Why Golden Jaguar Went Under, and What Happened to the Buffet Business

"Golden Jaguar was fast food stretched out. It sold the symbol of comfort food, and what you got in the end was a very full stomach." These days, refinement is the point of eating.

If he hadn't seen the news that it had folded, Yang Shengjie would never have thought about Golden Jaguar again.

But his memory went straight back to the last time he ate at a Golden Jaguar buffet, seven or eight years ago. He and four friends had set out to find somewhere upscale. "Two foreigners, three Chinese. One likes this dish, one likes that one. Fine, stop arguing, we'll go to Golden Jaguar. One place covers it." You had to book ahead, he remembers, or there were no tables left. Once inside, "there were just too many people — every trip to the counters was a scramble." What stayed with him was the little abalone, "served one small pot at a time." Yang and his friends spent a good two hours at that branch — the chain's national flagship — and caught a live band the other branches didn't have.

Last week, the eight-story European-style hotel on Yan'an West Road in Shanghai held nothing but food counters with no food and an empty wedding banquet hall. The executives had gone missing, suppliers were turning up to collect unpaid bills, and employees still waiting to be paid sat around inside doing nothing. A notice at the front desk said: due to internal maintenance work, the buffet is closed for the time being.

At about the same time, the last Golden Jaguar left in Beijing, in Cuiwei Plaza, also stopped serving. With that, Golden Jaguar International Food Plaza, once the benchmark for high-end buffets, was shut down for good.

Yang Shengjie wasn't surprised. He sent a friend a WeChat message: "Do you still remember that Golden Jaguar place?" The friend's answer matched most people's: "I can't believe it lasted this long."

Counting from 1991, when founder Yuan Changping opened the first Golden Jaguar in Taichung, this Taiwanese restaurant brand has a 26-year history. Through the 1990s, per capita disposable income in Taiwan climbed from NT$40,000 to NT$110,000, and the name Golden Jaguar — in Chinese it reads as "money leopard" — caught the new-money mood of the decade. The Taichung branch billed itself as the largest hotel in Southeast Asia. In 2003, Golden Jaguar came to mainland China as a buffet, opening its first restaurant in Shanghai. That was the year China's per capita GDP first passed 10,000 yuan, and Chinese dining entered its age of gorging.

At 200 to 300 yuan a head, with more than 400 dishes and unlimited salmon and Häagen-Dazs, Golden Jaguar quickly became a badge of luxury spending. You didn't choose it lightly: you went when a rich friend was paying, or when the company was footing the bill for a team outing. For a mall leasing out its sixth floor to restaurants, landing Golden Jaguar as a tenant was a coup in itself.

When Golden Jaguar opened in Shanghai, Zhou Jie and a friend walked past and saw the line out the door. "Back then [Golden Jaguar] was a fairly cool thing, one of the very few restaurants you had to queue for." Zhou Jie is now head chef at Yi Cafe, the buffet restaurant at the Pudong Shangri-La in Shanghai. Yi Cafe's predecessor was Garden Café, the buffet that opened with the hotel in 1998, when a meal cost 60 yuan a head — already far above the cheap buffets on the market at the time, places like Dingguagua and Huazheng. Golden Jaguar, charging 180 yuan for lunch and 220 yuan for dinner when it opened, pulled buffet spending into a luxury bracket that had simply never existed.

This way of eating is called a buffet in Europe and America, chi dao bao ("eat till you're full") in Taiwan and hodai in Japan, and since it was invented it has been bound up with human greed. The story goes that it started with the Norse pirates who gave the Spanish Empire so much trouble between the eighth and eleventh centuries. The pirates threw out European table manners and demanded that innkeepers lay out everything they had so the men could eat and drink their fill. The Swedes refined the form: before dinner in eighteenth-century Sweden there was often a spread of light dishes and drinks known as the Scandinavian cold table. The buffet reached the United States by way of the 1939 New York World's Fair. From the 1940s on, Las Vegas casinos' 24-hour, one-dollar all-you-can-eat buffets kept countless red-eyed gamblers tied to that sleepless city.

In the 1980s, as Western hotel management arrived in China, buffet restaurants started multiplying here too. This gluttonous pleasure happened to suit an appetite that was slowly catching fire among Chinese diners: the wish to taste the whole world.

"Walk in holding the wall, walk out holding the wall" was once the classic buffet mentality. Yang Shengjie, born in 1983, recalls: "Back then, if you wanted to eat something pricier and better, Golden Jaguar seemed like the only option." In an age when goods were not yet plentiful, Golden Jaguar's size and range, along with seafood you rarely saw on the market, made it scarce — and scarcity meant it had almost no competition.

In July 2011, after Golden Jaguar's attempt at an IPO failed, Yuan Changping sold the chain to the European private equity firm Apax Partners for 1.5 billion yuan. The year before, Golden Jaguar had booked 900 million yuan in revenue but only 40 million yuan in profit. Soon after the deal closed, Yuan Changping stepped down and a number of the Taiwanese executives left with him. Under Apax, the original 18 branches expanded fast, peaking at more than 30 and reaching almost every major Chinese city — from Fuzhou in the south to Hohhot and Harbin in the north.

