Yum China's Premium Experiment: Les Élites by Pizza Hut Shanghai
Yum China has launched some interesting initiatives in the premium space: adding premium menu items to Pizza Hut, opening a high-end Italian restaurant on the Bund (with no Pizza Hut branding), and this restaurant, Les Élites by Pizza Hut. I might guess that this restaurant is test experiment into a Pizza Hut-based premium brand extension.
Les Élites has a prominent location right off of Nanjing West Road, and you’re greeted by this heavy set door. Pizza Hut branding is subtle but noticeable.
All the pictures of the restaurant features this curved ceiling, mirrored to give the effect of a tunnel.
The rest of the restaurant, from the tables, chairs, bright lighting, and loud music, still felt quite “mass.”
Bread was served with a compound herb butter, which was delighful.
The salad with squash was decent.
There were very few vegetarian options on the menu: basically the salad above and this roasted vegetable pappardelle below. I didn’t taste this myself, since my vegetarian colleague only had this and some salad to eat!
I had high hopes for this Parma ham and truffle pizza. Look how tiny those dots of truffle paste are! The crust itself was nice - a bit of resistance on the outside with a pillowy inside.
The “secret recipe meat sauce” lasagna is one of their signatures, apparently. It was ok… a bit sweet, especially with the caramelized onion jam on top.
That caramelized onion jam reappeared in the low-temperature cooked Australian M4 Wagyu beef tenderloin. Chinese people are all about the “M” grades of beef nowadays! (A scale of 0 to 9 grades the degree of marbling in the beef, with 9 having the most marbling.) This was very tasty, with a good char on the outside. It’s just funny that the quenelle of caramelized onion appeared in an identical way as the lasagna.
They had a lot of virgin cocktails which was nice - this was a lemongrass jasmine iced tea, if I’m not mistaken.
The whole meal was capped off with a misnardise of mini madeleines. A cute touch that you would not find at a regular Pizza Hut!
Overall, I really wanted to like Les Élites. I was hoping for a fun, accessible version of high-end Italian cuisine. But between the sweetish flavor of the lasagna, the seriously paltry dots of truffle on the pizza, and the furniture and ambience, this felt like something not much better than a regular (Chinese) Pizza Hut (which are already several cuts above US Pizza Huts).
