On the World’s Plates, a Bit of New York

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/02/dining/new-york-restaurateurs-expand-around-the-world.html

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HONG KONG

AT Mario Batali’s luxe new Lupa in a gleaming tower on Queen’s Road here, soignée Chinese diners, expatriate regulars and foreign tourists glide up escalators to their tables. They navigate past a four-foot-tall bronze of Romulus and Remus in this sleek $3.2 million restaurant of glass, steel and floral terrazzo. On the menu are bucatini all’amatriciana and spaghetti alla carbonara.

Eight thousand miles away, in the original Lupa in an unassuming storefront on Thompson Street in Manhattan, dressed-down customers crowd the battered tables of Mr. Batali’s thriving Roman osteria. Yes, bucatini and carbonara are on the menu.

If the two restaurants’ décor, customers and locales are vastly disparate, their core menus and basic concepts are the same, as is another crucial element: the buzz and edge of New York City dining.

As the economy in the United States sputters and Europe’s reels, New York restaurateurs are exporting their increasingly sought-after brands to the more robust economies of Asia and the Middle East.

Mr. Batali has opened two restaurants in Singapore and two in Hong Kong, where Michael White also has an outpost of his Italian-food empire. Danny Meyer has Shake Shacks in Dubai, Kuwait, Qatar and, as of last month, Abu Dhabi. The chef Laurent Tourondel and the restaurateur Jimmy Haber own three BLT restaurants in Hong Kong and are thinking of adding more there and elsewhere.

“We’ve been approached by Qatar, Korea, the Philippines,” Mr. Haber said.

Other New York chefs and restaurateurs who have already set up foreign operations include Daniel Boulud, in Singapore, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, in Shanghai and Doha, Qatar. Zakary Pelaccio and Rick Camac are planning Fatty Crab restaurants in Southeast Asia. David Bouley has been approached about starting a restaurant in Beijing. Gray Kunz departed New York in 2009 to open a restaurant in Hong Kong, then stayed. David Chang said he has been sifting through transoceanic inquiries about planting his flag in Asia and the Middle East.

“In the culinary world, New York is the creative incubator and has some of the best-known restaurants on the planet,” said Sandeep Sekhri, who invited Mr. Batali, Mr. White and Mr. Tourondel to Hong Kong and now manages their restaurants. “Here, it is easier to market someone from New York — they have name recognition.”

Despite complicated feelings about the United States in the Middle East, “New York City is a very strong brand in its own right,” said Hilary Baker, a vice president of M.H. Alshaya Company in Kuwait, which has opened the Shake Shacks there and in Dubai. “And it has a hip urban cachet that helps to define Shake Shack.”

Even the devastation that Hurricane Sandy wreaked on many New York restaurants does not appear to have dampened the owners’ ardor to proliferate, or the city’s image overseas.

“New York’s restaurant brand wasn’t affected,” Mr. Sekhri said, “because although the hurricane was widely reported in our media, there wasn’t much coverage locally of what restaurants had to go through.”

There are economic hurdles, like the frightfully expensive real estate in Hong Kong and some Middle Eastern locations. But considerable profits — 13 to 15 percent a year, as compared to an average 10 percent or so in New York — are possible, Mr. Camac said after a recent Asian trip to scout locations for his Fatty restaurants. At the BLT steakhouse and burger places in Hong Kong, Mr. Haber said revenues have risen each year by more than 5 percent.

In the quest for faraway gold, though, restaurateurs must navigate a host of potential pitfalls, including menu mistranslations, cultural embarrassments, difficulties in finding ingredients and staff, and aggressive copycatting.

Foreign partners like Mr. Sekhri are necessary because “you can’t just plunk down an exact copy of the original,” said Malcolm M. Knapp, who heads a New York restaurant consulting company that bears his name. “You need to comprehend the exact dynamics of the local market, or you will come aground awfully quick.”

Menus require a difficult balancing act, he added.

“You need to offer that core of items that are your brand, although you might have to change the flavors,” he said. “You just have to adapt to the culture.”

Mr. Sekhri, whose company, Dining Concepts, owns or manages 21 restaurants and has $65 million in yearly revenues, described Hong Kong, with its history as an English colony, as the gateway to Asia and the Chinese market. As Joseph Bastianich, Mr. Batali’s partner, put it, “It’s an easier way to get your feet wet.”

But there is still a problem with salt.

“You think that Chinese food is very salty,” Mr. Bastianich said, “but we learned we had to tone down the salt a whole lot, so as not to have a lot of acidity in the food, because they don’t like that.”

