Carpenter

and Kim 1

The Fast Food Restaurants of Chinas Malls:

A Claim to Global Cosmopolitanism
When a fast food restaurant makes a claim to global cosmopolitanism, it attempts to
commodify foreign-ness; that is, a fast food restaurant will, by virtue of its menu and food
ingredients, decorations and ambience, and in-store and out-of-store advertisements, transport
the consumer to a different locale for the duration of the meal for financial gain, and this sense of
cosmopolitanism and access to the corners or sum total of the world is valuable in selling fast
food. These locales, as our research will show, run a spectrum of experiences ranging from a
global supra-culture to global chains with localized elements to specific experiences localized to
some point or area on the globe. Further, when establishing how cosmopolitanism is defined
along this spectrum we will make note of these differences between first- and third-tier cities.
Through the construction of a transcendental supra-cultural experience, a glocalized experience,
or a specific localized, but global, experience, fast food restaurants in upper- and middle-class
Chinese shopping centers illuminate the globe by appealing to middle-class Chinese consumers
who desire both the homogenized fast food culinary experience and the satisfaction of
cosmopolitanism; the mall food court, in particular, recreates and illuminates the globe, though
with more detail in first-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, and a vaguer abstraction of the
world in the third-tier city of Kaifeng where the sense of cosmopolitanism was often provided by
copying better-established chains.
This paper does not worry itself with authenticity. Authenticity is subjective and not
definitive of the consumer experience. In commodifying foreign-ness, restaurants sell an
experience, and this experience is ephemeral. In looking at the restaurants menus, aesthetics,
and advertisements, we employed the same broad strokes and links that a middle-class Chinese

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consumer would have in being exposed to them. The average consumer makes assumptions, and
we acknowledge these assumptions as being the basis for a meaningful globalized culinary
experience. If a consumer seeks, for example, Japanese food, the consumer can be satisfied by
the Japanese restaurant in a globalized food court by virtue of the perceived Japanese-ness of the
experience and irrespective of a lack of authenticity. The same works for a consumer seeking a
cosmopolitan experience.
In examining the role of globalization for the Chinese consumer in a homogenized fast
food consumer experience, it is necessary to define what a fast food restaurant entails. The fast
food model of operation is guided by an adherence to several or all of the following seven
qualities that are regulatory across the globe. First, they are clean. Second, they are brightly lit.
Third, they have an open seating arrangement with table options for couples or groups. Fourth,
they are lined with large windows or have an open-air faade. Fifth, they are run with an element
of self-service, be it in disposing of ones own tray of food after eating or retrieving food from a
centralized source that is usually near to the menu. Sixth, the placement of the menu is such that
a consumer must approach a cashier or server in order to view it and make orders from it.
Seventh, they have a high turnaround in consumers, with many dining experiences lasting a
fraction of the time as with a sit-down restaurant. In finding examples of fast food restaurants in
Kaifeng, Beijing, and Shanghai, we ensured that at least a majority of the qualities were satisfied
for any given restaurant before proceeding with photographic research and interviews with
consumers.
The last point of clarification comes in our utilization of what were calling the
Illuminated Globe Theory to help navigate regional differences in what constitutes a

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globalized culinary experience. That is, in terms of consumer experience, walking away from a
restaurant or food court having experienced cosmopolitanism can be achieved through differing
sets of food options and localized choices. The destination for the consumer is the same; the
journey to get there is different, and we will show those differences. If imagining a map of the
world, the areas of that map that are represented in these claims to cosmopolitanism illuminate,
revealing the scope to which a Chinese consumer from each of the research areas could consider
a dining experience global.
Our research methodology consisted of trips to food courts and fast food restaurants that,
depending on the area, are in what is considered a middle-class mall in Beijing, a middle-class
mall in Kaifeng, and two upper-class-range malls in Shanghai. These trips consisted of
interviews with consumers and photographic evidence of the menus, facades, logos, symbols,
and layouts that comprise the nature of the restaurants globalized consumer experience.
In Disco, Super Culture, James Farrer defines a supra-culture not as being a place
where one identifies with a particular culture, but as sites for experiencing a glamorous
modernity in which one does not distinguish oneself by class or locality (149). McDonalds is
an example of the fast food model achieving a
supra-culture status. Trips to the McDonalds
restaurants in Kaifeng, Beijing, and Shanghai
revealed several consistencies that help cement
this distinction. The furniture is modern,
colorful, and ambiguous in origin. The walls are
Figure 1 - black face selling coffee in background, modern
furniture of ambiguous origin (Beijing APM Mall, 6/3/2015)

adorned with in-store advertisements featuring

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faces of many colors. The menu, although containing elements of localization in ingredients,
does not label its food in any manner other than what the food contains (we will show later that
this is not the case for all global fast food brands). Each location contains a McCaf that lends an
element of Western cosmopolitanism via its construction as a European-style caf, ultimately
mixing the Western style of fast food
business operation with a European
aesthetic (note the accent adorning the
name) and a selection of global food
offerings that, themselves, are localized
to include ingredients like matcha green
tea and taro that are popular in many
places across Asia. McDonalds

