Chapter 2: Maxim's

Part One: What Shape Is the Structure? ｜ 📖 Who's Collecting at the Door ｜ 📖 Full Edition

---

Chapter 2: Maxim's

Prologue: The Taste of Chicken

"When Cantonese people eat chicken, what matters most is that it tastes of chicken." The line came from a Hong Kong television food show years ago and was later passed around online forums as a joke: of course chicken tastes of chicken. In 2007, the food writer Chua Lam shot an advertisement for the Macau bakery Koi Kei's almond biscuits, took a bite and said, "the biscuit tastes of biscuit." The laughter was louder this time; reportedly, after the ad played in a cinema, someone in the audience said "that's meaningless," and the advertiser soon cut the line.¹ Two years later, his co-host on a show exclaimed, "what a strong taste of pork!" and became a punchline too.¹

Even then, some people online pushed back: a biscuit tasting of biscuit, like chicken tasting of chicken, is not something you can take for granted.¹

They were right. Once a chicken has been cut up, chilled, shipped long distances and divided into bags, little of its fresh flavor is likely to remain.² Hong Kong's New Territories still have twenty-odd licensed chicken farms,² but locally raised live chicken has become steadily rarer, and most people now eat chilled chicken (shipped cold, not freshly slaughtered). The free-range chickens of my childhood and birds raised fast and fattened for market taste like two different things. Pork is the same: most people can no longer say what today's pigs are fed. In the budget market, chilled meat is the norm and reconstituted meat has started to appear. So with char siu, Cantonese barbecued pork: the old open-fire hanging ovens have all but disappeared, and the best char siu in Hong Kong today relies mostly on its sauce. To eat it the traditional way, you probably have to go to Australia or Canada and find an old master who emigrated. Chua Lam died in 2025,³ and the lines people once laughed at sound less and less like nonsense.

Flavor is hard to put into a financial statement. It is not on the balance sheet, yet it is a restaurant business's real foundation. Maxim's fast-food outlets went from good to bad; Maxim's Cantonese restaurants were good twenty-odd years ago. None of this is news. It is simply something many Hong Kong people know in their bones.

On September 30, 2026, Maxim's and Jardine Matheson split. When I first heard the news, I thought Jardines had paid Maxim's an extra HK$2.6 billion and that Maxim's was going it alone with cash in hand. When I checked, the direction turned out to be the exact opposite: it was the Maxim's side that paid.

A deal in which even the direction of the money is easy to misread is the right test of whether the structure described in Chapter 1 can travel beyond the tech industry. The original draft of this chapter was written on October 3, 2026, three days after the deal was announced; the deal itself is not expected to close until the end of the first quarter of 2027. So this is not hindsight but a forecast on file: write down the script first, then watch how reality plays out.

Here are the chapter's three points up front. First, when capital takes over a company, its moves follow a recurring sequence. Second, the costs those moves save end up where consumers can't see them: what used to be the passing grade becomes a luxury you pay extra for. Third, because every generation takes what it first saw as normal, few people notice the loss. Maxim's is this chapter's example, not its subject; change the company and the city, and the three points still hold.

1. A Four-Step Script

Chapter 1 looked at a loop inside one company. Pull the camera back, and capital's moves after taking over a company also follow a recurring script. In What Is the Capital Game Playing? I used Sony and Microsoft's Xbox as cases and summed it up in four steps:⁴

1. Personnel replacement: install management with a finance background.

2. Dilution through acquisition: change the ownership structure through mergers or new shareholders.

3. Precision layoffs: cut the units whose returns don't look good enough.

4. Narrative packaging: explain it all with a new story. Each round's story has a new name; in tech, this round it is called AI (see Chapter 1).

The fifth step is narrative laundering: through reposting and translation, these moves get described as "transformation," "restructuring," "win-win." The sequel, Who Says Games Can't Be Made?, asked a further question: once hollowed out, how long can a shell survive?⁵

Each section below opens with one sentence restating the relevant step, so there is no need to flip back.

2. The First Round Is Already Over

First, the deal itself. The Maxim's brand was founded in 1956; from 1972 it has been a joint venture between the Wu family's Hong Kong Foods and Jardines, with Jardines holding half through DFI Retail Group. The September 30, 2026 deal is DFI exiting Maxim's: Maxim's hands over Coffee Concepts, its Starbucks franchise business covering more than 1,100 stores in seven Asian markets, and DFI also receives about US$340 million (about HK$2.65 billion) in cash. The Wu family thereby becomes the sole owner of Maxim's.⁶

In other words, the Wus bought back the other half of their own company with their steadiest cash cow plus a sum of cash.

