- Wu Zhixun left his hometown and his job at a local bank to spend his 20s pursuing an acting career in Beijing.
- He entered his 30s ready for a career change and noticed Beijing lacked the flavors of his hometown.
- One year after opening his restaurant, Wu, now 31, says he has made back his initial investment.
Wu Zhixun stumbled into acting by accident when he was a young adult. Years later, a similarly unexpected turn of events led him to open — and become the face of — a popular restaurant in Beijing.
In 2013, the sporting brand Li Ning was sponsoring university basketball games across China. They chose Wu to appear in an ad. Soon after, people started recognizing him on the streets of Yunnan, the southern Chinese province, where he’d grown up.
After graduating, he got hired by a local bank, but six months in, a video-streaming company asked him to appear on a reality TV show in which he’d be cooking for celebrities.
“I thought it was a scam at first,” he told Business Insider. But they offered to buy him a flight to Beijing, 1,500 miles northeast of Yunnan, so he quit his job and dove into the world of acting and television.
Career shift into F&B
Over a seven-year acting career, Wu appeared in three TV shows and a Huawei campaign.
In 2017, after his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, he returned to Yunnan for a year and a half to spend time with her.
While he was back home, he invested money into two F&B ventures, neither of which panned out.
The first was a snack shop. Wu and three partners each invested 100,000 yuan into the shop, which sold chicken feet, rice noodles, and mango rice. The shop shuttered after six months.
Next, he invested 50,000 yuan in a Japanese restaurant. Within three months, the restaurant closed. Looking back, he said he could see the problems were with the location and the management.
The restaurant was tucked away on the second floor of an office building, and no one on the management team had any experience running a kitchen. They didn’t know how many ingredients to order, and they often sold out of popular dishes before the end of the day.
Bringing the taste of home to Beijing
At the end of 2018, Wu moved back to Beijing. Within a couple of years, he met his partner, and they started discussing the idea of starting a family.
He wanted more career stability and was tired of being an actor. “You’re always waiting to be chosen,” he said.
While living in Beijing, he spotted a market opportunity to serve authentic Yunnan food.
“Yunnan flavors are textured,” he said. “There are sour, fragrant, numbing, spicy notes, and these are all from natural plants.”
Restaurants in Beijing just weren’t getting the flavors right — so he decided to launch his third F&B venture.
He needed money for the initial investment, so he sold an apartment his mother had given him and invested 600,000 yuan into the restaurant.
His mother was against the idea of him selling. “My mom needs to know something will have a 100% success rate before she’ll do it,” he said.
Hands-on management
It’s been almost two years since Wu, now 31, began planning his restaurant, Yican, or Can Bistro in English. He works with a business partner, Qu Fei, who invested an additional 400,000 yuan into the business.
Learning from his previous business failure, Wu knew he wanted to open the restaurant in a busy area. He chose a commercial business park in southeast Beijing, near Sihuidong station.
They hired Yunnan chefs and slowly renovated a space that had previously been a clothing store.
The restaurant has been open for about a year. When BI visited the restaurant in early February, all 10 tables were full by noon.
Can Bistro is a dog-friendly restaurant, and a Bichon Frisé and a Schnauzer were among the guests. Diners sat on rattan chairs, eating from speckled black ceramic dishes. Steaming bowls of sour papaya fish, spicy beef, stewed chicken, and crispy tofu covered the wooden tables. Some guests washed down their meals with Asahi beer and natural wine from Yunnan.
A meal for four typically includes around six dishes. The stewed chicken, 68 yuan, has become popular. The potatoes fall apart, and the meat is perfectly tender. The sour bamboo shoots and water spinach dish is an uncommon combination in Beijing, but popular among the Dai ethnic minority in Yunnan.
Beijing’s changing food scene
Over the past five years, Beijing’s food scene has seen waves of restaurants open and close. “Ninety percent of bistros close in their first year,” Fiona Wu, a sales professional working in Beijing’s lifestyle industry, told BI.
In order to make it in the Beijing market, Fiona said restaurants need to be popular “from the beginning.”
And that’s where it came full circle for Wu.
“It was about looks at first,” Fiona said of Can Bistro’s popularity. “The look of the place, the restaurant decor, and the bosses’ being handsome, attracted users on RedNote,” she said, referencing the popular Chinese social media app.
Shortly after opening, Wu’s marketing team posted a series of candid photos of its owners on the Chinese social media app. The photos had captions like, “Not drinking coffee unless a hot guy has made it for me.” Wu said that people who saw the restaurant online began to come in person.
“Without that marketing campaign, they wouldn’t have gotten so much footfall in the beginning,” Fiona said.
One year after opening, Wu said he and Di have made back their initial investment. Wu said that in the summer, lines often form outside the restaurant.
Running the restaurant has meant both Wu and his business partner have had to learn each other’s way of doing things.
Wu says he’s happier now. He visits the restaurant every day — and still has time to play basketball twice a week.
“It’s a world away from when I was at the bank.”
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