Figure 2 - the European flair and mixing of localized foods and

western operations for a supra-cultural experience (Beijing APM
Mall, 6/3/2015)

transcends any specific culture and stands on its own as a place that, anywhere in the world, a
consumer can enter and become a member of a global, cosmopolitan consumer culture with
many influences and many opportunities for consumption.
To be glocalized is to be a global entity that, depending on the location, will localize
components of the experience a consumer can have with the entity with elements extracted from
that location (Roudometof 19). In Shanghai we found a McDonalds near two glocalized brands:
Burger King and KFC. Two insights prove the distinction between McDonalds and the other,
glocalized fast food brands. The first is the absence of Chinese characters in the McDonalds
logo above the restaurant. Both KFC and Burger King included Chinese characters next to their
English logos so as to localize the restaurants names to China, conveying a sense of

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compatibility with the Chinese

language and, thus, an element of
accessibility for the Chinese
consumer experience. The English
letters that comprise the name
McDonalds and the Golden
Arches of the logo convey enough
Figure 3 - note the lack of Chinese characters for McDonald's, and the
presence for Burger King (Shanghai Super Brand Mall, 6/10/2015)

for the Chinese consumer of the

cosmopolitan experience to be had

there that localization isnt necessary. This, however, implies that cosmopolitanism is
synonymous with the English language and, thus, the West, and is a major question for this piece
of evidence. A true supra-cultural experience would be without any one language because that
language, inherently, undermines the nature of being transcendental of all regions and all
cultures.
The second insight gained from this side-by-side comparison of global fast food brands,
and an insight that is consistent with our research done in Kaifeng and Beijing as well, is that
KFC and Burger King make their claims to cosmopolitanism by localizing their food offerings to
locations around the world for the Chinese consumers consumption of that globalization; in
other words, they glocalize their operations. For example, KFC offers the New Orleans-style
chicken. When quizzed about the actual location of New Orleans, two high school students
studying for their college entrance exam in Kaifeng said honestly that they didnt know, but
knew that New Orleans is somewhere in the United States of America. Burger King offers a
Texas Roadhouse-style Burger and sandwiches that are advertised as Korean-style barbequed

Carpenter and Kim 6

meat. McDonalds, in contrast, does not

include any mention of location in its
menu, conveying a sense of globalized
food without origin; a true cosmopolitan
culinary experience. Furthermore, whereas
the in-store advertisements inside
McDonalds feature people of many

Figure 4 - sample of Burger King menu featuring globally localized

food items (Shanghai Super Brand Mall, 6/10/2015)

different colors and identifies the global

consumer as being of no specific place, the in-store advertisements in Burger King feature a
specific location Shanghai as its place of business and its identification of what a
cosmopolitan consumer looks like. All three restaurants are global and offer experiences for the
Chinese consumer that mix a model of operation from the West with foods that are localized
both with ingredients originating in Asia and foods stemming from around the world, only
McDonalds achieves the status of supra-culture, thus creating the two distinctions: the supraculture fast food experience, and the glocalized fast food experience.
The next layer of fast food cosmopolitanism comes in the form of the localized global
restaurant food court. To experience a food court is to enter a zone of diverse food options that
have been disembedded from their original contexts of culinary origin and re-embedded in a
context that mixes them together in an array of simultaneous options. In examining claims to
cosmopolitanism these options are like culinary round-trips to diverse locales around the world.
Almost every restaurant at the food court at the Chenho Shopping Center in third-tier city
Kaifeng laid a claim to cosmopolitanism by localizing its aesthetic, logo, and menu to a specific

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region. The entryway to the food court was

decorated with a faintly European mural reembedded in this context of global food
consumption. One Korean restaurant integrated
Korean characters into its storefront, re-embedding
Figure 5 - entryway mural for Chenho Food Court
conveying general western-ness and a sense of
cosmopolitanism (Kaifeng Chenho Shopping Center
6/6/2015)

them with the Chinese characters alongside. When

asked what the characters mean, however, the
cashier stated it was the name of the restaurant. The

characters actually say beef squid, an item from the menu, reinforcing the notion that the
restaurant highlighted the Korean-ness of its culinary experience in an attempt to provide
consumers with a cosmopolitan experience localized to Korea. Additionally, by changing the
gender of the mascot and switching two of the characters in the name, a Japanese fast food
restaurant at Chenho copied a better-established Japanese fast food restaurant so as to recreate
and capitalize on a sense of Japanese-ness and lay claim to a cosmopolitan dining experience.
Last, a restaurant labeled Western Style
localized its menu to an ambiguous west;
its menu went so far as to copy offerings
and even images from KFC, a brand
with actual origins in the west, including
the shrimp and chicken sandwich offered
as part of KFCs localized menu. This
plagiarism reveals a few things. First, it

