High Life

HIGH LIFE 23 I t’s just past five o’clock on a Friday afternoon as we wait for our audience with Allan Zeman. One assistant silently brings us water. A second politely promises our subject is not far away. Zeman’s office is luxurious but unpretentious, with framed photographs of important meetings discreetly on display. Some pillars of books, including President Xi’s The Governance of China , are neatly stacked halfway to the ceiling. Stylish artistic pieces, no doubt each with its ownstory, are scattered about. Suddenly, he bounds through the door, a fashionable 10 minutes late. After a flurry of document signing, the man with the trademark upturned collar sits down and becomes focused on our discussion. At this time of the week many captains of industry might be jetting off for a weekend getaway or enjoying a relaxing whisky at the club. Not Zeman. It’s difficult to select one attribute to describe him, but it could well be his relentless energy and enthusiasm for, well, just about everything. Take theprojecthe ismostknown for, Lan Kwai Fong. Some 35 years ago, Zeman – who recognized the lack of upscale restaurants outside of five- star hotels to invite international business associates to – decided to create his own, wondering why Hong Kong didn’t have an equivalent to New York’s SoHo or London’sWest End. Step one was to convert an old supermarket into a restaurant. It worked and he began to repeat the process, acquiring old warehouses and offices and normalizing the concept of restaurants being in the upper floors of office buildings – somethingZemanhadexperiencedin Tokyo. These restaurant conversions doubled or even tripled the lease rentals and resultant building values and the area gradually evolved into the Lan Kwai Fong of today.