Xiaomian, or “small noodles”, a traditional numbingly hot noodle soup that originated in the city of Chongqing, have made their way north to small area in a business district of the city of Taiyuan, in Shanxi province.
There are more than 10 of these restaurants crammed into a no more than 100 meters square in the district, where the out-of-town noodle seems to have become a hit in spite of the fact that Shanxi is proud of its own range of mouthwatering noodles. And Taiyuan is not alone as other Shanxi cities succumb to the same condition.
In Shanxi, noodles seem to be more than just another kind of food, as a kind of resource for local government and the food business, especially as the province’s other traditional industry, coal, experiences a downward trend, with more than 1-million people in the catering industry in 2014, or approximately the same number for those in the coal industry.
And, the noodle business accounts for more than 40 percent of the total number in the food business since Shanxi has about 400 different types of noodles. But it has not gone very far in promoting the noodle business overall and has not made full use of its industrial possibilities.
In commenting on this, the Shanxi Party secretary, Wang Rulin, says that they didn’t have good planning for the industry and not one of their companies has held a place among China’s Top 100 catering companies in recent years and, across the country, they have no more than 2,000 noodles restaurants, with an annual income of only 1 billion yuan ($156 million).
Obviously, this spread of Chongqing noodles in Shanxi is raising some eyebrows in the province’s noodle industry. One survey of this xiaomian “invasion” in Taiyuan alone showed 70 percent of about 8,000 people questioned saying they’d eaten xiaomian and about 60 percent saying they did that just to follow the trend. So, the head of the Shanxi restaurant and catering association, Feng Shourui, says that xiaoman is just a sort of fad and can not be used as a reference point for judging the province’s noodle business. However, he does add that the Shanxi noodle business should do some introspection and learn how to make the local noodle industry stronger through the hit of xiaomian.
Adding fuel to this fire, the manager of a Shanxi noodle restaurant, Zhang Peng, says that, while they do have significant brand value, but lack leading companies, and the traditional noodle restaurant is easily affected by a lack of skilled staff, and that this can only be solved through more standardized operations.
The province says it is looking for a way out of this industrial problem by using preferential policies and examining market needs. And, just the past November, one long-popular beef brand opened a noodle restaurant under that name in Taiyuan.
