By Noelle Mateer, February 4, 2017
I must have heard this story five times. I’m only one day into my press trip, and yet multiple Kaluga Queen
reps have recounted it already. Now here we go again. I’m in a group of
25 journalists gathered around a dinner table overlooking Zhejiang’s
scenic Qiandao Lake, and company Vice President Xia Yongtao spies an
opportunity. Naturally, he begins:
“Lufthansa airlines did a blind taste test, and out of the 13 caviars they tried from around the world…,” he says. Everyone liked Kaluga Queen’s the best, I know,
I think. The story continues. “Later, Lufthansa did another taste test,
just to be sure.” Again, he says, every single person picked Kaluga
Queen as their favorite.
That
was 2011. Today, Kaluga Queen caviar comes standard in Lufthansa
first-class cabins. The company has become the largest producer of
caviar in China, and the third largest in the world. Xia tells us all
this, then holds up his glass of wine.
“Cheers,” he says. We all raise our glasses to Kaluga Queen.
Kaluga
Queen is hugely successful. And yet, the company is in many ways still a
little fish in a big pond. Because while China's caviar industry is
exploding, the country's producers face an uphill battle as they try to
convince the international community that the best sturgeon roe in the
world are, well – 'made in China.'
I suppose that’s why I’m here. Those in the fine dining industry know of China’s caviar domination, but diners still don’t.
“People
in the industry, of course, know,” says Dominique Martinez, executive
chef of The Peninsula Beijing. “But people outside the industry are
always surprised to learn that China makes the best caviar.”
Ask
a diner to name where her caviar originates, and chances are she’ll say
Iran or Russia. There’s some truth to this – the first record of humans
eating sturgeon roe is 2,000 years ago in Persia, but caviar really
gained prestige in the 18th century, when Catherine the Great served it
at palace banquets. From then on, caviar became synonymous with Russian
royalty, and when the country’s aristocrats fled the Bolshevik
Revolution, the expatriates made the delicacy popular in Paris. Today,
21 of Paris’ 26 Michelin-starred restaurants use Kaluga Queen caviar.
Caviar’s
recent history is more fraught. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the
Caspian Sea – then rich with wild sturgeon – reopened for fishing. It
was largely pilfered as a result. In 2000, the Convention on
International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) classified sturgeon as
endangered, and soon after, it banned the fishing of wild sturgeon
altogether.
With the world’s
most famous caviar-sourcing waters now off-limits, producers looked for
new places to raise sturgeon. China’s cheap land and labor beckoned. But
starting a sturgeon farm isn’t easy – sturgeon usually take a decade or
more to sexually mature.
“This is why there’s an explosion, and almost an oversupply
of caviar in the world right now – a lot of the farms that were set up
in the 90s or early 2000s are now coming to maturity,” says Toby
Collins, co-owner of the Shanghai-based Black Pearl Caviar.
Qiandao Lake, Zhejiang province is where Kaluga Queen sturgeon are raised
I’m
seeing proof of this in Qiandao, Zhejiang province, home to Kaluga
Queen’s extensive farming operations. I’m here to meet these first-class
fish, as are a slew of Singapore-based food writers and an American
camera crew – a member of which is rather unfortunately wearing a qipao
and Uggs. It’s raining hard, and we are all handed lemon-yellow
ponchos. We waddle like rubber ducks down to a fleet of motorboats at
the lakeside dock.
It takes
half an hour by boat to reach the farm, across pristine waters. Kaluga
Queen rep Cai Leqiao tells me that, on a clear day, you can see 7 meters
deep. The lake sits among the jaw-dropping foothills of the famed
Huangshan mountain range. Any skepticism we harbor toward
pollution-ridden China producing clean caviar evaporates when we see the
farm’s surroundings.
In an effort to boost
Chinese caviar’s international image, Kaluga Queen flies everyone from
journalists to chefs to KOLs to its farm, and then wows them with a
series of impressive facts throughout the trip. A select few: Kaluga
Queen scientists use ultrasound technology to monitor pregnant sturgeon
bellies. Superstar French Chef Alain Ducasse uses Kaluga Queen at his
three-Michelin-star restaurant in Monaco. Kaluga Queen was the official
caviar supplier for the 2016 G20 summit. Michelle Obama tried Kaluga
Queen and liked it. (There was a PowerPoint; I could go on.)
A fisherman checks up on sturgeon on Kaluga Queen's Qiandao farm
They
are wise to bring us here. Qiandao’s beauty is stupefying. At the
docks, we spy the graceful beasts lurking below us as Xia explains
fishermen's duties, and then we take turns holding an unhappy sturgeon,
posing for pictures with her in our hands. All in all, it gives a
splendid impression of China’s fine foods industry. And this is exactly
the point.
