Commencement speaker Chris Tsui revels in the risks and rewards of running restaurants

By Tom Gresham

If Chris Tsui's father had been a carpenter, Tsui believes he would have been a carpenter, too. If he had been a plumber, Tsui would have followed in his footsteps into the plumbing business. An architect? Tsui would be designing buildings. However, Tsui's father owned and operated a string of restaurants in Richmond, Virginia. And so that's what Tsui does today - to striking success.

"I always knew I was going to follow in my father's footsteps," Tsui said.

Tsui is founder and president of EAT Restaurant Partners, which has a roster of 12 restaurants in the Richmond area. For Tsui, a Virginia Commonwealth University alum, the restaurant industry is simple second nature. His first job was working as a dishwasher and busboy as a teenager at his father's Peking restaurant location on Grove Avenue. Tsui's EAT now owns a restaurant in that same site - Beijing on Grove, a Chinese restaurant that is both different from the one where Tsui learned the business and animated by its spirit.

Tsui will deliver the keynote address at VCU's universitywide commencement ceremony on Saturday. Ahead of the speech - an honor he called the highlight of his career - he reflected on the path that brought him to running a thriving business and the characteristics he believes are critical to succeeding as an entrepreneur, especially in a business notorious for its short lifespans.

A student with a purpose

Tsui said he has fond memories of his time at VCU, particularly hanging out with friends at spots around campus. They often met to play pool at the tables in the Commons.

He majored in business administration in the School of Business with an eye on helping with his father's locally based chain of Peking restaurants.

"I knew that I was going to go work for him and get into the management side of things, so I wanted to learn as much about business management as I could," Tsui said.

In one of Tsui's first classes as a freshman, a business professor told the class that they should all subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. Tsui obeyed, and he's been a subscriber ever since.

"I liked learning about business and how things operated," Tsui said. "Right away, it helped broaden my horizons. When you're 18 or 19 years old, you usually know your hometown and that's kind of your world. But reading in the Wall Street Journal about all of these big companies - GE, Boeing or whoever - you start to learn more about the world. Instead of somebody at the restaurant spending 50 bucks for a dinner, these guys are spending $50 million - it really caught my interest."

"When I went to New York, it really opened my eyes to seeing restaurants that operated on a much higher level. I kept my fingers in the restaurant business through family and through observing. I realized that I still had it in my blood. Even when I was in New York, I understood I was going to be back in Richmond one day."

Perusing the paper day after day made Tsui more curious about how businesses operated outside of the restaurant field - and how that could relate to the food service industry. A class that proved especially meaningful was a logistics course that emphasized a first-in, first-out inventory strategy that aligned with operating a restaurant and managing a kitchen full of perishable food.

Throughout college, Tsui waited tables at the Peking location on Grove Avenue. Following graduation in 1991, Tsui managed that site for a couple years before he started to move around to other Peking locations, learning the ins and outs of each version of the restaurant, as well as the unique challenges and conditions that they faced.

"I was in the offices a lot in those days," Tsui said. "They showed me how to do all the numbers. Back then there was pen and paper, spreadsheets and grids. They taught me how to do that, how to look at the numbers and what to look for. My business classes at VCU had helped prepare me for taking all that on."

A departure to Wall Street lays the groundwork for EAT

Then, in 1995, Tsui's father died. In the aftermath, Tsui found himself pulling away from the restaurant business. He wanted something completely different. He moved to New York in 1996 and got a job on Wall Street. After years of reading about high finance in the Wall Street Journal, Tsui was now living it.

For six years, Tsui lived in the city and worked in the high-stakes climate of trading stocks.

"It was a great learning experience - not just on the Wall Street side of it," Tsui said. "It helped me to step back from restaurants and see things a little differently. I learned how money moves in the world. I loved every minute of it."

Still, Tsui never took a full step away from restaurants. He had family in the business in the area, and he haunted their restaurants while eagerly eating everything that New York, often argued as the best food city in the world, had to offer.

"Before, when I was in Richmond, that was my center of the universe," Tsui said. "When I went to New York, it really opened my eyes to seeing restaurants that operated on a much higher level. I kept my fingers in the restaurant business through family and through observing. I realized that I still had it in my blood. Even when I was in New York, I understood I was going to be back in Richmond one day."

