This Frenchman Has Spent 12 Years in Shanghai — and Owns All Six "Internet-Famous" Shops on the City's Prettiest Street

Fussy, controlling, a workaholic — that is how many people describe Franck Pecol.

If you walked down Wukang Road, in Shanghai's former French Concession, this summer, the long line outside the window of an ice cream shop called WIYF will be familiar: at the peak, a single scoop meant a three-hour wait, and the queue snaked all the way to the next intersection.

If you never saw it yourself, no matter — this summer almost every WeChat official account mentioned this shop, this street, and the other "internet-famous" shops on it. Besides WIYF there is Farine, called "Shanghai's best French bakery"; the crêpe shop Far-West; the French restaurant Franck Bistrot; the café Grains; and the burger shop Rachel's.

Unless you work in the business, though, you probably don't know that all of these shops belong to one man — a 48-year-old Frenchman named Franck Pecol.

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Franck Pecol first came to Shanghai in 2004, for a Sino-French food expo. He had left home at 18 and worked as an apprentice and a waiter in Paris, London and the United States, dreaming of a place of his own. In 2007 his first restaurant, Franck Bistrot, opened inside Ferguson Lane at No. 376 Wukang Road, back when Wukang Road was still a quiet corner of the city, nothing like the tourist crush of today.

He kept opening shops after that — French cooking at 500 yuan a head, and a bakery selling croissants for 14 yuan. They are packed together around tiny No. 376, like a small kingdom.

Franck Pecol came up through culinary school and waiting tables, and he speaks in short sentences. His employees call him "always low-key"; he calls himself a workaholic. For his interview with QDaily he picked a newly opened bar on Yuyuan Road — that way he could also scout the new shops nearby.

His shops on Wukang Road grew one out of another. He opened the bakery first, he says, because a restaurant has a hard time buying good bread from outside: the quality is never steady. At first he only meant to set up a bread workshop with a van to deliver it, but he happened to find a street-front space for rent 50 meters from the restaurant, with a 70-square-meter basement kitchen, so he took it and baked there instead. Later, at the crêpe shop he opened at the other end of Wukang Road, the scoops inside the caramel ice cream crêpes came from his own ice cream shop next door.

Wukang Road has only come alive as a commercial district in the past decade. The small road in Shanghai's former French Concession was built in 1907 and originally named Ferguson Road; shaded by plane trees and quiet, it is a textbook piece of the concession's garden residential district. Along it stand 14 listed heritage buildings and 37 preserved historic buildings, along with a cluster of garden villas and former homes of famous residents. In 2005, Hong Kong's Kangshi Investment Group redeveloped and repackaged No. 376-378 Wukang Road and brought in mid- to high-end Western restaurants, cafés, galleries and jewelry shops; the remade block has done well.

Franck Pecol has gathered every kind of food and drink shop in one spot on Wukang Road so that he can watch them all whenever he likes. Xiang Jing, 22, has worked at the ice cream shop WIYF and the café Grains for five months. "I feel like Franck comes by every single day to look around, and the moment he sees something wrong he says so — if he notices the straws on the counter are half gone, he'll tell me, 'Watch out for that,'" she said.

"The only way I can grow is by keeping all my concepts next to each other. If you had to go from here to Jing'an Temple, you'd be dead, because you're not there …" In 2012, Franck Pecol told Smart Shanghai what worried him about expanding. "When you have a business that's doing pretty well, and someone comes to you and says, 'Hey, I've got a great spot for you,' of course that's tempting. But when you already have a lot to do in one place, you lose your identity, and you get diluted fast. Your customers tell you it's not the same anymore, and it will be true."

Four years later, his bakery has set out on exactly that path. The first Farine opened on Wukang Road in 2012; the first branch opened at IFC Mall in Pudong at the end of 2015, and two more opened this summer, in Xintiandi and on the Bund. To keep the ovens supplied, a central factory in Minhang District started running in September. He told QDaily that he plans to open three more branches in Shanghai before the year is out, and to move into nearby cities — Suzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing.

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Farine uses "traditional French recipes." Alongside the classics — baguettes, croissants, pain au chocolat, almond croissants, choux pastries, apple tarts, madeleines — it sells the more obscure, regional and seasonal things too, such as the bûche de Noël for Christmas dinner and the King's cake eaten to ring in the new year.

But set against the bakeries on every French street corner selling a baguette for a euro, Farine's style is not traditional at all: the first shop was designed by Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, with industrial lighting and dark elm, and "the café is Australian and American in style." The two basics, the baguette and the croissant, cost twice as much. Franck is glad he chose Shanghai: if he opened a Farine in Paris, he says, plenty of people would attack it — "That's impossible, what kind of bakery is this?"

Farine deliberately offers no Wi-Fi, and the tables and chairs are cramped; everything pushes customers to buy, eat and go. "We're not Starbucks," Franck says — this is not the place for someone who buys one coffee and sits all afternoon. An American once sat in the shop for hours with his own Wi-Fi dongle, and Franck got angry enough to walk over and ask what he was doing.

