Am; Lek
Almost a year after it opened, the Pekin restaurant, which was a stronghold of the famous and the famous, is about to close. “We never closed the door, not even during the wars, and now it’s for good. My heart hurts,” says Benny Kalter, the legendary owner and manager. In the interview, he tells what made her so successful in the good old days (“the food was served in abundance and not in pomp”), why she got the nickname “the Chinese hummus”, how only four years ago everything looked rosy, and how the end of the battle is connected to Instagram.
In the innocent 2000s, long before the invention of Instagram, which to some extent eliminated the gossip sections and made the lives of celebrities documented at any given moment, reporters knew where they could almost always find shiny customers to report on to their readers: the mythical Pekin restaurant in the Tzalah neighborhood.
Almost at any hour you could find well-known customers in the restaurant: from politicians, businessmen, military personnel, theater, cinema – and of course celebrities. The late Zvika Peak was a regular guest at the restaurant, his wife Sharona even worked at the restaurant as a messenger, the former Chief of Staff, Dan Halutz, Limor Levant, Uzi Dayan, the late minister Gideon Ezra, coach Avraham Grant, businessmen Lonnie Hertsikovich and Meir Shamir, journalist Amnon Abramowitz and more many many others.
Since then, not only the gossip sections have changed their face, but also the whole world of restaurants has been turned upside down and the glory days of Beijing seem especially distant: after 44 years of operation, the Chinese restaurant will close its doors and its fate will be the same as that of all the Chinese restaurants “of old” that opened in the late 1990s The seventy in Israel and swept away an entire country following an egg roll in sweet and sour sauce.
“The last Empress is closing,” says sadly Benjamin (Benny) Kalter, who was for a quarter of a century the manager, owner and face of the restaurant. Under his management, the restaurant was open during the most difficult times: “We never closed the door, not even during the wars, and now it is closing forever. My heart hurts. I was there for 27 years, it’s a lifetime. It’s an institution. There aren’t many places that last in Israel’s cuisine 40 years. Most new restaurants close in their first year, and most old Chinese restaurants closed a long time ago.”
Kalter, a colorful and well-known figure in the Israeli restaurant world, is totally identified with Pekin, and the restaurant is identified with him. Even today, years after he left the restaurant, he is considered its “face”. “When it was announced that the restaurant was closing, I received dozens of inquiries, as if I were still there, even though I am no longer the owner and am not connected to a practical restaurant.”
For the past month, Clutter has been holding an ongoing farewell party from Pekin. He eats meals there with friends and plans a farewell party with employees and past customers. “I had an amazing meal there with one of the owners – an amazing and talented person, and I am now making a farewell trip to the place that is going to become a branch of the Bangkok Kitchen restaurant. Beijing is deep in my heart.” By the way, even now, a few days before the restaurant closes its doors, Kalter finds it difficult to name his famous customers from the heyday: “I never published it and it didn’t get out,” he explains, “there was a special atmosphere of parties and social connections in the place. I kept them “.
“Restaurant is a germ”
Kalter’s affair with Peking began in 1990 when he came to manage the restaurant. A decade later he became a partner and continued to manage the place for another 15 years. It was Kalter who set up the restaurant’s oiled take-away system that transported the restaurant’s flagship dishes – beef, eggplant, chicken in lemon and chicken in cashews – to every block of Dan, and managed to maintain the restaurant’s popularity even when the kitchens around him turned from sweet and sour and sticky Chinese to modern “fusion” cuisine. “The place was packed. We got the nickname ‘The Chinese Hummus’, because people stood in line to eat at the restaurant,” he recalled.
Kalter came to the restaurants after serving as an assistant to Eric Sharon, then the minister of agriculture in the Begin government. “My acquaintance with Sharon began against the background that my first son-in-law, the billionaire Meshulam Riklis, loaned him the money for the farm, and against this background we developed excellent relations. For two years I was very close to him.”
How do you get to the restaurants from there?
“I’m not built for politics. Those who don’t know how to blink and deny without shame will not survive in politics. But the realest reason was that I had just started dating my second wife, Masada Zeev, who is Gandhi’s daughter, and Gandhi and Eric were the biggest enemies since the hanging affair. Our relationship was severed and were never renewed.
“Later I asked Dobi Weisglass, who was Eric’s chief of staff as prime minister, to bring him to a dinner in Peking to straighten the generations, but he told me it was impossible because he would have to close the entire street with security guards. Instead we scheduled a meeting at Sharon’s office but We didn’t have time to hold it and I didn’t close a circle with him.”
Pekin Restaurant / Photo: Eyal Yitzhar
What do you think was the secret of Beijing’s success?
“People come to a restaurant to feel at home. Pekin brought this experience to both the employees and the diners. It was a restaurant with good and plentiful food, and above all people felt loved and wanted in it. It was never a chef’s restaurant. The food was served in abundance and not in a fancy way, where you put a little something on the plate – Always leave with a “left over” bag.
But there are other restaurants with good food and love in the air, that don’t survive 40 years, especially when everything gets more expensive and it’s hard to get employees.
