Dragon Noodles Academy’s adds to celebration of Chinese culture

Dragon Noodles Academy (DNA)’s opening in November 2016 raised the number of brands in Dining Workshop’s stable of restaurants to three. The year had earlier seen the advent of Urban Park and Yum Cha both opening outlets in Tsim Sha Tsui and Central.

The restaurant group’s founder and director is Shanghai-born Wang Zhongying, who moved to Hong Kong 25 years ago, when she organised cultural education exchanges between the mainland and Hong Kong.

“I used to arrange educational tours to Hong Kong for mainland children,” she says. “So being in the travel industry, I learnt a lot about the restaurant scene here.”

Wang loved the energy and international diversity that the city and its restaurants offered. However, she desired to eat familiar food, dishes that she missed from home, so she did something about it.

“I saw that [mainland restaurant brand] Xiao Nan Guo offered Shanghai food that was much healthier and lighter and more suitable for the local palate than the Chinese food in Hong Kong [at the time], so I decided to bring the brand to the city.” She hasn’t looked back since making that decision 16 years ago. In 2012, Xiao Nan Guo listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange.

Wang also saw the potential in Honeymoon Dessert and she decided to take the brand to China as there was nobody offering such a wide variety of desserts with the range of fruits. There are now more than 300 Honeymoon Dessert branches in China.

Wang, who is passionate about promoting Chinese culture, decided to start a new food and beverage group in 2015, so she assembled people she had worked with previously. This was the start of Dining Workshop. For their first concept, they wanted to leverage the power of young people and social media which they felt was important and could influence older generations to try new things, so they came up with the concept of Yum Cha, which offers innovative dim sum and Instagram-worthy dishes.