According to the 2016 China Foodies' Happiness Index Big Data Report from Meituan-Dianping's Data Research Institute, the drawback of first-tier cities is that there are so many people in them: good restaurants have serious queues, and waiting costs food lovers a lot of time. On a "happiness" index calculated from how long people wait to book a table or stand in line, Shanghai scored 73, Guangzhou 81, Beijing 83 and Shenzhen 84. Shanghai, in other words, is the city where waiting costs the most — more than 55% of Shanghai food lovers line up for over half an hour to get a good meal.

Shanghai's consumers may in fact bear queues better. Franck told QDaily that 90% of Farine's customers are Chinese; the French ones complain about the line, since most of them only want a baguette, and one friend has suggested he open a checkout window for baguettes alone. At the ice cream shop, 99% of customers are Chinese — "the French can't wait more than 10 minutes before they start complaining."

"I don't worry much about marketing. Chinese people like to show off the food they eat and the way they live," Franck says.

Patrick, a veteran employee at WIYF, says the ice cream went through in-house tastings last September and opened on trial at the end of the year, Saturdays and Sundays only. Business stayed quiet until it suddenly caught fire on social media this March. At the peak in April the line ran three or four hours. Nobody saw it coming.

At Ferguson Lane, where most tenants are mid- to high-end cafés and Western restaurants, 30 yuan for a waffle with two scoops, or 20 yuan for one, looks like good value — and Franck thinks that is why the crowds come: it is a good deal.

"About 70% of the customers are women, and about 20% are older Shanghainese women who bring their grandchildren. Some of them just tell me straight out, 'Make my scoop bigger,'" Patrick said. He has also met the disappointed and the angry, who queue through all that trouble, take one bite and grumble, "What is this stuff?" or "Not so special after all."

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Franck Pecol is from Marseille, the largest commercial port on the Mediterranean and a city full of seafood. His grandparents and his mother all worked in restaurants. "My family took food very seriously. I'd guess the biggest expense at home was what we ate," he says.

He says he was never a good student. After finishing a culinary school in Marseille he went to London at 18 and found his first job, waiting tables. He worked in Paris for a while after that, then moved to the French restaurant inside Epcot Center at Disney World in Florida, waiting tables again.

The Disney job was also an exercise in rebuilding France abroad — not a very faithful one. The restaurant had a replica of the Eiffel Tower and served the French dishes Americans swallow most easily: steak, fries, beef stew. No blood pudding. Nothing especially French about the French food.

He looked back on those years in the 2012 interview. "We were like kids … like we were living in the American Dream." There he learned how Disney treats its guests, and grasped the importance of "user experience." "From the second you walk in, you feel that everyone is really nice, really cool, explaining things to you, helping you," he says.

He worked next on a cruise ship out of Miami. The restaurant work was punishing: up at 5 a.m., in the kitchen prepping at 6, guests at breakfast by 7, then straight on to lunch; back in his cabin to rest at 3, laying tables again a little after 4, done at 11:30 p.m. or midnight. Seven days a week. "That's when you really learn where your limits are," he says.

Between 1999 and 2000 he planned to open a restaurant in Brooklyn, New York. He loved New York; downtown Brooklyn had not yet begun the boom that followed the city's 2004 planning decisions, but he sensed "this is going to be a cool place." It fell through in the end, over his relationship with two partners.

He hesitated then — what could he do? He had a few offers to open a restaurant in Paris, but Paris was too expensive. In 2004 he happened to come to Shanghai for an expo on Chinese and French food, and though China had never especially interested him, he liked the city at once. "I like big cities, and my first experience was really good. Shanghai is full of energy, full of potential." That same year he took a job managing a nightclub on Jianguo Road, and saw it through from construction to opening. "It was a great experience. I learned how this city works," he said in the 2012 interview.

A year and a half later he began thinking about what local people would want to eat. Chinese people were starting to travel, and the old Shanghai Western restaurant — broad-brush, stuck in the middle — could no longer fob anyone off. In 2007 the restaurant opened on Wukang Road, serving classics such as steak tartare (tartare de boeuf) and roast chicken (poulet rôti), with the day's dishes chalked in French on a movable blackboard instead of a printed menu. His rule was "don't compromise" — "do it exactly the way you would open a restaurant in Paris."

But in the chain of businesses he built on that restaurant, some diners grumble that the quality has slipped. An American user called Gumby, who has posted 172 reviews on Bon App, a dining app popular with foreigners, calls himself a loyal customer of Franck Bistrot for six years. In the summer of 2015 he gave the restaurant a bad review, saying he had watched the service decay over the past few years: wine poured roughly, staff unable to explain the menu, quality no longer matching what the dishes cost. He posted his bill — a mozzarella, tomato and vegetable salad for 190 yuan.

This looks more like the problem every restaurant company faces after it expands: whether quality control and management can keep up with size. "Simon used to be able to put together a more reasonable salad. When he's not there, we're forced to pay 190 yuan," Gumby wrote. Simon, a Frenchman, used to manage Franck Bistrot; he has since moved to No. 202 Wukang Road, where he runs the ice cream shop, the café, the burger shop and the rest of that cluster.

And the diners who swarm in over a very short stretch of time, drawn by the fame of an "internet-famous shop," and who may scatter just as fast — working out when they become a strain on Franck's business and when they become its engine is probably no easy thing to judge either.

Cover image source: Pinwei Shenghuo@Chocolate muimui, Dezeen