these mystery business ventures with my wife and unexpectedly she came up with the answer, which hadn’t occurred to me at all.  What she said was that they are massive money laundering scams, someone takes a bribe, then opens a fancy restaurant, and then launders the money through the restaurants earnings until all the money is clean, and then shut the place down.

It seems to make sense, everyone knows that there are massive levels of corruption here, and bribes are being passed out in the $billions.  But with the change of government leaders there has also been a massive crackdown on corruption.  Seen recently with the death of a party employee during interrogation (torture) shanggui extra legal corruption investigations, and also with the Bo Xilai case.  I also head another rumour (many rumours flying around Xuzhou these days) that the certain so and so who’s son opened the tea house did a runner.  This has actually happened quite a lot all over China with the leadership change and corruption crackdown.  Many officials have stepped down from their jobs to save themselves from being found out.

So maybe these short term restaurants and fancy tea houses will soon be a thing of the past.  But I bet there will still be a few more opening up in good old Xuzhou over the next few years.  China may be changing ridiculously fast, but old habits die hard, especially when money is concerned.