Just as Golden Jaguar was pushing this hard, the Eight-Point Regulation curbing spending on official entertainment arrived in 2012. According to China UnionPay, year-on-year growth in card spending at high-end restaurants fell from 21% in September 2012 to -27% in February 2014, the lowest on record. Golden Jaguar was one of the restaurant brands hit hardest.

In 2013 Golden Jaguar started losing money. Many branches closed in a hurry before they had earned back their build-out costs; the Shijiazhuang branch lasted six months. That same year, CCTV exposed a fake shark fin scandal, Golden Jaguar was among the restaurants named, and it pulled shark fin, abalone and similar dishes. In 2015 the chain was passed on to Carnival Group International, a Hong Kong-listed company, at a price that had shrunk sharply from the 1.5 billion yuan Apax paid: HK$253 million, about 220 million yuan.

In Carnival Group International's hands, Golden Jaguar became part of a pleasing capital story. The company, which calls itself China's only publicly listed developer of large integrated tourism, hotel and retail projects, announced on its website that Golden Jaguar was its first acquisition in the restaurant business and would help promote the Qingdao Carnival Land project it began opening in 2015. Reports at the time said the company had put together a PR team and planned to use Golden Jaguar as a marketing network to push that property project hard. Carnival Group International's financial reports show its restaurant business lost HK$51.706 million in 2015 and HK$82.967 million in 2016.

That is how the story of this landmark buffet brand ends. But even without the anti-corruption campaign and the upheaval of changing hands twice, Golden Jaguar would probably have disappeared sooner or later. It arrived as something new and met the appetite of its moment, but like many aging brands, as the times and tastes moved on, Golden Jaguar stayed exactly the Golden Jaguar people remembered.

An average of 200 to 300 yuan a head is not cheap even now, and with all the talk of consumption upgrading, Golden Jaguar should in theory have been able to win more customers. But in an age when everyone calls themselves a foodie, what people want is to eat with refinement and to eat something with character.

In 2016 the Michelin Guide began publishing a Shanghai edition, and the price of a meal at Golden Jaguar would buy you dinner at a two-star restaurant. Gao Yan, who has run the food account Yipian Chixin ("A Heart for Eating") on WeChat since 2014, thinks the buffet is "a format that's been crushed under the wheels of changing dining trends." "You can't eat braised pork and then sashimi, or steak and then pizza. It's like how a sushi chef doesn't cook kaiseki, and a kaiseki chef doesn't sell tempura."

Even so, the buffet business in China can hardly be called a dying trade. According to the "China Catering Report (White Paper 2017)" that Meituan-Dianping put out this April, buffet restaurants took in about 1.15 billion yuan in 2016, or 12% of the restaurant market, second only to hot pot. Revenue grew 0.2% year on year, making buffets one of the few restaurant categories still growing at all.

Even five-star hotels, now one of the main places people go for a buffet, are chasing a distinctive touch. Search for buffets on Dianping and Shangri-La properties come up near the top every time. Textor, executive chef at the Pudong Shangri-La in Shanghai, told QDaily that certain dishes matter because they "leave an impression" on customers. The German chef, then a year and a half into the job, added plenty of eye-catching, interactive touches to Yi Cafe — having head chef Zhou Jie make strawberry cake in front of guests on weekend mornings, for instance.

Yi Cafe uses 500 to 600 ingredients for breakfast, he said, and 800 to 1,000 for lunch and dinner, far more than a non-buffet restaurant. The great advantage of a hotel buffet is a steady flow of diners: even though 65% of Yi Cafe's customers are not staying at the hotel, the hotel's 950 rooms alone bring in at least 600 people for breakfast a day. "For a restaurant inside a hotel, I don't think there's anything especially difficult about it. High rent — that's a problem outside the hotel," Textor said.

Golden Jaguar liked to open in high-end office towers or on the top floor of a mall, with an average floor area of 7,000 to 8,000 square meters, which made finding sites a huge problem in itself. That is even truer now, when e-commerce is squeezing physical stores and department stores and malls keep giving restaurants more space to pull in foot traffic. In Shanghai, restaurant space in a mall can already reach 40% of the total — "every one of them has 20,000 or 30,000 square meters." Du Bin, general manager of the leasing services division at RET, advises malls on recruiting tenants. "Malls actually still like buffet restaurants quite a lot," he says. "Apart from Golden Jaguar, the rest are doing fine." It's just that with competition this fierce, malls now prefer standard restaurants of 250 to 350 square meters, and buffet restaurants over 1,000 square meters are getting rarer.

Malls also increasingly want distinctive, fresh restaurant brands to suit younger customers. CBRE's survey report "Asia Pacific Retailer Activity" found that 429 retail brands crossed a border into an Asia-Pacific market for the first time in 2016, and restaurant brands made up close to 30% of them. Mainland China was the market global retailers picked most often when expanding in the region.

