COLUMN ONE : Fast Food in Asia on Fast Track : From Taipei to Jakarta, American fare is big business. Marketers have even figured out how to sell pizza to cheese-wary Thais. Critics warn of losing traditions, gaining weight.

The restaurant seemed strangely familiar: A Los Angeles Times news rack was nestled next to the front door, the Raiders were playing on the large-screen televisions overhead and yuppies at the bar munched buffalo wings and “Dodger Dogs.”

The menu offered Rodeo Drive nachos, Santa Monica clam chowder and a Wilshire vegetarian club sandwich. The ambience seemed straight out of Melrose Avenue; the blond furniture suggested a tony Encino bistro.

But barely visible, past the neon signs in the polished plate glass, loomed the Bank of China building--an unmistakable Hong Kong landmark. Welcome to L.A. Cafe, a new restaurant chain, which is doing booming business by selling a slice of California to Asia.

“This wouldn’t work in L.A., where it’s old hat,” said J.R. Robertson, an expatriate American insurance executive who founded the restaurant a year ago. “We’re selling the L.A. lifestyle, which seems exotic here. Asians are throwing away the values of older generations and this kind of place is different from anything they are used to.”

While American gourmets increasingly experiment with the foods of Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and even Myanmar, Asian diners, especially in the prosperous crescent from Taipei to Jakarta, have fallen head over heels in love with American food--from Big Macs to Haagen-Dazs.

In fact, when fast-food franchiser McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in Singapore in 1982, it quickly became the biggest selling McDonald’s in the world. Now, eight of the world’s top 10 selling McDonald’s are in Asia, seven of them in Hong Kong and one in Beijing.

Take a stroll down Bangkok’s Silom Road and you might think you have been transported to a suburban American shopping mall: McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Swensen’s Ice Cream and a Sizzler Steak House anchor one side of the avenue, facing Arby’s and Burger King on the other.

Tony Roma’s, a Dallas-based franchise chain that specializes in ribs, opened its doors in Singapore a year ago and has a line around the block every night. With only 130 seats, it sells 800 meals a day. Franchised by Indonesian entrepreneurs, Tony Roma’s has expanded to Hong Kong and Jakarta, where every month it manages to sell a 20-foot container-load of pork ribs in the world’s largest Muslim country; 15 more branches are to open in the region in the next three years.

“Business is just terrific; it’s unreal,” said Karl Faux, an Austrian hotelier who oversees Tony Roma’s operations in Southeast Asia for franchise owner Mas Millenium. “Anything that is American is really hot right now.”

Like Tony Roma’s, some American companies have found success by selling food that is familiar to Asian tastes but is presented in an unusual setting. Pork ribs, after all, have been a mainstay of the ethnic Chinese diet for thousands of years.

Another company that is advancing in Asia is Kentucky Fried Chicken, now a subsidiary of PepsiCo Inc. and renamed simply KFC with “the colonel” demoted to a peripheral role. Tim Lane, KFC’s president for Asia, said that in the last four years, the number of its chicken restaurants in Southeast Asia has shot from 250 to 600; the Japanese market has grown from 600 to 1,000. Thailand, where there were none as recently as 1989, has 50 KFC outlets.

“Chicken is a great concept for Asia because it’s familiar and there are no health or religious issues,” Lane said. “We’re selling Americana and your slice of it. We’re concentrated in areas with folks with rising incomes.”

While rents are often higher in Asia’s congested cities than in the United States, increased business more than compensates. Lane said that while the typical KFC restaurant in America does $200,000 a month in business, the average outlet in Asia rakes in $750,000.

One man who successfully challenged the conventional wisdom that food has to be familiar to succeed in Asia is Bill Heinecke, an American who grew up in Thailand. When he proposed opening a Bangkok Pizza Hut in 1982, potential investors told him he had lost his marbles; even the franchiser was dubious. Asians, they said, are notorious for hating cheese--and pizza uses lots of it.

But Heinecke is the one who is laughing these days. He just opened his 50th Pizza Hut in Thailand and is christening a new restaurant every 15 days. His company also just opened Thailand’s first factory to make cheese, cranking out 36 tons of mozzarella a month.

“Everybody thinks the world is full of different people,” Heinecke said in an interview. “But people are more similar than dissimilar. People haven’t given up eating Thai food, but a secretary in an Esprit skirt is no longer willing to pull up a stool at a noodle stall. It’s now considered part of the modern lifestyle to be seen in a fast-food restaurant.”

The ever-inventive Heinecke has capitalized on Bangkok’s notorious traffic by hiring 500 motorcycle delivery boys and promising a pizza delivery in 30 minutes, despite the gridlock. Most of his new restaurants don’t even have tables and chairs but are simply kitchens and take-out windows.

Daniel Ng, a chemical engineer who became a millionaire as the Hong Kong franchise owner for McDonald’s, recalled that in the early 1980s, many people warned him against entering the fast-food business. “Chinese won’t eat hamburgers,” he recalled being told by friends. “How can you do market research with food nobody had ever heard of in an ambience no one knew?”

Ng now owns 72 McDonald’s in Hong Kong, three in China and has a one-third interest of the franchise in Singapore.