Mr. Tourondel discovered that he had to offer a lunch buffet “because Hong Kong people like to eat buffet style,” he said. And it turns out that many women here prefer their tap water warm.

One evening in the Hong Kong Lupa — when, mistakenly, sanitary hats were not delivered for the kitchen staff — Zach Allen, the restaurant’s executive chef, asked workers to wrap table napkins around their heads like bandannas, as they would in an American kitchen.

“But they refused to do it, and I was getting upset,” Mr. Allen recalled. “So I asked my Chinese sous chef why, and he said, ‘You wear a white bandanna on your head only when you are mourning the death of a loved one.’ Boy, did I feel stupid.”

Sharp lessons like these were learned decades ago by American fast-food chains and snack-food companies. A mistranslation of KFC’s “finger-lickin’ good” slogan into Chinese characters urged consumers to “eat your fingers off,” before the company fixed it and went on to success in China. In Russia, Lay’s potato chips fell flat until the company added a fishy “crab flavor.”

Brands can be tweaked for foreign consumption, but only up to a point.

“The perception in Hong Kong about Mario was that he was upscale, but we started Lupa as a family-style trattoria,” Mr. Sekhri said. “So we made it more Babbo.”

Mr. Bastianich explained that “in a brand-new, $300 million building, the Hong Kong Lupa couldn’t be as rustic as New York’s. But it must still offer our menu of authentic Italian food and wine.”

In Kuwait, the Shake Shack menu posed a quandary.

“Bacon won’t fly, nor any pork,” said David Swinghamer, the company’s chief development officer. But his team found a beef-based bacon in Europe “that has a smoky flavor and high quality.”

Cultural challenges do not stop many of these restaurateurs, however.

“We plan to open at least another six Shake Shacks over the next 12 months,” said Ms. Baker of the Alshaya company, which operates more than 20 restaurant brands in the Middle East, Turkey, Russia and Eastern Europe, including Le Pain Quotidien, Starbucks, Dean & DeLuca and the Cheesecake Factory.

Locating authentic menu ingredients can be a concern abroad, though not in Hong Kong.

“You can get it all here,” said Mr. Allen, the Lupa chef.

But even in Hong Kong, replicating the New York experience isn’t easy. Mr. Tourondel said he made the 16-hour flight here from New York to “taste more than 50 different formulations of prime Black Angus” to design an Asian BLT burger similar to the American original.

There is also a 12-hour time difference between New York and Hong Kong.

“Early morning and late evening conference calls certainly elongate the workday,” said Mr. Swinghamer of Shake Shack. “We try not to interfere with family and personal time.”

Distance can also provide a useful buffer in partnership disputes or disasters. Mr. Tourondel created his Hong Kong restaurants with Mr. Haber, but after they broke up their American operations in March 2010, the Chinese restaurants were jointly owned by the two through Mr. Sekhri’s company. And they will continue to share management, despite the settlement of their ugly legal struggle in November.

Mr. Sekhri said he first approached Mr. Haber and Mr. Tourondel in 2009 about locating in Hong Kong, after local developers told him “it would add to the value of their real estate if I brought in the right brand names.” He then approached Mr. White and his partner Ahmass Fakahany — both of whom declined to be interviewed for this article — and in May 2011, their 180-seat Al Molo opened here, with an average dinner check of $70.

In many of these deals, the loose network that has developed among New York chefs offered a sounding board.

“Sandeep was chasing us, but I didn’t return his phone calls for two years,” Mr. Bastianich said. “Finally I got on the phone with him and he was here the next day — wow! So I checked him out with Michael White, and he said thumbs up.”

Still, New York chefs haven’t welcomed every foreign manifestation of their brands. Tom Colicchio, whose holdings in the United States include two Craftsteaks, was surprised a few years ago to find out that Mr. Sekhri had named his own Hong Kong restaurant Craftsteak.

“The guy never called me,” he said of Mr. Sekhri. “I never had a conversation with him.”

Mr. Sekhri denies knowing about Mr. Colicchio’s restaurants when he chose the name. Their restaurants “are different,” he said, adding that “we are supported by the trademark and intellectual property laws in Hong Kong. If you register the name, you own that brand, under Hong Kong law.”

Mr. Colicchio said, “We called our trademark people, and they said we’d spend a lot of money but we weren’t going to get anywhere.”

Yet surprisingly, Mr. Colicchio was conciliatory. Mr. Sekhri is “by all accounts good at what he does,” he said. “I’m not bitter, and I wouldn’t be against working with him” on a future project.