Europe and then returned to China in the late 1980s. By 2002, he had
more than twenty chain restaurants serving food in both Chinese and
Western styles. The restaurant business in China differs from that in
the West in two major ways. First, the process of cooking traditional
Chinese food is not standardized, which makes the quality of the food
dependent on the culinary skills of the chef. To ensure food quality,
owners of Chinese restaurants usually have to pay their chefs high
salaries in order to retain them. Second, in China, the government
places restrictions on restaurants regarding the ratio of the size of the
serving area to that of the kitchen area. A restaurant that uses a lot
of space for the kitchen must limit space for customers, which will
reduce the restaurant’s profit. High salaries and the regulations on
space increase the cost of business and make it difficult to have chain
restaurants. However, borrowing from the business practices of
Western restaurants such as McDonald’s that offer Western fast food,
this general manager set up a central kitchen in a suburban area
providing semi-finished food to each chain restaurant in the down-
town of the city. The chef in the restaurant cooks the already prepared
food very quickly and does not need a large kitchen. At the same time,
the manager developed a standardized process of cooking Chinese
food which made the cooking consistent across different chain res-
taurants and chefs, thereby ensuring high food quality. These practices
enabled the executive to have a booming restaurant business in China.
He believes that his life experiences in Europe allowed him to learn
how to manage his company in a more scientific and standardized
manner.
Another interviewee, who is the general manager of a state-owned
company, said that he was impressed by Hong Kong employees’
remarkable commitment to work. He recalled an episode when he
was asked to close down a branch company in Hong Kong. Upon
hearing the closing-down news, employees from mainland China
did not work as hard as before. However, Hong Kong employees
continued to work as usual even though they knew that they would
lose their jobs very soon. In another instance, he was surprised to find
that a female Hong Kong employee did not show any signs of idleness
during the month before she quit her job. When the interviewee
returned to China to take the position of general manager, he became
very committed to his job and pursued the goal of inculcating a
sense of work commitment among his employees.
Chinese traditions and Western theories 255