Seafood is no longer shorthand for fine dining. Toronto Seafood Buffet, with more than 100 company-owned branches nationwide, is the top restaurant by online sales on Meituan-Dianping, with two price tiers, 89 yuan and 199 yuan. Origus, which used to build its menu around pizza and grilled meat, opened its 5.0 version last December under the name Pirate No. 5 — also built on seafood, but with Japanese food, Korean food and hot pot added, an attempt to give customers more to remember.

For higher-quality seafood buffets, the standard is now widely taken to be Japanese: fine tableware, careful service, and above all the boom in travel to Japan, which has introduced more and more people to the country's many styles of eating.

You'll notice that none of these buffets that are still doing reasonably well are really buffets in the old sense. Most have shifted to a half-buffet, order-from-the-menu model: you don't fetch your own food from an open kitchen, and apart from unlimited refills on what's in the set menu, the experience is barely different from an ordinary restaurant.

This is also a way to cut costs. Back in 2011, one buffet owner gave an interview holding forth on the tricks of the trade, and the ways he described of thinning out costs haven't changed much: make one waiter do the work of three; bring out the expensive dishes slowly and the cheap ones without pause; and buy in volumes far above an ordinary restaurant's to force down ingredient prices. Last March an employee of Beijing's Zhizun Golden Jaguar, answering the question "How does a seafood buffet make money?" on Zhihu, said the same thing: "You're asking how cheap [our purchase price] is? Go buy the cheapest seafood in the market, then take another 30% off that."

The bar looks low, but building a buffet chain is not easy. Golden Jaguar was that rare buffet brand with a national reputation, and even it never became a true national chain. After the collapse, Xu Min, deputy general manager of Dongyuan Group, which owns Toronto Seafood Buffet, told Canyin Laoban Neican ("Restaurant Owner Insider") that buffets are unlike other restaurants: the model is capital-heavy, running into the tens of millions of yuan, and it demands bulk purchasing, storage space and deep pockets.

Seafood Wharf, with three restaurants in Shanghai and one franchise in Suzhou, charges 378 yuan a head for dinner. Executive chef Tang Yongfeng told QDaily that to draw customers he and the owner have rolled out signature dishes one after another, including Buddha Jumps Over the Wall and lobster rice porridge. They recently added a crab set menu along the lines of Okadaya's, thrown in free with any booking of four or more.

Tang Yongfeng has no plans to open more restaurants for now. The market weeds businesses out too quickly, he says, and he only has the energy to run the ones he has well: "Shanghai's restaurant business definitely works, as long as you do it well and manage it well."

The American buffet market may be worth a look.

Buffets hold a middling share of restaurant spending in the United States. The industry's four biggest players together hold only 38.8% of the market and lean heavily on franchises. Even brands with close to a hundred locations nationwide tend to be concentrated in one or two states.

Last February, dozens of restaurants belonging to Ovation Brands, the buffet group second by market share, closed for poor performance, and the group's bankruptcy filing affected more than 300 locations across the country.

A report the consultancy IBISWorld published this April put the compound annual growth rate of the U.S. buffet market over the past five years at -0.2%, on a market of US$7 billion. The steady shift toward healthy eating may keep eating into the industry's revenue.

In any market, you see, falling behind the times lands you in trouble.

Most people probably never notice that in quite a few cities, buffet is the first button under food on Dianping. The order reflects how popular each kind of cooking is in that city.

But plenty of operators miss something just as plain: a buffet is not a cuisine, it's a way of serving food. Strictly speaking, it isn't the dish under the chef's knife; it's the knife in the chef's hand.

According to the latest figures the Meituan-Dianping Research Institute gave QDaily, there were 37,576 buffet restaurants in China in the second quarter of 2017, roughly level with the start of 2016 but 18% below the peak in the autumn of 2016, the gap made up of closures. The number in first-tier cities is falling too, and the force pulling the whole market along now is second-tier cities. Of the total, more than 10,000 buffet restaurants are in fifth-tier markets and below.

The Korean American writer Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee, recalling her childhood at Sizzler (an American chain known for steak, seafood and its salad bar), once said that the salad bar at a suburban buffet was the American Dream made visible: all the vegetables and fruit you could eat meant that in America you would never go hungry. That is not so different from what buffets once did for people in China: fill them up.

Yang Shengjie still eats at a buffet at least twice a month, and he can reel off Shanghai's buffets like a collector — "the crayfish at Rongxinguan, the crab pot at Wandao, the value at the San Want Hotel Shanghai, and the best quality at the Mandarin Oriental."

Looking back at Golden Jaguar now, he thinks it never gave him much satisfaction even then. It was fast food stretched out, selling the symbol of comfort food, and what he got in the end was a very full stomach.

Cover image from dailygag

Graphics: Feng Xiuxia