With a waiting list of over 5,000 tables, it is the king of dining queues. Why do they like to open in high-end shopping malls?

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With a waiting list of over 5,000 tables, it is the king of dining queues. Why do they like to open in high-end shopping malls?

red meal network

2026.11.10 18:07

· From Guangdong

Full text 3215 words

Text | red meal network

The most popular restaurants are clustered in Vientiane City, and the shopping mall is not just about rent.

"The biggest risk when going to Baietan Wanxiang City is not being able to eat."

More than a month has passed since the opening of Guangzhou Baietan Vientiane City, but waiting for a table is still the norm - around 1 noon, popular restaurants stopped taking orders offline due to too many people in line; some restaurants only released seats at 4 p.m., and there was already a long queue outside the door at 3 o'clock. According to Guangzhou Daily, at the most exaggerated time, some stores set a record of more than 5,465 tables in a single day during the National Day holiday.

Guangzhou Mixc has gathered nearly 500 brands. First stores, flagship stores, and customized stores account for more than 60% of the total. It really gives the reason to visit "it can only be found here". But just relying on the word "first store" is not enough to make thousands of people wait hungry for hours.

In fact, not only in Guangzhou, but also across the country, many of these higher-end shopping malls, which are called "Class A malls" in the industry, are experiencing similar traffic events.

What kind of business secrets are hidden behind these top-notch queues and popularity? In other words, how do high-end shopping malls and catering brands turn these stores into "popular stores"?

Use benefit binding to force brands to improve square footage

In order to make good brands willing to stay and continue to generate traffic, the first trump card that Class A sites use is to "screen people for the brand." It does not reject all comers, but uses high entry barriers to keep ordinary brands out, leaving room for brands to avoid price wars and homogenization, and avoiding low-price competition in thousands of stores.

According to local media reports such as Xinkuaibao, Zhengzhou Daily and official information released by China Resources Land, Guangzhou Mixc Catering has introduced 45 first stores in Guangzhou and 37 first stores in Liwan. Even if it is not the first store in the region, it is the debut of a new model of a brand; in Zhengdong Mixc City, which will be opened in July 2025, more than 40% of the catering brands will be the first stores in Zhengzhou; in Hohhot Mixc City, which opened in the same period, the first store rate of catering is as high as 90%.

The ultra-high "first store rate" is the hard KPI set by the mall for the brands that enter. What shopping malls want is not tenants to fill up the shops, but partners who can create the scarcity of "only available here" - if a restaurant can be found everywhere, consumers have no reason to travel across half of the city to eat.

Shopping malls use this set of strict indicators to reversely filter customer flow. For brands with higher per capita consumption, crossing this threshold means entering a customer pool that has been pre-screened by the mall and has a clear willingness to spend.

But thresholds alone are not enough. What truly binds the brand and the shopping mall is the reconstruction of the interest mechanism. A senior industry insider revealed to Red Food Network that catering rents in Class A shopping malls have long bid farewell to the "fixed price" model, and generally adopt the model of "fixed rent and commission on turnover". The commission ratio for dinner is usually about 4% to 8%, and the commission for fast food tea is 10% to 12%.

As for the so-called "taking the higher", the practice of a leading shopping mall in the northern region is that if the brand's business is booming and the amount of commission based on turnover is greater than the guaranteed rent, the mall will charge based on the commission; if the brand's customer flow is not ideal and the commission is lower than the guaranteed rent, the brand will still have to pay the bottom rent.

In order for high-quality brands to dare to take on this challenge, some shopping malls will also provide favorable conditions such as free rent for the first year, tiered deductions and even decoration subsidies.

In this way, shopping malls use profit-sharing methods to reduce the brand's early start-up costs, but they also use this "higher" mechanism to force brands to continue to produce high square footage.

In addition, in addition to the hard binding of interests, the mall also provides a soft premium: using its own positioning to complete trust endorsement for the brand.

For example, Ningjia Shizhi, a popular Taizhou cuisine brand this year, almost all of its regional first stores are located in high-end shopping malls such as Deji, Hang Lung, and Vientiane City. The core lies in adapting to the customer base. With a per capita price of more than 160 yuan, it needs shopping malls to help it identify customer groups with spending power, and it also needs to use the quality of shopping malls to improve its own brand level. When consumers enter Vientiane City or Hang Lung, they will naturally classify the brands in these malls into the category of "quality", which can establish certain advantages in brand recognition.

In addition, an investor in the consumer industry also mentioned to Red Food Network that leading shopping malls are still playing the value of "channel incubation". As long as the brand has run the model in some markets and verified its regional strength, the shopping mall will rely on its national network to promote the brand to more cities. The brand handed over its first store in the city, in exchange for the shopping mall's resources tilting towards national expansion.

