"In France, if we wanted to analyze a product for use in the restaurant, we would have the suppliers send a small portion to try before we made an order," he says.

"I remember one time we wanted to sample a tuna fish and were sent the entire fish. A tuna is a big fish, maybe around 5 kilos. After sampling, we would lose the rest of the fish and the price was very expensive."

Dealing with customs officials also provided some interesting experiences for Le Meur.

"Getting lemon juice was strange. They were afraid that if a lemon came from another country, it might bring illness. So we would process the lemons and keep the juice, but the rest of the lemon we had to give back to officials at the airport to send back to the country it came from."

The menu prices at Maxim's reflected the steep cost of ingredients, which narrowed the type of customers the restaurant would attract. With only a few hundred French people working in China at the time, clientele was limited mostly to embassy staff seeking a taste of home, as well as government officials and Chinese celebrities.

For the average Chinese at that time, a meal at Maxim's meant far more than simply getting good foreign food. With a starting price of about 280 yuan ($45; 34 euros) a person, the cost of a meal would equal six to eight months of the average salary, Le Meur says.

"We used to have the menu outside the restaurant and when people would look at the price their eyes would go wide and they'd look shocked."

But some would save just for the experience of stepping into such a culturally different environment.

"In China at the time, there were very few people who could get passports, so very few people could travel outside of China" he says. "But Maxim's was like a different world, with the decor and atmosphere, so for them it was a chance to go to another country."

Le Meur returned to France in 1989 and spent the next eight years working at his family restaurant in Paris, where he first learned his craft at 14 working alongside his mother, also a chef.

When he returned to China in 1997, it was a different world.

"I remember looking outside the window during the taxi ride from the airport. I had the same look on my face as a first-time tourist," he says, eyes widened to mimic his reaction at the time.

"I remember seeing a McDonald's and being shocked, thinking to myself, 'McDonald's in China? We didn't have those when I was here during the 80s'."

In the years since his return, Le Meur says he has seen the restaurant industry in China transform, for better and worse.

"Competition now is very strong," he says. "You have so many more options. There are so many more big hotels with restaurants. You have restaurants offering French cooking, American cooking, Italian cooking. There are now more than 20 French restaurants in Beijing alone."

While competition has become stronger, obtaining food products has become much cheaper and easier as demand for basic foreign cooking ingredients has skyrocketed.

"The price for goose liver used to be more than 400 yuan ($64; 49 euros) just for a kilo, now it's half that. I can't say this for everything, but the price for getting products has gone down quite a bit."

And while food costs have fallen, earnings in China have gone up, with the majority of Maxim's clients now made up of a typical Chinese diner.

"Now when Chinese customers walk into the restaurant, they don't even look at the price."

Toddbalazovic@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 03/01/2013 page15)