Qiandao is lovely
when you see it, but most people don’t get this far. For Kaluga Queen
marketing manager Lily Liu, that’s a problem.
“To
be honest, it takes time to increase the international image of Chinese
food, even today,” she says. “The biggest obstacle is the low image of,
and low trust in, Chinese food safety.”
This is why she and the Kaluga Team have flown us all here – seeing is believing. Or as Liu says: “Quality talks.”
Quality
can talk all it wants – but what does it matter if no one’s listening?
When Toby Collins started his caviar brand in 2006, many were simply
unwilling to buy caviar made in China, no matter how good it was. “There
was a stigma,” he says. “China has not had the world’s best reputation
for quality controls and sustainable farming.”
Collins
went to painstaking efforts to find the perfect farm and settled on a
beautiful one in Hubei – naturally filtered and sustainable. His
business partner had extensive experience working for the prestigious
American caviar company, Tsar Nicoulai.
Even still, customers were hesitant. So Collins tried a strategy many
of China’s caviar companies still employ: Appearing as Western as
possible.
“When we started,
the Black Pearl Caviar brand was deliberately designed to avoid seeming
like it’s Chinese,” he says. In sales meetings, Collins’ Russian
colleague played up the caviar’s Russianness. “She would say, ‘actually
they’re not Chinese caviar – it’s Russian sturgeon, farmed in China. So
basically they’re expats. They’re expat sturgeon.’”
Collins
is not alone in this. Many Chinese luxury companies rely on the
endorsement of Western brands. This is why China’s robust caviar
industry – which produces 60 percent of the world’s caviar – remains
relatively unknown among consumers.
In the Beijing offices of Chinese brand Caviar & Traditions,
founder John Zheng leads me through a tasting of three varieties of –
uniformly delicious – roe. Then he points to one of his tins and says:
“See this. It says, ‘Chinese Caviar, French Touch.’” But a photo of the
same product on Sinodis.com,
Caviar & Traditions’ distributor, doesn’t have the “Chinese” bit.
It simply reads, “Caviar & Traditions, French Touch.”
Search the website of the world’s most famous caviar vendor – Petrossian
– for the word “Chinese,” and you’ll find only a set of tea leaves. Of
course, Petrossian and other vendors are legally required to say where
their caviar is made when asked, and several brands have “Origin:
Chinese” written in tiny, light-gray letters near the product info.
But no one is in a rush to claim their caviar is Chinese.
“If
[our caviar] was from Iran, we’d be like, ‘This is Iranian beluga!’”
says Collins. And while reception to Chinese-made roe is improving, “We
still don’t stamp it with big letters.”
But
change is coming. Or, at least, that’s what Kaluga Queen hopes. At its
processing plant in Quzhou, a couple hours from the lake, one of the
reporters is live-streaming our factory tour. I am avoiding the gaze of
her selfie stick as best I can.
Because while caviar eating
may be glamorous, caviar producing is decidedly unsexy. I’m forced to
wear an oversized labcoat, boots, hairnet and face mask. I look like I’m
about to perform surgery. I also look fat.
Armed
with my camera and 20 pounds of excess fabric, I enter what is
essentially a gallows for fancy fish. Sturgeon carcasses hang
upside-down on metal hooks, pools of blood just beneath them. A stench
hangs about the room. We snap some photos, but Kaluga Queen reps are
eager for us to move on. They’re happier to let us linger in the final
room, where the eggs are already separated from their dead mothers and
are being packaged.
Left: A factory worker removes roe from a sturgeon womb; Right: Sturgeon carcasses hang at Kaluga Queen's processing plant in Quzhou, Zhejiang province
I then watch, mesmerized, as a
factory worker unceremoniously slices open the sturgeons’ long bodies
with a single blade stroke. She scoops out the tiny eggs by the fistful,
thousands of glistening ova from every womb. It’s magical to see a
smelly corpse open up to reveal the world’s most luxurious food product.
Sure, there is a lot of
money in these eggs. But there is also a fair bit of gore.
Internationally, much ado has been made of the ethical concerns of
caviar. In December, an educational video on caviar production went
viral, simply because it was gross. (“Caviar – Further exploitation of
& violence towards females' bodies in our collective
misogynistic-carnist society,” wrote one Facebook commenter.)
And
yet, today’s caviar production is more ethical than ever. The rise of
farmed sturgeon means that fewer of the endangered wild ones are
poached, and also, possibly, better caviar: The more sturgeon farms
develop, the more they can control the growth of their fish. And China
is leading this charge.
John
Zheng is a pioneer of sturgeon breeding. After earning his doctorate in
marine biology, he started farming sturgeon in a direct reaction to the
CITES wild-fishing ban. Zheng spent years as a researcher for the
Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences perfecting sustainable aquaculture –
something he thinks China does quite well.
