Zebra consumption Ren Jianxin
In the alley next to Shanghai's Meilong Market, there is a humble Cantonese restaurant with an ingenious kitchen; The people under the mountain next to the mountain gate of Chengdu Qingcheng Mountain Scenic Area, the soil casserole chop restaurant, is far more delicious than the general scenic restaurant.
In the past, it was difficult for ordinary diners, especially outsiders, to pay attention to them. However, with the popularity of "taste bud tour" and the upsurge of young people's exploration of "fireworks shops", more small shops have attracted waves of diners with their "good taste". The user's "good reputation" has put the store on the "must-eat list", and the store is more crowded with diners, and it is not surprising that the trolley box is dragged to queue.
This year, 800 million people left reviews on Dianping, integrating the most objective and accurate consumer feedback on the Chinese Internet. These real reviews have been condensed into Dianping's annual must-eat list.
The 2024 must-eat list will feature more participating users and wider reviews, with a record number of cities and restaurants on the list. Dianping has also followed the 800 million users and discovered more authentic street shops and local specialty restaurants. The "sense of discovery" of these treasure restaurants has further boosted the significance of the must-eat list in the industry under the boom of "taste bud tour".
In the era of new consumerist buyers, Dianping's "must-eat list" is getting closer and closer to users and consumers. After all, where the user's attention and activity are, the commercial value will naturally stay, and the value of the must-eat list is also the value of the must-eat list to inherit the traditional catering skills with commercial value.
The treasure shop is concentrated out of the circle
28 years ago, Xiao Yong, a native of Shaoguan, Guangdong, came to Shanghai to do garment foreign trade business. At that time, the glory of Shanghai's clothing business was a real "Flowers".
Later, with the industrial transformation of Shanghai, garment factories were evacuated one after another, and Xiao Yong began to plan for self-transformation. His interest in the kitchen since he was a child, coupled with two years of further study at the chef school, has made him a well-known Cantonese chef in Shanghai's dining industry.
In 2020, Xiao Yong opened an ingenious kitchen in Meilong Market. It's cheap to rent and it's a remote location, but it's full of fireworks. In such an atmosphere, he can concentrate on the essence of a restaurant - to make cost-effective food and gain a good reputation.
The popular soy sauce chicken of the ingenious kitchen is marinated with fresh chicken for 2-3 hours, blanched over ice and then marinated, the marinade is a broth made of bones, pork skin and chicken feet; The more distinctive lion-headed goose is slaughtered in Chaoshan and transported to Shanghai in the cold chain for re-marinating, which makes people "return to Chaoshan"; If you want to eat his fish, you need to be more patient, Xiao Yong will go to Meilong Market to catch live fish, kill and steam.
Ingenuity Kitchen opened in the nightmare of the catering industry in 2020, and within two or three years, it was on the must-eat list of Dianping. This is not only a story of a fly restaurant becoming popular, but also an inspirational legend of cross-border transformation.
Like Lao Xiao, Xiao Huang, a post-95 generation who cooks pork knuckle rice in Shenzhen, also has the simple persistence of a "lonely gourmet".
"Hurricane" and Gao Qiqiang made Guangdong Chaoshan's special delicacy pork knuckle rice popular again. Boss Huang's Changji Longjiang Pork Knuckle Rice is located near the Baishilong Metro Station in Longhua, Shenzhen.
Every day at two o'clock in the morning, he goes to the Dongguan Fumin Agricultural and Sideline Products Wholesale Market, 60 kilometers away, which is one of the few places around Shenzhen where live pigs can be slaughtered. It takes three or four hours to buy pork knuckles and stew them.
Thirty or forty square meters of small stalls, Chang Ji has to sell 150 pork knuckles every day. There are three people in the meat cutting gang, and the meal keeps chopping pig's feet, and more than 1,000 meals are sold every day. When it comes to peak hours, you have to wait for two or three hours.
Pork knuckle rice is a must-eat delicacy for migrant workers in Shenzhen, and there are nearly 5,000 pork knuckle rice restaurants here, why is only 1 on the Dianping must-eat list? Boss Huang's answer is light and light: Do a good job of food quietly and insist on high cost performance, and you will definitely be recognized by diners.
Without the legendary story of Xiao Yong and Xiao Huang, Zhu Dan, the owner of Chengdu Xinruiyuan Oil Marinated Skewers, opened a store with a very simple intention.
In order to accompany his daughter, Zhu Dan, who originally worked as a catering manager in Zhejiang and Shanghai, returned to Chengdu to take over a shop. She studied with the chef for three days, jotted down the details of the cooking, and slowly worked on it for 8 years with feeling.
Every day, fresh beef is hand-pickled, fried at half past nine, and refined at half past four in the afternoon, waiting for the evening guests to come to the door.
Zhu Dan is the backbone of the shop, and if she has something, she will close the shop for a day. A sentence of "intentions" sent Xin Ruiyuan to the top of thousands of skewer shops in Chengdu.
In China, there are many, many fireworks shops rooted in the streets and alleys, such as Ingenuity Kitchen, Changji Longjiang, and Xinruiyuan Oil. The story of Xiao Yong can never be finished.
Authentic restaurants are the best for the taste buds
On June 27, Dianping's 2024 must-eat list was released in Beijing, with 2,797 restaurants in 119 cities and regions on the list. Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, Chongqing, and Guangzhou have become the top five must-eat cities.
