Can't win on taste? Experience is on the menu too

At Haidilao, a store manager's review does not center on sales. 🍲Haidilao (@haidilaokorea)Jianyang, Sichuan, 1994. Zhang Yong, barely twenty, pooled 8,000 yuan with his girlfriend and a married couple who were his friends, and opened a hot pot restaurant with four tables. Until he was nineteen, he had never eaten at a restaurant. He had finished middle school, learned welding at a technical school, and had just quit his job at a tractor factory. The name Haidilao comes from mahjong: haidilaoyue, the moment you win with the last tile.The problem was taste. He later said himself that back then he didn't even know how to stir-fry hot pot broth. In Sichuan, every alley had hot pot restaurants decades old. He knew he couldn't win on taste.So he counted something else. He saw the time spent waiting as time spent at the restaurant. Zhang Yong came out himself to take customers' bags, and staff looked after children and shined shoes. Customers came back even when the taste fell a little short. Today the waiting area has manicures and snacks; staff shine shoes and celebrate birthdays. Diners who come alone get a stuffed toy to sit across from them. When the hot pot starts to boil, a staff member performs a noodle-pulling dance.The most expensive thing in the restaurant is not the hot pot but the staff. Having been treated poorly at the factory, he took care of his employees. Most are young people from the provinces without much schooling. The company provides housing, pays their children's tuition and sends an allowance to their parents too. Most store managers rose from frontline jobs such as waiter.Store manager reviews center on customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. Managers and staff become master and apprentice, and when an apprentice becomes a manager, the master receives a share from the apprentice's restaurant. So a manager's share grows by training successors. Even entry-level staff have the authority to decide anything from free service to discounts.In 2012 it opened its first overseas restaurant in Singapore, and in 2018 it served more than 160 million customers in a year. That same year it listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange, raising nearly 1 billion dollars, and the following year, in 2019, Zhang Yong became the richest person in Singapore. In 2022, Yang Lijuan, who joined as a waitress at seventeen, became CEO. In 2025, revenue was 43.2 billion yuan, around 8 trillion won, from 1,383 restaurants. In Korea, there are about ten, starting with Myeongdong in 2014.Worth adding: it has not only gone up. During COVID in 2020 it expanded sharply, then at the end of 2021 cut back by about 300 restaurants. The company said publicly that its judgment had been wrong, and even then it did not let staff go; it moved them to other restaurants. The following year, in March 2022, Zhang Yong stepped down as CEO and stayed on as chairman.Treat employees like family, and they treat customers like family.Pushing people-first management made it one of the world's largest hot pot chains.