Would you like kimchee with that baguette?

An unusual aspect of globalization is hitting Beijing, and it involves French bakeries.

Curiously, it’s taken me five days in Seoul to realize this. That’s where I was this past week.

In the past few months, a chain of bakeries, Paris Baguette, has been springing up all around our southeast Beijing neighborhood. My wife is fond of the place, and goes out of her way to shop there. 

Meanwhile, across Beijing I recently spotted another French-style bakery, Tous Les Jours, that looked very inviting. Several of the bakeries have opened around the city now, and I see from the internet that the chain entered Shanghai last year.

Well, guess who owns the French bakery chains? South Korean companies. That’s right, South Korean corporations are opening faux French bakeries in China and doing so in force.

I didn’t realize this until I was driving around Seoul the other day and saw a Tous Les Jours bakery and commented to a companion that we have the same chain in Beijing. She promptly remarked that it was a South Korean company. Now I see on the internet that Tous Les Jours belongs to South Korea’s biggest foodstuff company, CJ Corporation. I then started seeing Paris Baguettes in Seoul and soon realized it, too, is South Korean.

Paris Baguette now has dozens of stores in Beijing, Hangzhou, Suzhou and Shanghai.

There’s more: CJ Corp, apparently looking to ride the back of any catchy foreign dining experience to commercial success, is opening a noodle shop here in China. It’s going after a little Japanese cachet now. The name of the noodle shop is Czen, presumably pronounced like the Zen of Zen Buddhism in Japan.

What’s next? A Sri Lankan-owned German-style beer hall? An Austrian chain of Thai food restaurants? Mon dieu…