Double Handshake

I recently interviewed Peruvian chef and restaurateur Eduardo Vargas for an upcoming story in China Economic Review magazine about food at this year’s Shanghai Expo. Vargas has lived in Shanghai since 2002 and launched a number of restaurants around the city with lots more planned.  One of Vargas’ upcoming projects is that he will run the Peruvian Kitchen restaurant at Peru’s pavilion for the Shanghai Expo. I only used a few brief quotes from Vargas for the story, but the full Q&A transcript is fairly interesting.

Q: What do you have planned for the Peruvian pavilion?
A: The restaurant will be a representation of the culinary traditions in Peru now. Peru is now the most trendy, most fashionable food in Latin America at the present moment. What the Spanish are in Europe, the Peruvians now are in Latin America. In Spain, you have many famous chefs doing modern cuisine, and there is a similar situation in Peru in Latin America. All the winners of best restaurants of the year in Latin America for the last three or four years have been Peruvian restaurants. Peru has very rich influences from Africa, from China, from Japan, from Europe, from the Andes. The result is very interesting food. We have a huge coast, so we have a lot of seafood. So, a lot of food is based on that. So, the food we’re going to serve at the Expo is a combination of that. We’re starting with our national dish, ceviche.

Q: Are you planning on serving all the classic Peruvian dishes like ceviche, causa, lomo saltado, anticuchos?
A: Yes and no. We will use Peruvian ingredients, Peruvian flavors and Peruvian techniques, but served in a contemporary way. So, we will use rojoto or ajia marillo like before, but maybe we will make a foam from it. We will do a causa, but will add a contemporary twist on it. We will present it as it would be in a contemporary restaurant in Peru. In a trendy restaurant in Peru, you don’t eat what mama and papa cooked 20 years ago. I’m bringing over five young star chefs from Lima to Shanghai in the next two weeks, all Cordon Bleu-trained and who have been working with the best chefs in Peru. I went to Peru to handpick them. My good friend (well-known chef and restaurateur) Gaston Acurio introduced me to two young chefs from his restaurant Astrid & Gaston. (This is possible because) in Peru, chefs are very united, and we have a common goal, to promote Peruvian cuisine, to make it as well-known as Mexican food around the world. We believe our food is better than Mexican, but unfortunately Mexican food is more wide-spread, everybody knows it. The only way to do that is to help each other to promote where ever we can, and the Expo is a perfect opportunity.

I had a chance to bring these young chefs over to China and work for me for a couple years. They will live in China, and we will eventually have five-star chefs from Peru working in Shanghai for awhile.

Q: So, the five chefs will come for the Expo and stay in China afterward?
A: Yes, they’ll stay for a couple years. I want to use them as much as I can.

Q: Are you making changes to the menu to adapt to Chinese tastes or the market?
A: No, not really. At the Expo, I believe each countries’ restaurants want to demonstrate what happens and how food is from their home. Therefore, our food will be authentic. We have many dishes in Peru that are influenced from Chinese dishes in the past. Lomo Saltado is basically a stir fry of beef that Chinese brought with them to Peru 100 years ago and then added some Peruvian ingredients. Now it’s a classic Peruvian dish. Another dish is a sort of stir fried rice using Peruvian chilies with it and a lot of seafood. We’re going to make this fried rice Peruvian style. I know it’s going to be acceptable to the local market.

Q: Are you sourcing ingredients from China or importing from Peru?
A: The main ingredients are coming from China. We’re importing about 3,000 kilos of chiles, the corn, the potatoes and some other important ingredients. The meat and the vegetables are all coming from China.

Q: Are the logistics difficult? Have you had issues with poor quality on the China side?
A: I’m doing my own importing. I flew to Peru, found the suppliers and bought them and now it’s in the boat. I already have a few restaurants in China and already work with suppliers, so it’s all right. Today, the situation is much better than a few years ago. Now, the standards of products in China are now at a standard level.

Q: Is setting up a temporary restaurant much different than setting up a permanent restaurant?
A: If I hadn’t previously opened restaurants in Shanghai, then I would have big troubles. But now, I have everything. I already know how to set up places. I don’t have problems because I already have years doing this in China, but I believe I believe a lot of restauranteurs coming to China for the first time are having a hard time. I’ve been receieving phone calls from the other pavilions asking me to take over their pavilion restaurants. But I won’t do it because there are too many regulations for the Expo. So, we’ll do the Peruvian pavilion and that’s it.

Image: Shmag.cn

I was reading about the weird and intriguing (and for purposes of this blog, not so relevant) theory of geological hot spots in Al Gore’s great climate change primer Our Choice, and it got me thinking. The (still unproven) idea is that areas of the earth’s surface that are unusually hot, such as Old Faithful at Yellowstone National Park in the US, can be explained by large asteroid strikes in the ocean at the corresponding place exactly on the opposite side of the world. This point, 180 degrees away, is called an antipode.

This made me remember growing up in the US and occasionally hearing grownups say “if you dig a hole straight through the earth to the other side, you’d be in China.” This, I can confirm with this nifty Antipode Map, is not the case. America’s whole collective anitpode is out in the south Indian Ocean (exception: Hawaii – you’re in Botswana!)