The must-eat list was born in 2017, and for 8 years, no one has been nominated, and it is completely selected by the real evaluation of users that year, and it is a list of "800 million users to eat".
In 2023, the scale of Dianping's user reviews will increase by more than 200%; Based on more than 100 million evaluation data, more than 2,000 treasure restaurants were selected from tens of millions of merchants, of which non-cooperative merchants accounted for nearly 20%.
The first feature of the must-eat list in 2024 is that it has become "big". More users participated, more reviews were accumulated, and users explored food further, with the number of cities on the list exceeding 100 for the first time, and the number of merchants and cities reaching a new high, with 58 new cities on the list.
Most of the praise of these restaurants is because of "authenticity". Among the 2,797 merchants on the list, nearly half of them are urban characteristic merchants, with fireworks shops accounting for 46% and more than 500 snack merchants; Of the 1,395 new restaurants on the list, nearly 60% are non-chain stores.
Shanghai, which has the largest number of restaurants on the list, is an example: among the 144 restaurants, nearly 30 are small fireworks shops rooted in the streets and alleys; Nearly 40% of the new merchants on the list were on the list; More city-specific restaurants are on the list, accounting for nearly 25%, of which more than 35% are new to the list.
Chengdu has 96 restaurants and 15 street shops on the list, with new merchants accounting for more than 35%. Specialty restaurants here are even more prominent, accounting for nearly 60% of the total, and nearly half of them are new to the list.
If it weren't for Dianping's must-eat list, these treasure shops hidden in the alleys would be difficult for more users to discover, taste, praise and check in.
The greater significance of the 2024 Dianping must-eat list is that the discovery of treasure restaurants has identified the new trend of "taste bud travel", and has become a driving force for the development of the catering industry, the promotion of food culture, and the promotion of the local economy, which can be called the "vane of taste bud economy".
Since 2023, Zibo barbecue, Tianshui Malatang have been splashing with wealth and wealth, and the charm of local specialties has been released infinitely. It turns out that there are really many people who go to a city for a dish.
The new cities on the list in 2024, such as Hohhot in Inner Mongolia, Qingyuan in Guangdong, Jingdezhen in Jiangxi, Yancheng in Jiangsu, Yiwu in Zhejiang, Zibo in Shandong, etc., are all treasure destinations for "taste bud tours" in recent years.
According to the data, in the past year, the proportion of non-local users on the must-eat list has reached 42%. If you travel to Qingcheng Mountain, many guides will mention the people under the mountain, the soil casserole chop restaurant; When you come to the Yellow Crane Tower in Wuhan, the must-eat list will tell you that after getting off the Yellow Crane Tower, you will go to Liangdao Street, and there are Fangfang beef offal and Xiaomin food stalls to the south.
The restaurants on the list clearly feel that since they were on the must-eat list, there have been more customers from other places, and there are many people who come to queue up with suitcases in small shops that used to only do neighborhood business.
The vane of the catering industry
According to last year's experience, most restaurants have increased their customer traffic by more than 50% on the must-eat list. In order to help these small stores cope with the surge in traffic, Dianping has also thoughtfully prepared a "one-page business advice" for merchants.
For shopkeepers, explicit dividends are attractive, but in-depth industrial empowerment is even more important.
The three brothers of Peking Shabu Shabu, in 2015, first launched the "Standing Pan Can't Fall" to show the freshness of shabu-shabu, and after entering the first Dianping must-eat list in 2017, it has always been one of the top brands in the shabu industry.
Liang Li, co-founder of the three brothers in Beiping, said that in 2017, the development of the fresh meat raw material supply chain was not yet mature.
In order to cooperate with the must-eat list, Dianping also launched a must-eat festival. The first must-eat festival in 2023 will drive the transaction scale of merchants to increase by more than 80% year-on-year.
After the release of the 2024 must-eat list at the end of June, Dianping will invest 100 million marketing resources in July to hold the second must-eat festival. Use traffic and subsidies to attract more users to participate, so that more treasure stores have the opportunity to get out of the circle.
From the must-eat list to the must-eat festival, Dianping is leading merchants to set out towards the goal of providing users with better services. From the user, back to the user.
Founded in 2003, Dianping is the world's first independent third-party consumer review website and has the largest user review system in China, comparable to Amazon. This bottom-up C2B value production has made it the most user-based consumer platform on the Internet in China.
Here, food lovers choose their favorite restaurants, so that more people can experience and evaluate, forming a positive evaluation-feedback loop. The must-eat list is a concentrated embodiment of the long-term accumulation of evaluation.
8 years of persistence, countless young people, with the goal of eating all the must-eat restaurants; When they go to other places, they will take out the must-eat list and check in one by one. They don't eat for the sake of eating, they are in pursuit of authenticity, nature, and a passionate life.
Once this kind of content drainage model of evaluation and grass is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, the must-live list and must-play list are also being launched one by one, and the "must-have" list has gradually evolved into a way of life.
With operational products such as must-eat lists and must-eat festivals as tipping points, Dianping is showing new potential. Industry data shows that the activity of Dianping has increased significantly in recent years, becoming one of the new growth points of Meituan. Throughout 2023, Meituan's annual transacting users and annual active merchants increased by more than 30% and 60% year-on-year, respectively.
Dianping followed 800 million users to discover these treasure merchants. The market has also followed users and rediscovered Dianping.