Annie Lee: Beijing’s Pizza Queen Dispels Myths About Her Name and Her Delivery Service

Annie Lee is not only a real person; she is a ball of energy. While she describes herself as someone who doesn’t like to talk, she barely stopped to breathe during our two-hour interview with a person that many in Beijing who have eaten at one of her nine restaurants didn’t know actually existed. 

Annie and her namesake restaurant are very much one, but they were not always. Her initial foray into food and beverage was not a pizza restaurant, but a café opened in 1996, on the south side of Gongti Beilu, across from what is now Taikoo Li South, in a strip of long demolished venues that also included the first outlet of supermarket chain Jenny Lou’s.
 

Despite significant foot traffic, Annie’s second-floor café wasn’t doing well. One day, she asked a customer, a German writer who came regularly and nursed a single cup of coffee for most of the day, why she wasn’t getting more business. “No one can remember your place,” he said. “You need a name that people can find easily and remember easily.” Soon afterwards, as the writer was leaving one day, he handed her a piece of paper with five English letters on it. “Your name should be Annie,” she recalled, and suggested that she name the venue with her newly christened moniker. She did both. 

In 1999, following the first outlet’s closure, Annie opened in Chaoyang Park West, at a store that continues to operate today. But there was a problem: just after to opening, water leaked into the restaurant from above and caused significant damage, causing her to close after just a short time. “I had 20 employees with nothing to do. So you know what we did? Delivery.” The restaurant chain’s reputation for quality and swift delivery has helped Annie’s win Best Delivery at the Beijinger Reader Restaurant Awards in 2014 and 2015, and has been a key factor in both its popularity and its success, to the point where some have wondered if pizzas are actually baking on the back of the delivery bikes. “No, no,” Annie laughed. “It’s simple: we prioritize delivery orders. If a delivery customer and a customer in the store order at the same time, we make the one for delivery first. With delivery, if a customer is unhappy, it’s easy to find where the problem occurred, but hard to solve it and make that person happy. I can look at the ticket and ask, ‘was the order not made promptly? Did it not go out quickly? Did we get the address wrong, or did the bike break down?’”

One of Annie’s (the restaurant) other great strengths has been its service to families and children. Again, Annie sees that as a happy accident. “When I first opened Annie’s in 1999, my son was about six. I couldn’t be at home to take care of him and I couldn’t leave him there, so he spent hours with me in the restaurant. One day he was watching the chef, and he said, ‘Mom, I want to make pizza too.’ At first I said no, but then I asked one of the chefs to give him a little bit of dough, a bit of cheese, and some sauce. He took such care to make it, and we baked it, and he was so proud! I took his photo with that pizza, and that photo still hangs in the Chaoyang Park West store,” Annie said. “Now, we let all of the children who come to the restaurant make their own, too.”

Other family-friendly ideas also came from her personal experience. “I gave my son paper and crayons to draw, he spent many hours, and he got really good at it. Now he’s studying fine art in Canada,” she said. Needless to say, younger visitors to Annie’s may not only draw there now, but can have their works displayed on Annie’s wall, or even in her newly-published book, Artists of Annie’s. 

Annie said that she has no particular plans for 2016, except to continue doing what Annie’s is good at: providing a good customer experience at a reasonable price. We’ll buy that.

More stories by this author here.

Email: stevenschwankert@thebeijinger.com
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Photos courtesy of Annie's