Tsui lived just a few blocks from the World Trade Center and witnessed the second plane strike the South Tower on September 11, 2001. In the wake of the devastation, Tsui decided to return home - driven also by changes in financial trading that were altering the nature of his work.

Tsui figured he could either find a job in finance in Richmond or go to work for himself in the restaurant business. The choice proved easy. It was time to return to the life he was born into - but now he'd be starting fresh.

Tsui found a family friend who was looking to sell her restaurant, Osaka, in Short Pump. The timing was perfect, as was the concept.

"I knew when I came back to Richmond what restaurant I wanted to do - it was going to be a sushi restaurant," Tsui said. "I'd had great sushi in New York, and back then there were not many sushi restaurants in this area."

Tsui bought the business in 2002 and opened a second Osaka in 2005. Wild Ginger then followed in 2008 in the heart of the financial crisis. The pace of openings soon accelerated. Tsui had an entrepreneurial mindset and a knack for identifying concepts that fell into the dining zeitgeist.

Rather than taking one concept and opening a chain of locations, EAT's success has been marked by launching new brands that are distinctive from each other - ranging from Boulevard Burger & Brew to Wong's Tacos.

"We've just kept seeing room to grow and seeing more opportunities," Tsui said. "Each one that is successful kind of spurs us on to open more."

Kevin LaCivita, executive chef of Red Salt Chophouse and Sushi, cooks while Chris Tsui looks on. (Kevin Morley, Enterprise Marketing and Communications)

As rapidly as EAT has grown so far, Tsui's plans are only growing increasingly ambitious with aspirations to double the company's size in the next three to five years.

Tsui believes his success in Richmond during the past two decades is due in part to his time outside the industry he knew so well.

"It was important to me to go somewhere else and do something else," Tsui said. "If I never moved out of Richmond and just stayed in the restaurant business here, I think things would have looked different. Not a lot of people get to work in their family business, but getting different perspectives is important. And that applies to anyone. If you graduate with an art degree, maybe working for a manufacturing company or some other business would be good for you. It gives you a broader view, and I think that gives you a much better chance of being successful."

Finding lessons everywhere

The key to success in the restaurant business, Tsui said, is understanding and appreciating the gritty - sometimes tedious - back-office strategic analysis and planning that is the foundation for the field.

"There are a lot of great restaurants out there where the food is awesome, but you also have to understand how the numbers work to be successful," Tsui said. "A lot of people get in the restaurant business because it looks glamorous, but they don't see what goes on behind the curtains. But behind the curtains is where the business happens - doing the books, profit-and-loss statements, managing the invoices. I've learned how to do that well."

Tsui describes himself as a "calculated risk-taker" who is keenly attuned to the low margins and feeble hit rate in the restaurant business but also willing to embrace that environment and hunt for the gaps in the marketplace where his business can thrive.

"In life, I just think you need to take risks - whether it's work or personal, sometimes you just have to try things," Tsui said. "Failing is a great way to learn."

Tsui believes the key to resilience - a critical trait for any entrepreneur - is patience. That is true whether you are contending with a global pandemic that is upending your entire industry or with a wayward motorist crashing through your front door and putting your restaurant out of business for an extended period of time, as recently happened to Boulevard Burger & Brew.

"You need some patience to figure out what the best way forward is," Tsui said. "With Boulevard Burger, I didn't expect some car to make it a drive-thru restaurant, but you have to be ready to say, 'OK, now what?' You need to get to work and get busy managing the situation rather than just fall into despair and say, 'Oh, gosh, how could this happen?'"

Kevin LaCivita, executive chef of Red Salt Chophouse and Sushi, cooks while Chris Tsui looks on. (Kevin Morley, Enterprise Marketing and Communications)

Tsui agreed that growing up in the restaurant business helped forge instincts of what does and doesn't work in the industry, and there are lessons he learned from his father 40 years ago that still resonate with him today - lessons he is grateful for.

"I think I had a leg up learning from my Dad," Tsui said. "I remember working with him, I would say to myself, 'I wouldn't do it that way.' And then when I had my own restaurant and had to actually run it, I'd go, 'Ah, I see why he did it that way.' Even with all my experience, I knew how much I didn't know when I got started running my own restaurants. I have learned so much since then, and I'm always learning every day. That's what makes it fun."

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