The Legend Begins: From a Tiny Shop to a Global Phenomenon

On a humid Saturday evening in Beijing, the line outside Haidilao stretches well past the restaurant's entrance, curving around the block like a patient serpent. It's nearly eight o'clock, and the estimated wait time displayed on the electronic board reads ninety minutes. Yet the people gathered here—young couples on dates, families with restless children, groups of friends in matching shirts celebrating a birthday—show no visible signs of frustration. Instead, they chat animatedly, accept small cups of herbal tea from roaming servers, and steal glances at the floor-to-ceiling windows where glimpses of the bustling kitchen offer their own form of entertainment. A woman near the front of the line is receiving a complimentary hand massage from a young employee who kneels beside her, working careful circles into her palms with practiced efficiency. Two children are being escorted to a small play area by a server who crouches to their eye level, speaking in gentle tones about the toys and cartoons that await them inside.

This scene—simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary—plays out dozens of times each day at Haidilao locations across the globe. From Shanghai to Singapore, from Los Angeles to London, customers queue for hours not because they have no alternative, but because they choose to wait. They choose to delay their meals, to surrender their Saturday evening to a seemingly irrational proposition: standing in line for the privilege of spending money on dinner. What makes this behavior remarkable isn't merely its existence—American consumers, after all, will wait for hours to purchase the latest iPhone—but the joy with which these customers embrace their wait. They photograph the queue. They post about it on social media. Some travel across cities or even countries specifically to experience what they have only heard about from friends and strangers alike. The restaurant that has transformed waiting from a tedious necessity into an anticipated pleasure has become something approaching a cultural phenomenon, a case study taught in business schools from Harvard to Hong Kong, and a subject of fascination for entrepreneurs who struggle to understand how a hot pot chain founded in provincial China could redefine what excellent service looks like in the twenty-first century.

The Theater of Service

Step inside any Haidilao location, and you enter a carefully orchestrated world where the boundaries between customer and served blur in unexpected ways. The moment you are seated—and you will be seated, eventually, after your ninety-minute wait—a server appears with a small cloth napkin, bowing slightly as they offer you the choice of several colors. This gesture, seemingly trivial, sets the tone for what follows: an experience in which every detail has been considered, every discomfort anticipated, every need preempted by employees trained to see service not as a transaction but as an art form. Your server will ask about the spiciness level of your preferences before the menu appears. They will offer to tie back your hair if it's long, provide protective aprons if you're wearing light-colored clothing, and present small plastic bags for your phones if you wish to keep them dry from the steam rising from your bubbling pot.

The menu at Haidilao offers standard hot pot fare—thinly sliced meats, fresh vegetables, tofu products, and an array of dipping sauces—but the food, while competent and often excellent, is not the primary attraction. What brings customers back, what generates the breathless reviews and viral videos, is the human element. A server notices that you've been reaching for the remote control to adjust the air conditioning and beats you to it. Another server, watching a child grow restless at the table, materializes with a balloon animal shaped like a rabbit. When a birthday customer is spotted by staff members—they have been trained to watch for such occasions—a small procession of employees appears, singing a cheerful song while carrying a small cake illuminated by a single candle. The birthday person is often surprised, not because they hadn't considered that their birthday might be noticed, but because they cannot imagine a restaurant caring enough to notice.

This attentiveness extends into territories that most service establishments consider beyond their scope. Haidilao locations offer complimentary manicures, a fact that strikes first-time visitors as almost absurd. A small salon area adjacent to the main dining room employs trained nail technicians who will shape, polish, and care for your fingernails while you wait for your table or even during your meal. Should you mention to a server that your shoulders ache from travel or work, an employee may appear minutes later with a small hand-held massager or, in some locations, a trained massage therapist ready to work out the tension. During the long pandemic year of 2020, when Haidilao locations were forced to close their doors across China, the company's customer service teams pivoted to delivering care packages to regular customers, including fresh vegetables and household supplies. When the crisis passed and restaurants reopened, these customers returned first, and returned loyally.

The logic behind such seemingly extravagant service investments becomes clearer when examined through the lens of what business theorists call the "experience economy." Pioneered by researchers Joseph Pine and James Gilmore in the late 1990s, this framework suggests that modern consumers increasingly seek not merely products or services, but memorable experiences—transformations that engage them emotionally and create lasting memories. A restaurant that serves excellent food provides value; a restaurant that makes you feel genuinely cared for, that anticipates your needs before you voice them, that transforms the mundane act of eating into something approaching celebration, provides an experience that cannot be easily replicated or forgotten. Haidilao, whether by instinct or intention, has positioned itself at the apex of this economy, creating what might be called a theater of service where every interaction is a performance and every customer is both audience and participant.

The Man Behind the Mirror

To understand how this remarkable approach to hospitality emerged, we must travel backward through time to the provincial cities of Sichuan, China's southwestern heartland, where the story of Haidilao begins not with grand ambitions or revolutionary theories, but with a young man named Zhang Yong and a handful of coins in his pocket.

Zhang Yong was born in 1970 in Sichuan Province, in the ancient city of Jianyang, a place known more for its agricultural output than its commercial sophistication. His family belonged to the vast cohort of ordinary Chinese households that survived through hard work and careful conservation rather than wealth or connections. Like millions of young people of his generation, Zhang's education ended earlier than he might have wished, and by his late teens he found himself navigating the uncertain waters of early reform-era China, seeking employment in an economy still transitioning from collective agriculture to market competition. He worked various jobs—a construction worker, a small-market vendor, a factory hand—each position offering only the most tenuous foothold on the ladder of economic advancement.

The story of Haidilao, as told through Zhang's own recollections and the accounts of early employees, contains no dramatic moment of inspiration, no vision that struck like lightning. Instead, it emerged from the more modest and perhaps more powerful territory of dissatisfaction with the status quo. As Zhang consumed hot pot in the restaurants of his home province, he noticed something that others seemed to accept as immutable: the poor service. Tables remained uncleared for long stretches. Servers appeared disinterested or even rude. The experience of dining, which sho