Foreign
Study: Asian restaurants still foreign to U.S. chains
By Bob Krummert
Fast-casual concept gurus take note. Now there’s yet another reason why a chain restaurant that serves Asian food should be a can’t-miss proposition: lack of competition from other chains. Numbers compiled by foodservice database and analytics firm CHD Expert show that of themore than 64,000 Asian restaurants now doing business in the U.S., only six percent are run by chains.
Factor in the many other attributes this segment holds and you’d think fast casual developers would be opening new Asian concepts as fast as they could think them up. That’s not the case, even though this segment provides most of the things customers want from a contemporary restaurant experience. Consider: Asian food embraces a wide variety of unique ethnic flavors; most dishes are inherently healthful; the nature of Asian meal preparation makes it easy for patrons to customize their orders without overburdening the kitchen; and Asian dishes travel well, a particularly important component given the current boom in takeout and delivery business. All this and relatively low price points, too.
Restaurant industry watcher Technomic sees more growth on the way. “There's something about Asia,” Technomic writes in its roundup of 2015 food trends. “Asian foods have been trending for years, but the world's biggest and fastest-moving continent always delivers something new. In 2015, look for the breakout of Korean, mainstreaming of Vietnamese and upscaling of spicy ramen noodles, the quintessential Asian street food.”
There’s a lot going on in the Asian restaurant segment, even though CHD Expert’s data shows that most operators in it take the old-school approach. Not only is this segment heavily dominated by mom-and-pop operations. It’s also a stronghold of full-service operations. The numbers show that 84 percent of