His
company, Caviar & Traditions, has a farm in Hunan, not far from the
province’s famous Zhangjiajie scenic area. Zheng started the company in
2006 as a joint venture with a French producer – hence the alleged
‘French Touch.’
It’s a
win-win relationship. Caviar & Traditions can benefit from the
prestige of partnering with a French brand; the French brand can produce
caviar more cheaply, thanks to lower production costs in China.
Ultimately, this plays an important part in Chinese caviar’s rise:
Farmland is cheap.
But Chef Dominique Martinez
says it’s not an issue of cost for him. “I will never compromise
quality,” he says. His reason for using Chinese caviar is simple: It’s
the best.
Martinez buys his
caviar from W3, a company with farms in Sichuan that also supplies to
celebrity-chef Joel Robuchon’s restaurants. At The Peninsula’s
farm-to-table restaurant, Jing, the caviar’s origin is written on the menu.
W3
chooses eggs specifically for Martinez, and then packages them with The
Peninsula stamp on them. Martinez sees this as a way of endorsing
Chinese caviar. After all, he reasons, he wouldn’t want to have anything
of low quality bearing his company’s brand.
The
Peninsula Shanghai, meanwhile, uses Kaluga Queen caviar. And after a
day of touring farming and processing facilities, it’s finally time to
taste it.
First,
we are all handed tiny mother-of-pearl spoons, and instructed to scoop
little piles of caviar onto the back of our hands. (Metal spoons are
said to interact unfavorably with the taste of caviar; if you are such a
peasant as to not own a mother-of-pearl spoon,
then go find a wooden one.) When we place the eggs on our tongues, we
are instructed to push the little orbs to the roof of our mouths.
Low-quality caviar will turn to mush with the pressure; high-quality
caviar will pop. Kaluga’s pops.
The
caviar is exquisite – even if I still believe the global fervor for
these rich-people eggs is a little overblown. Nonetheless, I’m struck
with a sense of injustice.
By all accounts, Kaluga Queen’s operation is impressive. And yet they have to be impressive – the most impressive – if they’re to be successful in a European-dominated luxury market.
Qipao-and-Uggs lady muses aloud that she didn’t know a Chinese caviar production this sophisticated would even be possible.
“Yeah,” says a Kaluga rep. “If people could just come and see all this, they’d understand.”
One
day, they will. For China’s caviar industry is only growing larger.
Collins says the stigma against Chinese caviar has improved in recent
years, and he believes it will continue to do so. In China, he says:
“Since 2009 to now, it’s exploded – there’s double-digit growth every
year, and we’ve seen so many restaurants and hotels adopt caviar.”
China
just may be saving the caviar industry from ruin. In an era in which
consumers in the West are turning their backs on sturgeon as they wake
up to eco-conscious cuisine, many in the East are just discovering it.
At
the moment, the vast majority of caviar produced in China is exported
abroad – primarily to Europe. But Chinese consumers are growing to
appreciate it, too.
“We want
to sell more caviar in China,” says Zheng, who believes that he will,
given time. “More and more people enjoy new foods, like cheese and
wine,” he says, giving Pizza Hut as an example of where all the young
Chinese cheese lovers go.
Zheng’s colleague Kang
Mei, in marketing and sales, faces the difficult task of convincing
Chinese consumers to drop a few hundred kuai on tiny, expensive eggs they might not have heard of before.
Some
of her marketing techniques work better than others – “before I began
eating caviar, I used to have spots on my face, like you,” she says,
pointing at a patch of acne on my chin. But her main strategy is one I
can get behind. Kang uses WeChat to educate potential clients as to
caviar’s historical significance. Rather eloquently, she calls sturgeon
“living fossils in the water.” (As Zheng later tells me, sturgeon have
been on Earth for over 200 million years. “The fact that this kind of
animal can still survive on Earth, it’s amazing,” he says.) She uses her
platform to tell tales of the Russian court, the Parisian Belle-Époque,
the modern world of high-flying caviar enthusiasts.
These
are, after all, resilient little eggs. They’ve survived the fall of
Russian monarchy; world wars; the Industrial Revolution; the fall of the
Soviet Union; the looming threat of their own extinction. There’s a lot
of inspiration to be taken from their long, storied past. Zheng
believes caviar is best served with a history lesson (and also
technically a mother-of-pearl spoon).
“It’s a topic of conversation on the table,” he says. “Behind food, there is a story.”
It’s a story in which he – and thousands across the country – believes China will write the next chapter.
Ref:http://www.thatsmags.com/beijing/post/17511/the-world-is-eating-chinese-caviar-and-doesn-t-know-it
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