“The secret of success is human capital. The Yerzin brothers, who opened ‘Up to the Bone’, developed a system according to which a good restaurant manager and a good chef become partners. Because human capital is the heart of the restaurant, and that was the secret of Peking as well.” And the success was also dizzying in terms of profitability: “From the mid-nineties to the end of the 2000s, successful restaurants that were managed well earned 20%-25% on their turnover. After that, for the next seven to eight years, restaurants earned 15%.”
In a world where restaurants don’t survive a year these are dream numbers.
“Today, anyone who earns between 5% and 10% is a genius. Making a profit in restaurants today is difficult, because you can’t always raise prices when everything goes up and you can’t when there is no employee loyalty and they move on quickly. They also burdened the pensions and everything on the employer and the regulation is difficult And the property tax went up, so the profitability was eroded. Today only falafel can earn 25%. You can invest the money elsewhere and earn more, but restaurant business is love, it’s a germ. It grabs you and doesn’t leave you. There is something internal, emotional, that grabs restaurateurs even if it Earning only 5%, he will still be there and not leave. It’s a way of life.”
“It’s not the corona virus”
When he talks about the restaurateur bacterium, Kalter knows him closely: he has been married and divorced three times, but Pekin was a long and lasting love. In 2014, at the age of 67, he sold his share to his partners and flew to India for six months, but the separation was not final. In 2019, the year of the restaurant’s 40th celebration, he was once again called to the banner by the new owners who purchased the restaurant, one of whom is the restaurateur and entrepreneur Lee Pen. Kalter managed the restaurant for them for a short period of time: “Pekin was on the decline and Lee was able to stabilize it,” compliments Kalter: “In the restaurant’s 40th year, it looks good. When they asked me to return to Peking, it was a full circle for me. I didn’t hesitate at all. Everything was It looked rosy that year. There was a special menu with historical dishes, there were celebrations and interviews and visitors came to eat at the restaurant and praised the food and the experience.”
Li Pen, Pekin Restaurant / Photo: Anatoli Michaelou
Then the corona virus came and destroyed the cards of the restaurant world. But Kalter is sure that the story of Pekin is not the story of the restaurants that closed due to the corona virus: “The story of Pekin is the story of the captain of the Titanic who fell asleep on watch and did not see the iceberg. There was a management failure here. The corona virus was only a catalyst – it would have happened anyway. Most restaurants Asian women actually flourished in Corona thanks to the deliveries.”
From Kalter’s point of view, Pekin would not have closed this month if it weren’t for the new owners’ attempts to “refresh” the restaurant’s image: “The new owners wanted to bring in a young crowd, and I kept telling them, ‘You can’t break the DNA of a place that’s been around for 35 years. Pekin had a loyal audience that was not young. The restaurant became very Instagrammable and photographed very well,” explains Kalter, “They gave up any traditional Chinese sign and it photographed very well, but it didn’t work for the Peking customer base, who don’t eat Instagram. This is the sin of hubris of the young people who enter restaurants. Guys aged 20 to 30 who don’t know what it’s like to run a restaurant in Israel. It’s not just that 50-year-old people won’t buy restaurants and won’t enter as partners in a restaurant unless they expand their existing restaurant.”
So do you think young people shouldn’t open restaurants at all?
“Let them first go to work in a restaurant as shift managers, then they will manage a restaurant and only later will they go to open a restaurant if they want, but most of them will not want to after they understand what it entails. There is a lot of glam in restaurants, but it is not a pleasure. When I was Sharon’s assistant I would go into the Volvo every morning early in the morning and every morning he would turn to me and say: ‘Remember, ‘the young don’t know what the old have managed to forget.’ That was his mantra, and I didn’t understand what he wanted from me. Today I understand him perfectly. The young people with all their energy and vigor do not listen to advice. That’s why many restaurants close in the first year of their operation, because you don’t listen to people with experience and then make mistakes and pay for them.”
“no longer relevant”
“Pekin is closing because it’s simply no longer relevant,” entrepreneur and restaurateur Lee Fenn the owner downplays the flames and adds: “In fact, it hasn’t been relevant for many years.” The decision to buy it, Penn explains, was an emotional one: “When I entered Pekin, the restaurant was losing NIS 150-100,000 a month. I entered to restore it out of love for the place and the brand: I grew up there. I would come to eat in Pekin with my grandmother and parents, we ordered food from there all the years “.
“We tried to update it and we succeeded up to a certain level,” Penn says, and pays tribute to Kalter: “My son is one of the elders of the tribe whose honor rests in their place, the ones who built the first infrastructures of food culture in Israel, but at the same time the world of restaurants today is changing at a rapid pace, certainly after a period The corona virus, and this is the reason for closing the restaurant.”
“With all the respect and love that my son has, those who drive the Israeli restaurant world are young guys – young people who invest their soul and their money so that the restaurants will succeed and there will be a boom here. In some cases they fail, but Pekin is not a failure. We were a year ago the restaurant The most talked about in Israel. We worked with the biggest chefs in the last year, including Israel Aharoni, and there was a boom here, but restaurants need to know not only when to open but also when to close.”
Benny Clutter (75)
residence: Ramat Hasharon
Personal status: Divorced three times, in a relationship, father of two and grandfather of four
Past positions: Restaurateur, owner and manager of Pekin Restaurant
currently: Writer, lecturer and “busy being and not doing”