Figure 6 - "Western Style" fast food restaurant; note the far left
panel highlighting the shrimp and chicken sandwich, lifted from
KFC (Kaifeng Chenho Shopping Center, 6/6/2015)

reinforces the earlier notion that KFC does not achieve true supra-culture status; the fact that a

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Western Style restaurant takes it cues from KFC implies KFC is identified as Western, rather
than of no specific culture. Second, it reveals the fast food restaurants attempt to capture a sense
of Western-ness for the sake of providing a global experience for the consumer, ironically
copying a food item that had been localized to China from a source perceived as being Western,
and the vague abstraction with which this restaurant defines globalism.
When considering the entryway mural as a preview to cosmopolitanism and the food
courts role as a mixing of global food options, it is important to consider which countries
comprise that definition of global for Kaifeng: a handful of Asian options are present, balanced
by a vague Western Style option. This implies that the middle class Chinese consumer in
Kaifeng can be satisfied by cosmopolitanism at this level of variety.
The food courts at the APM Mall in Beijing and the IFC and Super Brand Malls in
Shanghai display a more diverse and specific definition of globalism in the context of fast food
restaurants. At APM, options included the Macao Kitchen, A Taste of Nippon, Hong Kong
cuisine, and Babelas Kitchen, a pizza fast
food restaurant with an overt Italian
aesthetic. Likewise, Shanghais malls
feature a similar, if not more diverse, array
of options. At IFC, offerings from
Hokkaido, Denmark, France, and Italy line
the various food courts, in addition to
Figure 7 - a fast food restaurant in Beijing advertising its globally
localized food of Nippon (Beijing APM Mall, 6/3/2015)

previously-seen offerings from Korea,

Taiwan, Japan, and other Asian countries

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and cities. Super Brand in Shanghai also featured the first instance of Burger King. In
illuminating the parts of the globe represented by these culinary experience options, it is evident
that middle-class Chinese consumers in first-tier cities define globalism in a wider, more diverse,
and more specific sense. The cosmopolitan experience for a first-tier city resident, by virtue of
living in that first-tier city, is expanded, and a higher number of international options, either
localized globally, glocalized, or of a supra-culture, may be expected to achieve satisfaction in
cosmopolitanism. According to Akbar Abbas, cosmopolitanism in Shanghai could be
understood not as the cultural domination by the foreign but as the appropriation by the local of
elements of foreign culture to enrich a new national culture, which reinforces the notion that
awareness, recognition, and implementation of many international influences leads again a
meaningful sense of cosmopolitanism (775).
Each of the fast food restaurants examined seeks to provide a meaningful global
experience to the consumer in its own way. For the first-tier cities of Shanghai and Beijing, the
definition for globalized food experience is diverse, but specific more countries and cities from
all regions of the world are represented in the food court context whereas in the third-tier city
of Kaifeng the globalized food options are limited, less specific, and take cues from better
established brands due to what appears to be a vaguer understanding of the West. To varying
extents, all three cities lay claims to cosmopolitanism in different aspects; their claims are
segregated into three classifications of experience supra-culture that provides Chinese
consumers a transcendental dining experience where class and background cease to matter as the
consumer becomes a member of a greater global community; the glocalized fast food chain as
seen in Burger King and KFCs homogenized model of operation with localized elements; and
the globally localized fast food restaurant which provides specific international experiences by

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virtue of its adherence to a specific foreign-ness in aesthetic, menu, and advertisements. The
Illuminated Globe Theory also helps to explain the city-based differences in cosmopolitanism
as it reveals a sliding scale of what cosmopolitanism entails. This research shows that
cosmopolitanism and globalism are valuable commodities in selling the fast food experience, are
manifested in a variety of ways that are each meaningful, and are as multi-faceted and complex
as the tastes of the consumers themselves.

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Works Cited
Abbas, Ackbar. "Cosmopolitan De-scriptions." Cosmopolitanism (2002): 209-28. Print.
Roudometof, V. "Nationalism, Globalization and Glocalization." Thesis Eleven (2014): 18-33. Print.