However, this win-win mechanism is a game that can only be played in Class A malls - high-end shopping malls use good locations and signboards to increase the value of brands, and the brands that are stationed are also capable of driving customer flow and achieving performance. In a shopping mall of this level, both parties have long since broken away from the limitations of "rent collection and rent payment" and have become a community of interests that jointly expand the traffic volume.

In addition to cooking, catering brands also need to be able to create content.

The mall has set the threshold and shown sincerity in binding interests. Naturally, the brand cannot just hand over a standardized menu. Brands that can be selected and become popular in Category A malls must come up with something that the mall cannot do on its own, and in turn, drive customer flow to the mall.

1. The ultimate “first store innovation”

Shopping malls need to have a "first store rate", firstly, to introduce new faces that are not available locally, and secondly, to force established local brands to innovate and open unique flagship stores or new model stores. For this reason, brands can no longer copy the same drawings, but must roll out higher-standard stores to submit the drawings.

In Guangzhou Vientiane City, Taotaoju launched the country's first 6.0 premium store. In the 1,100-square-meter store, the proportion of the back kitchen area has been increased to 30% and is displayed to the public. It also added a large number of store-limited handmade dim sum and high-end Cantonese dishes to the menu, directly raising the unit price by one level.

Guangzhou Restaurant·Yaji took over a large area of 1,700 square meters and took advantage of the 270-degree surrounding river view to turn the time-honored restaurant into a high-standard "River View Living Room".

The same is true for the "Cake Lab+" opened by Heytea in Baietan. This is the first time this independent store has been launched in Guangzhou. It also launched a limited-edition "Laoguang Fresh Beancurd Soy Milk Cake", which is not available in other Heytea stores but only here.

In order to create a new store type or even a new brand, catering companies need to pay higher costs for decoration and trial and error. This is a "certificate of investment" that must be paid to enter a Class A site.

2. Powerful “content production capabilities”

No matter how scarce the space is, if it has no communication power, it is just a bunch of expensive hardware. Category A stores require brands to continue to create topics, and even turn stores into "topics" themselves.

One of the methods favored by the market is to make the kitchen front-facing and scene-based.

For example, Ningjia Shizhi places a super bright stall in the middle of the store, and the chef cooks and steams the food right away, with a clear view of the firelight, steam, and operating table; Tao Taoju’s 6.0 Zhenpin store in Baietan uses the bright kitchen and bright stove as the facade, covering 90% of the kitchen area Comprehensive display, from rough processing of ingredients, hand-made to cooking, the whole process is visualized; Chef Fei opened the first full-scale gas kitchen store in Luohu Vientiane City, Shenzhen, and the scene of the chef frying the food has become a natural short video material on customers' mobile phones.

Another way is to break the brand's original visual perception and create contrast.

In Hangzhou Vientiane City, the Zhejiang first store of Yunnan cuisine brand Hong0871 did not turn into a traditional closed restaurant, but directly moved in the market scene of Kunming. Customers walking among wooden structures, stone walls and green plants feel like visiting a market in a border forest. Blue Bottle Coffee's first store in Hangzhou has given up its iconic minimalist industrial style visual standards and specially designed a courtyard space of Jiangnan garden for this store.

This kind of move by catering brands turns the production process and the store itself into natural communication materials. The brand rolls out the scene design, and customers are responsible for taking photos and checking in and sending them to the media. A steady stream of social fission traffic pours into the mall one after another.

Conclusion

The popularity of catering in Guangzhou Mixc can be seen as a concentrated release of the "traffic co-creation" model between Class A venues and catering brands. In the past, it was not uncommon for top shopping malls to have a few queue kings. However, it was rare before that the large-area, high-density, and continuously high popularity of catering floors like Baietan Vientiane City was rare.

It is more like a highly concentrated window that displays the mall's high dependence on catering's ability to attract customers, the brand's desire for top venues, and the deep engagement between the two parties in the interest mechanism, concentrated and concretely presented to the industry. As Wang Lei, Vice President of China Resources Vientiane Lifestyle, expressed in a speech: The essence of business is the competition of "customer-inbound factors". The essence is to compete for traffic, entrance, and consumers' time.

But the cruel thing about this mechanism is that it has a shelf life. The novelty of the first store will eventually wear off, and the number of thousands of tables in the queue cannot last forever. Category A venues are willing to provide endorsements and profits for brands, provided that the catering company can continue to contribute square footage, topics, and even new first stores and new brands. Once this premise is not established, it is only a matter of time before it changes hands.

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