Youthful ambition, master service

A South African restaurateur seizes the day in China with wine and food from home. Joseph Catanzaro reports.

The kitchen buzzed with bonhomie, pots and pans clattered, and food sizzled and hissed in that secret language known only by the master chef. Among the organized chaos, the staff at the newly opened Pinotage restaurant and wine bar in Beijing's Sanlitun area turned the dinner rush hour into something almost graceful in its execution.

At its center, Amber Deetlefs directed her employees with a hard-edged confidence that belies her youth.

While creating food and offering a fine dining experience is a passion for Deetlefs, it is not her only venture. She and business partner Toby Cao also import the biggest range of South African wine into China.

At just 25, she has already made her mark in Beijing.

She has no formal business qualifications but is asked to guest lecture South African business students, many of whom are older than her.

Deetlefs says she now wants to play a role in fundamentally altering the way Chinese consumers drink wine and lead the way in changing the culture of wine service in Beijing.

As a child growing up in Johannesburg, she never dreamt of becoming a chef or an entrepreneur.

Deetlefs says her calling found her in Beijing after her father, who worked in mining, convinced her to relocate to China with him in 2007.

"At that stage, I had no concept of what China was and what it was all about," she says.

Deetlefs was 18 when she arrived in Beijing and enrolled in a Mandarin course.

As chance would have it, her father's company had a stake in a South African winery. Her now business partner Cao happened to be importing its wine into China.

Deetlefs, who sensed opportunity, had the South African connections and an easy way into the lucrative expatriate market in Beijing. Cao, 43, had the know-how to negotiate the business end.

Partnering up, they imported a few sample cases from a range of South African wineries, and set up a taste-testing table at a South African embassy event. The level of interest stunned Deetlefs.

"My dad funded the first container," she says. "I remember it arriving at the house - a full container is 13,830 bottles. We had boxes stacked to the ceiling.

"It was basically direct distribution, word of mouth, no advertising."