Snow (Xiaoxue) Qu is a legendary Chinese girl reported by many top news media, including NBC, ABC, and FOX. Snow (Xiaoxue) Qu is a restaurant owner, internet marketer, programmer, video editor, and graphic designer. Indeed, she is a girl blessed with diverse talents. 9 years ago, Snow (Xiaoxue) Qu came to the United States to obtain her degree in finance from San Francisco State University, which she completed while remaining in the top 2% of the university. She received recognition and scholarships from the White House, California State Assembly, California State Senate, universities, and non-profit organizations that recognized her talents. Upon completion, she returned to her mother country and started a restaurant in Beijing called “云水人家”, which means “Yunnan Family”. The American influence helped her to offer a unique experience to customers through her restaurant, and has subsequently become one of the most popular restaurants in Beijing. Meanwhile, Snow (Xiaoxue) Qu is serving the community with her other talents.
Snow (Xiaoxue) Qu got the idea of starting her own restaurant while she was in the United States. She planned hard so that she could kick off the restaurant following her return to China. Everything went as Snow (Xiaoxue) Qu planned. Most of the food ingredients of Yunnan Family are shipped directly from Yunnan by air. Based on the cooking methods of local minorities in Yunnan and combined with secret ingredients and recipes from all over the world, including the United States, France, South Korea, Japan and other countries, the founder Snow (Xiaoxue) Qu has created a variety of “innovative blending dishes of Chinese and Western nations” with unique exotic flavors.
Every corner of Yunnan Family has a spectacular look. In this Yunnan-style fairyland with “Cloud of Zen”, every design was created by Snow (Xiaoxue) Qu. “Waiting for rain is the fate of an umbrella.” The restaurant’s ceiling is decorated with dozens of hand-made oil-paper umbrellas (China’s national intangible cultural heritage) and hand-painted lanterns. Accompanied by the light music Cloud of Zen, the guests entering the restaurant seem to transcend the chaos and confusion of the world. In the middle of the restaurant, there is a mural that best represents Yunnan, A Painting of Blue Peafowl. For Dai people in Yunnan, the peafowl symbolizes beauty, friendship, good fortune, and sacredness. On the right side, there is A Painting of Mahakala Thang-ga, while on the left, there is a Buddha mural with 3D relief spray-painting technology and a marble cross-section mural, which are as realistic as a copper sculpture. Yunnan is a place where China’s various Buddhist schools converge. The history of Chinese Buddhism started from around the Common Era, when Buddhism spread from ancient India to China. Through long-term spreading and development, it formed Chinese Buddhism with Chinese national characteristics. The whole restaurant looks very warm under the light of wall lamps, spotlights, and ceiling lamps. When the guests enter the restaurant, they are immediately attracted by its decoration.
All food ingredients of the dishes are derived from the world’s last piece of pure land, the South of Colorful Clouds, Yunnan. Snow (Xiaoxue) Qu’s hometown of Yunnan is in the Southwest border area of China, which borders on many Southeast Asian countries, such as Myanmar, Vietnam, and Laos. The typical low latitude and high altitudes have created a rich and diverse three-dimensional climate in Yunnan and made the region one of the most diversified provinces in China for animals, plants, and ethnic minorities. All the dishes of Yunnan Family use a variety of wild mushrooms, exotic flowers, and rare herbs as their main ingredients. Lijiang Preserved Spareribs of Yunnan Family come from free-roaming pigs in the farm yard of Naxi nationality in the snow-capped mountains and plateau and are produced through air drying after being preserved. Yunnan Family’s Snow Ginseng with Honey originates solely from the deep mountains and forests in Dali, Yunnan, and is shaped like Cordyceps sinensis. Cultivated by fertile soil, moistened by snow water in the mountains, and absorbing the essence of the sun and the moon, it is rich in nutriments and is called “Shibao Shanzhen” by locals. Yunnan Family uses pure chicken soup to make its Cross-bridge Rice Noodle. A pot of chicken soup should be carefully boiled with pig bones, old hen, duck, pig skin, and Yunnan Xuanwei ham for 10 hours, while the ingredients are mixed by the chef, who learned his cooking skills from a master in Yunnan through numerous standardized, quantitative extractions, and countless nights of weighing Chinese herbal medicine and many ingredients. The “Lemongrass Roasted Tilapia” and “Lemon Leaf Chicken” of Yunnan Family are made from dozens of plant herbs on the Yunnan plateau, coupled with lemon leaves, lemongrass and Thai parsley, with a unique flavor.
