Can the man who created Lan Kwai Fong help make Hong Kong a more creative place?

ALLAN ZEMAN WAS just an ordinary garment guy until the early 1980s when he and his friends decided they’d like to eat at restaurants outside hotels. With that simple idea Lan Kwai Fong was born – and Hong Kong’s eating, drinking and social life was transformed. Zeman told his story to power editor Anthony Spaeth and reporter Tiffany Tang.

I wanted to start off by saying that nothing has taken more money out of my wallet – not my wife, my mortgage, my kid’s school tuitions – than Lan Kwai Fong.
I’m very glad to hear that.

Let’s go over familiar ground. I lived here in the early 1980s, and I remember going to 1997 when it was new. I think we went originally for the desserts.
It was 28 years ago, an area that was considered to be fringe Central, and there were a lot of warehouses for embroidered Chinese tablecloths from Swatow district. It was very colonial here. If you wanted to have a good meal you had to have a jacket, and you had to have a tie, and everything was in the hotels. I grew up in the fashion industry, and we were all young, and we were all saying it’d be great if we could have some normal street restaurants, some places where I could take my buyers and my designers from overseas. So we said, “Why don’t we open a restaurant?” I had a designer from San Francisco who was going back to San Francisco, and I said “Why?” She said, “Oh, I miss my boyfriend.” I said, “What does he do?” She said, “He runs a restaurant.” I said, “Oh.” Instead of losing the designer, I could open a restaurant and employ her boyfriend. The building where California Tower is was an old supermarket. I walked into it, and I just liked the feeling, even though in those years they used to dump rubbish on Wellington Street. But there was just something … it was magic, the feng shui was great. And on a trip to Tokyo, I noticed something very strange. Many restaurants were on the fifth floor, 10th floor of a building. Karaoke places, bars, and I realized that the rents on the ground floor were so expensive in Tokyo, and that in an office building the upper floors were a lot cheaper. So I thought, “Why not in Hong Kong?” So anyway, we came back to Hong Kong, and we set up 1997 and then California, and it became an instant success.

And California had the only good burger in town.
The only good hamburger at the time. I had people coming from China, Americans, who would come off the train and call from the station to make a reservation, because they had withdrawal pains, they needed the burger. And so that took off, and I realized that if you want to be in restaurants it’s better to own the property. Everybody thinks you’re making a fortune in restaurants, but you know, it’s very labor-intensive and the return is quite narrow. But if you own the property, the good news is that if the restaurant doesn’t do well, you still have an asset. I thought, “I am going to buy up some of the property in Lan Kwai Fong,” because nobody knew what I was doing. I bought my first building, which is now called the California Entertainment Building, and paid a very small amount for what was an office building, and moved all the tenants. I realized I could get three times the rent, because restaurants paid three times the rent of office space. Suddenly the income from the building was tripling. I slowly started buying up more of the property as it became available, giving it a facelift, like an old woman, you know, making her look young again.

So you bought the entire block in 1984?
Just one building, the California Entertainment Building. From there I started buying other buildings as they became available, because I didn’t want anyone to know what I was doing, because then the prices would go crazy.

And you own something like 65 percent ...
Yes, 65 percent of Lan Kwai Fong. Another thing was to form a Lan Kwai Fong Association, because I wanted to get Lan Kwai Fong pedestrianized. In those years, no one in Hong Kong had ever thought of pedestrianizing anything. I thought all the expats and the Chinese would like to come and drink outside. If I went myself as a restaurateur to the government, they wouldn’t listen to me. So I formed the Lan Kwai Fong Association and I became my own government.

From there, I started different events. We were the first to introduce Halloween to Hong Kong. In those years, no one knew what Halloween was. We used to dress up like kids, in costumes. The first year, Chinese came to see the gweilos make fools of themselves. Then the second year I saw a few Chinese dressed up, and then the third and fourth year, more and more. And suddenly very few gweilos were dressing up, it was all Chinese!

How does it feel to have created out of a simple idea a new landmark, an important part of a big, great city?
How does it feel? Lan Kwai Fong is like having a child that grows up and goes through different phases. And suddenly it becomes famous and has done really, really well. My office is in Lan Kwai Fong, it’s a great community; it’s like having your own little village in a big city like Hong Kong. After 1997, everybody was worried that Hong Kong would become another mainland city. As long as we have areas like Lan Kwai Fong, it will keep the internationalism of Hong Kong and that’s the strength of Hong Kong. China doesn’t need another Chinese city, they need a city that is international; they need a city that is recognized around the world as being special. And today, you have Lan Kwai Fong copies all over the mainland, Singapore. I was just approached by the government in Chengdu, Sichuan. They have finished a shopping mall in the central business district. It’s brand new, done by a Chinese architect, it’s really got style; it’s really got life. And the party secretary came here to see me, trying to convince me to fill it up with restaurants, to create a lifestyle center and call it Lan Kwai Fong, which I just agreed to do.

I’d love to go to Lan Kwai Fong in Chengdu. Think of the food!
Absolutely. And then we’re also opening up a Lan Kwai Fong Express, which is noodles of the world. Our first one is in Shenzhen. It’s a fast food concept but done Lan Kwai Fong style, with different kinds of noodles.

Did you hold on to all the real estate through the 1990s? Did you sell anything?
No. I held on to every single thing.

You weren’t tempted to sell when the price reached …
Real estate is cyclical. Sometimes it’s high, sometimes it’s low, and Lan Kwai Fong today obviously is prime real estate, so if you want to sell, it wouldn’t be a problem. Probably at the end of this year, we will be redeveloping the California Tower and Entertainment Building. I’ll be tearing down two buildings, and we have this beautiful plan in my office … a beautiful new structure, which will have many floors of restaurants and lifestyle shops above.

How tall?
It’ll be about 28 floors. We’ll have big floor plans, we’ll have 4.2m high ceilings, which will be great, outdoor lifts…

It’ll change the look of the neighborhood.
It’ll change the look of the neighborhood, but you’ll have really good restaurant spaces, bar spaces and club spaces. What I have done is to design each floor to be unique. It’s a good time to do it because it’s a downturn, construction costs have gone down. I couldn’t do it before because construction costs were crazy, oil prices were high.

In such terrible times, one of the only things you can do is to get by through being clever, by having new ideas or innovating. How do you see Hong Kong evolving into a more creative economy?
Hong Kong has always been an innovative place, innovative in different ways. Hong Kong’s strength has always been real estate development and stock market, a very fast moving society, people had little time for culture, because the culture was making money. The parents had a hard life, they came from China and they wanted to put the kids through school. That was the most important thing. They didn’t have a lot of money, so they didn’t really have time to appreciate culture. Now, of course, we have built Hong Kong into a financial center, a logistic center, a legal center, and the next step obviously is to promote culture.

I’m on the West Kowloon committee, I’m the chairman of the performing arts committee, I am helping to put West Kowloon together, it’s not an easy task. West Kowloon is a very, very ambitious project, and it needs to be done right. It’s not about the hardware, the buildings, it’s more about the software. Do we have enough art groups that are up to a certain level that can sell enough tickets every night in order to get an audience there? And do we have the audience? It’s the chicken and egg situation. I guess if you don’t have the venues, there is no point in nurturing the software, the art groups, but I think the government is realizing that, and I think there will be a balance between the hardware and the software.
The other thing the government is talking about is creative industries. In the past, there’s been a lot of lip service, but not that much has been done for creative industries, but I think the government is serious. If given the chance, if given the hardware, the software will come, because there is enough talent in Hong Kong, between Hong Kong and the mainland, the attraction of people living here and working here, to make these creative industries a very important part of Hong Kong’s success.