Zhao Yuling

By Matthew Jukes

Zhao Yuling isn't a professional chef, and when she came to Beijing five years ago, she looked set to retire and live out her old age pottering around the local hutong like any other Beijing mother. Today she runs a chic Mediterranean style-café which serves excellent homemade food to local expats and tourists.

But it was a long journey for Zhao to get where she is today. Born in rural Jilin Province, Northeast China, to a Manchu family of farmers, times were hard and she had to work fast and smart in order to get ahead. That was aside from taking care of her four children. Rather than sit back and live the farm life, Zhao wanted to get out and see the sights, and she toured a lot of Northern China looking to launch herself to bigger and better things.

"In the beginning I set up a fruit stall and was making just a small amount of money. But the more I made, the more I could expand," she says. "Once I had enough I was able to open a snack shop. Each penny went toward a bigger and bigger stall. I just kept saving and saving and saving," she says. "I've always been concerned that I didn't have much of an education, but I can make a better life."

Better life

That better life allowed Zhao to open a restaurant in Changchun, Jilin Province and eventually send her daughter to university abroad to study business management, something that would influence Zhao's future too. When her daughter returned, they both decided to settle in Beijing.

Alba's Mediterranean-style café and food. Photos: Matthew Jukes and Wang Zi

"We wanted to live in Beijing because it's a city with a rich culture and amazing people," says Zhao. "I didn't want to just stay at home and wander around like some old lady. I wanted to do something," she adds.

Her list of action plans to begin with included a mini market and a Chinese restaurant, but the entrepreneurial mother had an equally feisty daughter to deal with, and the mini market was deemed not profitable enough, and a Chinese restaurant too much work and grit. The next option on the list was a café, and Zhao was sharp enough back then to spot which way the wind was blowing.

"I began scoping out all these cafés around where we lived in Tongzhou, UBC coffee, things like that. But I really liked the atmosphere around Nanluoguxiang," she says. It was in 2006 that she set up her own spot on what is now one of Beijing's most famous streets. Although many were cashing in, it wasn't as easy as she thought.

"There were no customers," she says with a grin. "Come Valentine's Day, all the other places were packed with people, but none came to me."

Not losing faith, the self-described "old woman" took to combing the streets with a sandwich board, trying to hook passersby into the shop, but it was clear she'd have to branch out into the world of cuisine in order to make herself known.

A hardened dweller of Northeastern China for most of her life, Zhao already had the skills to make mantou and baozi (made with the Chinese equivalent of bread dough). Western-style bread was a step down, requiring far less grievous bodily harm to prepare than its Eastern counterparts. Taking as much as she could from books, Zhao had the perfect testing lab for her experiments in the tourist haven of Nanluoguxiang.

The travelers and expats that had begun to flock to the street were only too happy to oblige, and even fulfilled her request for a café name that conjured up the image that she was looking for.

Alba's Mediterranean-style café and food. Photos: Matthew Jukes and Wang Zi

"I wanted something that meant morning, I didn't want a Chinese name, I wanted a Western one with a sunny feeling." And thus Alba (Spanish for dawn) came into being.

Experimentation

Just as the café was created in partnership with its customers, so was the menu.

Once she'd mastered the basics it was back to the guinea pigs on the street to perfect the recipes. Every time an Italian came in, it was a taste test for pasta, for the Spanish, it was the tapas. She always offered to pay for cooking lessons when they were given, but not a single experimentee would take a penny.

"The first thing I really perfected was my chocolate pudding," she says modestly. Even now she gets up at 6 am to spend four hours making the day's worth of homemade bread for the sandwiches and sorting out her legendary apple pies.

Her deserts are now good enough to earn her rave reviews from the picky and incestuous restaurant critics around Beijing.

It turned out that the drinks were trickier to master than the food, and there were one or two hangovers before Zhao had learned how to make cocktails. Again, another taste testing experiment.

"Yes I got very drunk," says the 53 year old. "I'm also allergic to some of the alcohol which brought me out in all kinds of rashes."

Soon the customers were flooding in, but Zhao had a bit of trouble communicating. "I felt so embarrassed when I couldn't even understand that people needed the bathroom," she says, "it's much better now though." She's also employed foreign staff to handle the drinks.

Last year she moved out of Nanluoguxiang, the picturesque site for her enterprise and has taken refuge on Gulou Dongdajie just up the road. The old regulars have discovered the new location and are often to be found chilling out on the rooftop. In the meantime she's looking at places in Songzhuang to set up closer to her family.

"It's a great way to spend your old age," she says.