Two factors seem to have helped speed American food into Asia during the last few years. First, the region is growing substantially richer, thanks to an economic boom that began in the early 1980s and has sustained growth rates of 8% to 10% a year in many countries. That translates as rapidly rising salaries for many urban workers. “Basically, all the Asians are getting discretionary income making the widgets we are importing,” said the L.A. Cafe’s Robertson.

Secondly, the region is not only getting richer but growing older. “A maturing Thai population will provide demographic support for a fast-food boom into the next century,” said a study by Smith New Court, a stock brokerage company, which quoted census figures showing that 70% of the population is younger than 30. “Combined with increasing upward mobility in this dynamic sector, consumer spending will continue its current up-trend.”

One thing that sets Asia apart from other regions is the relative strength of its families. Food outlets with the strongest appeal to families with children seem to have the most success.

McDonald’s in Hong Kong staged 18,000 birthday parties last year for 500,000 children. Singapore’s franchise owner paid for a weekly television show hosted by a Chinese version of Ronald McDonald, the restaurant’s trademark clown. “Much more than in the United States, we’re very kid-oriented in Asia,” KFC’s Lane said.

Most major restaurant operators try to keep their menus identical with the American market and import food from America when no local substitutes can be found. Tony Roma’s coleslaw comes from Dallas; KFC’s chicken comes from the United States and Australia.

Some have found, however, that Asian tastes differ: In Thailand, Pizza Hut puts pineapple on some of its pizzas and hot sauce on the tables; KFC offers a “hot and spicy” version of the old standby for Asians accustomed to piquant food. Burger King found that Thais, most of whom are Buddhists, weren’t snapping up beef burgers and found a niche by promoting chicken sandwiches. McDonald’s countered by offering fried chicken, which is not available at American outlets.

“It took a while to get a handle on the market,” conceded Stephen Hunt, an American executive who works for the Central Group, Burger King’s franchise owner in Bangkok. “What we didn’t realize at the time was that apparently a large segment of the market doesn’t eat beef. We were advertising products with a limited appeal.”

When McDonald’s opens in India, now expected in about three years, beef Big Macs won’t even be on the menu because of the Hindu reverence for the cow. “We haven’t decided yet what will be there, but it will probably involve chicken,” said Mike Gordon, director of communications for McDonald’s Inc.

American marketers also had to rethink strategies to accommodate cultural differences.

The Hard Rock Cafe, for example, was a big success in Singapore and Jakarta, but stumbled in Thailand. For one thing, Thai customers were offended by the Hard Rock’s legendary friendly waiters, who were encouraged to sit with the customers to take their orders, said James Choong, financial director of the restaurant. Thais were not used to sitting with servants. Another complication was the name--many Thais considered a “cafe” a euphemism for a brothel. The company stuck with its name, but got its waiters to take orders in more formal fashion--standing up; business is slowly improving.

Similarly, a Hong Kong-based restaurant chain called Dan Ryan’s Chicago Bar and Grill, which tries to evoke the image of an old Midwestern steak house, faced a negative image in Singapore because families would normally never go to a “bar” to eat.

One American chocolate chip cookie company encountered a hostile market because the gourmet treats were simply too expensive for local pocketbooks, even with the region’s greater affluence.

The invasion by American food also has not been universally welcomed in Asian countries, many of which view with suspicion any hint that American values are being imported to their relatively conservative countries.

“We should not be swayed by the trend towards eating non-rice food, including Western food,” Indonesia’s vice president Try Sutrisno warned in a speech last September. He said Indonesians should go back to eating traditional food that requires “more chewing.”

But, so far, there have been few local efforts to repulse the American onslaught. One Thai restaurant chain, S&P;, has started offering Thai food in a Western fast-food type setting. A number of local fast-food efforts in the region have failed, however, because American brands are so well-known and the chains achieve tremendous economies of scale by buying in bulk.

Satit Niyomyart, dean of sociology at Bangkok’s Thammasat University, said he believes that Western food has become popular in Thailand because so many Thais have studied in the United States. There are 200,000 Thais in California alone, he noted. “It’s a phenomenon of the past 15 years,” Satit said. “Young Thais are trying to become Westernized. These lifestyle changes are worrying. People are gaining weight and getting fat. That never used to happen.”

One big change wrought by the shift toward a Western diet is that young Asians are getting bigger than their parents, with average height and weight ratios much higher for the young. A study of young people published in Singapore last month showed that, on average, 18-year-old boys weighed 120 pounds in 1983 and 137 pounds in 1993. Girls added 2.5 pounds, on average.

Because fast food is so new to the region and its clientele is so young, restaurant owners have yet to hear many concerns expressed about the healthfulness of their fare. In part, they suspect that Asian families are eating fast food only occasionally and don’t have to start worrying about fat in their diet as do their American counterparts.

As for the future of the industry, almost all of the restaurant executives interviewed believed that they have only scratched the surface of fast food in Asia. “If anything, the growth will be accelerated,” said Gordon of McDonald’s, who noted the chain is adding 1,000 restaurants a year outside the United States and doubling its presence in China next year. “There’s a lot of opportunity and potential in the Asian market.”

Cerebos Pacific, which holds the franchise for Pizza Hut in Singapore and Malaysia, is adding 15 restaurants in the next few months. It reported a $56-million profit last year.

Even on the day last week that President Clinton lifted the American trade embargo against Vietnam, McDonald’s received inquiries about the possibility of opening restaurants in Asia’s newest market. But Gordon said there were “no plans to go into Vietnam . . . yet.”