But it turns out that China and Latin America have some serious antipodean matching going on. John at the great Sinosplice blog apparently figured this out three years ago:

So you can see that China mostly just overlaps with Argentina, and most countries don’t overlap with any land at all. According to another website, China gets these exciting antipodes match-ups:

1. Beijing – Bahia Blanca, Argentina
2. Taipei – Asuncion, Paraguay
3. Shanghai – Buenos Aires, Argentina
4. Wuhan – Cordoba, Argentina
5. Xi’an – Santiago, Chile

Some of them are give-or-take a few hundred kilometers according to the map but still cool approximations to know.

Back in October, I posted a snippet of a Shanghai Daily article relating to Chile’s pavilion preparation for this year’s Shanghai Expo:

At the Shanghai event next year, Chile will attract visitors with three special wells. People will be able to look into the wells in the pavilion in Shanghai to see scenes and hear the sounds of some Chilean cities on the opposite side of the earth.

It still sounds hokey, but I guess now more credible than the “digging a hole to China” silliness I thought of when I first heard about it – even if those scenes and sounds are technically coming from Argentina.

Image: Sinosplice

A few noteworthy links from around the web (a few that I’ve had on my desk for some time now). With a little down time in the coming weeks, I’ll hopefully give a few of these stories their proper treatment. But, for now, the short list:

Bloomberg reports that newly christened 2016 Olympic city Rio de Janeiro is looking to China to help finance the its planned US$11 billion in Olympics-related infrastructure projects. (China knows a thing or two about the topic). State-owned China Development Bank loaned Brazilian state-owned oil giant Brasileiro SA US$10 billion earlier this year.

On the subject of oil, the Latin Business Chronicle republished an article from the Wharton Business School on China’s quest for oil in Latin America. Buried half-way down in the piece is a good breakdown of China’s proposed deal to buy Argentinean oil exploration and refining firm YPF for around US$17 billion – which would be the largest-ever overseas deal by a Chinese company.

R. Evan Ellis, whose book China in Latin America: The Whats and Wherefores has been reviewed nicely here, published another exhaustively cited bird’s eye view of what China’s presence in Latin America means for the US earlier this month for the Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief.

Two of his four main claims raised an eyebrow for me: “[China] is enabling the survival and spread of regimes oriented against the United States, Western-style democracy and economic models” and “[China] is undermining the United States as a source of political and economic influence in the region, as well as U.S. options for regional engagement.” Ellis takes pains to point out that China is, of course, not directly undermining democracy and US influence, but rather propping up the economies and the political lives of leaders like Hugo Chavez and Rafael Correa with its investment and trade dollars. Still, should we be alarmed or is Ellis being alarmist? Is the US’s capacity for “regional engagement” actually hindered by China’s presence or is the US simply in less of a position of power?

Chile is the only South American country to commit to its own pavilion at next year’s Shanghai Expo, spending US$6 million on construction rather than renting, according to Shanghai Daily. Fear not: Easter Island will be represented at the Chilean pavilion, as will this groan-inducing design idea:

At the Shanghai event next year, Chile will attract visitors with three special wells. People will be able to look into the wells in the pavilion in Shanghai to see scenes and hear the sounds of some Chilean cities on the opposite side of the earth.

Finally, here is a new trilingual corporate blog from the newly launched SinoLatin Capital, which specializes in China-Latin American investment deals. The blog got off to a roaring start in August, but posts have since grown a bit infrequent. I can relate. There’s more to be written about SinoLatin Capital, but for now, find some background on the company here.

As mentioned before, a number of top-ranking Chinese officials are currently on goodwill tours in Latin America. Thus far, declarations for “strengthening cooperation” and “boosting friendships” abound. Vice President / President-in-waiting Xi Jinping is now in Venezuela, having already made his way through Mexico, Jamaica and Colombia. Yesterday, he addressed President Hugo Chavez and Venezuelan entrepreneurs and “welcomed” Latin America participation in the 2010 Shanghai Expo.

The global recession has cast a dark shadow on the Expo, which is wildly anticipated within China. Last week, rumors started that the US may skip the Expo entirely as organizers are struggling to raise the US$65 million needed for a pavilion. The UK has recently reshuffled its “Expo Task Force,” and has yet to break ground on its pavilion.

Of course, things are different for most Latin American countries. China has already told Colombia and others that it “would try its best to meet [their] needs including both financially and technologically (sic).” Other Latin American and Caribbean countries are building joint pavilions instead of individually. El Salvador and Costa Rica, for example, are part of a nine-country Expo bloc. Ten countries in the Caribbean have also banded together for a joint pavilion.

Still, there are vows of participation and then there are official contracts. Many of the countries above, including Venezuela as of last October, have yet to officially sign on the dotted line or appoint a commissioner general to oversee development.

Xi’s Expo “welcome” yesterday may have been less of a friendly gesture and more of a reminder that, recession or not, participation is still expected.

Image: showchina.org