The Most Delicious Dry Fried String Beans was researched and developed by Snow (Xiaoxue) Qu, and the recipe differs totally from the conventional understanding of dry fried string beans, and is the most delicious dish Snow (Xiaoxue) Qu’s father has ever had. Yunnan Family’s Royal Soup Simmered Mushroom is taught secretly by a national master of Yunnan cuisine, which is rich in a variety of rare wild mushrooms and high-concentration collagen. It is elaborately boiled with old chicken, old goose, trotters, ham, gastrodia elata, medlar and more than 20 kinds of raw materials for 8 hours. The edible flower has spent over a hundred years in Yunnan’s food and beverage history. Snow (Xiaoxue) Qu’s restaurant uses a variety of exotic flowers and rare herbs as food materials to make mouth-watering delicacies, where people can taste delicious food made of jasmine, rose, broom, and Pu’er tea. Besides exotic flowers and wild mushrooms, people can also taste an “insect feast” with fried bamboo worms, locusts and mint leaves. Snow (Xiaoxue) Qu not only ships the raw ingredients from Yunnan directly by air and adopts the unique cooking methods of ethnic minorities in Yunnan, but also creates a variety of “innovative blending dishes of Chinese and Western nations”, combining Chinese and Western cultures. A dish called “Jade Dragon Snow Mountain Veal” has become uniquely exotic with the fusion of American barbecue sauce, American black pepper sauce, Japanese wasabi oil, Korean barbecue sauce, and the Yunnan Va people’s secret sauce.
Snow (Xiaoxue) Qu was a tech-savvy girl. She used the maximum benefit of technology to increase the efficiency of running her restaurant, along with promoting it and taking it to the next level.
Snow (Xiaoxue) Qu said China may be the world’s largest and fastest-growing market using mobile payments and on-demand services. She says that cash and credit cards are gradually becoming obsolete in China. Most Chinese people use mobile payments with QR code scanning technology, such as Alipay and WeChat Wallet, to pay for restaurants, supermarkets, underground trains, movie theaters, utility bills, and even college tuition. More than 70% of the customers coming to her restaurant use mobile payment.
An on-demand service, called O2O (Online To Offline), is popular in China. Customers can order and purchase restaurant food through a mobile app or website, such as the Meituan or Baidu online food delivery service. A smart device can automatically print the order and send alerts to the kitchen. Once the food is prepared, “riders” from the Meituan or Baidu online food delivery network will come to the restaurants to pick up and deliver the food. She also uses an e-vendor, called “Meicai”, that provides service to thousands of restaurants in China, to order restaurant ingredients, sauces, and supplies at wholesale prices and to get her orders delivered the next day.
Even when she is not in the restaurant, she can use a smart mobile app with cloud-computing technology and a visualized interface, called 2Dfire, invested in by Alibaba, to monitor everything happening in her restaurant in real time, such as revenues, costs, inventories, number of customers served, which foods are ordered, which ingredients customers like or are allergic to, or any mistakes made by employees.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and big data are widely used in the Chinese e-commerce industry. She knows online businesses can use AI and big data to analyze which and how many keywords their competitors are using to improve the rankings of certain products and services and get more traffic on Taobao (the largest e-commerce website in China, owned by Alibaba). By using other sophisticated online platforms, such as sycm.taobao.com, online businesses can use AI and big data to help them deliver advertisements automatically, accurately, and efficiently based on customers’ geolocation, gender, age, occupation, income level, hobby, preference of payment, and even local weather conditions.
According to Andrew Ng, the former chief scientist at Baidu and a professor at Stanford University, China may be the leading country for artificial intelligence (AI) because it has a huge market that can support a larger amount of data for AI to process. Snow (Xiaoxue) Qu is now looking forward to using big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the efficiency of operating and launch innovative marketing campaigns to increase the customer base. With all these skills and efforts of Snow (Xiaoxue) Qu, her restaurant will undoubtedly become well-known in China in the near future.