The Most Valuable Thing Wasn't Theirs

Maxim's is not just a restaurant group; it is also a brand franchisee. Mainland Chinese media have called it the restaurant world's "trendy-brand buyer": Starbucks, Genki Sushi, Ippudo and Shake Shack all opened in mainland China with Maxim's behind them.⁷ The advantage of franchising is that you don't have to build the brands yourself; the drawback is that the brands aren't yours. Starbucks, which was taken away in this deal, is exactly such a brand.

This matters for the second round. The value of a franchised brand can walk away with the contract. What Maxim's actually owns are its own brands, such as its mooncakes, its bakeries, Maxim's MX and Jade Garden, plus the capability to operate foreign brands under franchise. Whether Maxim's later brings in private equity, lists or sells, a buyer's first question will be whether it is buying brands or a stack of contracts.

What Jardines Did

The direction from which the deal was launched deserves attention. Jardines chairman Ben Keswick has been pushing a group restructuring in recent years, turning Jardines from a traditional "owner-operator" into a portfolio company that recycles capital.⁸ DFI described the deal as a key step from portfolio company to focused operating company: the Starbucks business immediately lifts revenue and operating margin, the cash strengthens the balance sheet, and the payout ratio for 2027 rises to 80%.⁹ After the announcement, DFI's share price jumped 6.6%.⁸

Take the best asset, collect cash, raise the dividend, and the market applauds. Anyone who has read Chapter 1 will find this familiar.

A Listed Company's Illness Without a Listed Company's Life

Maxim's position over the past fifty-four years was unusual. It was not listed and did not have to publish accounts; but its profits flowed into DFI's books under the equity method,¹⁰ and DFI had to answer to public shareholders. The rhythm and pressure of a listed company came down to it through its shareholder; the benefits of being listed, such as raising money in the market, liquid shares and a market valuation, it had none of.

The more fundamental constraint was the 50/50 split. Day-to-day operations were run by the Wus, but selling a brand, bringing in a new shareholder or a large-scale transformation could be held up by either side. An ownership structure like that is almost impossible to sell: no buyer wants half a company plus a partner with a veto.

So my judgment is this: the first round of the capital game is over. The player was Jardines, and Maxim's is the part left behind. Only one question remains: will the Wu family start a second round?

3. The Four Steps, Matched

To apply the four-step script to Maxim's, each step needs a signal that tells the cases apart. The reason is simple: the restaurant industry itself is shrinking, so many moves could be part of the script or just normal business. A comparison that can't tell them apart is only forcing a framework onto the facts.

Personnel Replacement

The script's first step is installing management with a finance background. At present, Maxim's chairman and managing director is Michael Wu, with the family at the helm.

Signal to watch: after the deal closes, will Maxim's parachute in a CEO or CFO from private equity, investment banking or finance? The family continuing to run things itself is a counter-signal.

Dilution Through Acquisition

The second step is changing the ownership structure through mergers or new shareholders. This time Maxim's went the opposite way: from 50% back to 100%.

But the opposite direction is precisely the precondition for the next step. The media have already speculated that with a simpler ownership structure, bringing in a private equity fund or a strategic shareholder, or even listing, will be much easier; and with many Hong Kong brands falling into mainland Chinese hands in recent years, whether Maxim's will be sold is being watched too.⁸

Signal to watch: does a private equity or strategic investor buy in, even a minority stake? Is any individual brand sold or licensed separately?

Precision Layoffs

The third step is cutting the units whose returns don't look good enough. In early 2026, Maxim's had already closed the Tseung Kwan O branch of Jade Garden.¹¹

But closing a restaurant is not evidence in itself. The whole Cantonese restaurant sector is shrinking, and closing a loss-making branch is what any operator would do.

Signal to watch: are the branches Maxim's closes losing money, or "profitable but not returning enough"? The first is stopping the bleeding; the second is dressing up the books for the next buyer. Another signal is central functions: are departments that don't directly produce revenue, such as R&D, purchasing and chef training, cut sharply?

Narrative Packaging

The fourth step is explaining everything with a new story. In tech, this round's story is AI; the restaurant industry's equivalent is "expanding into Southeast Asia," "Greater Bay Area growth," "digitalization." In the deal announcement, Michael Wu already said Maxim's would seize growth opportunities in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Southeast Asia and beyond.⁶

Signal to watch: after the story, does real money follow? Capital spending on new stores, new factories and new markets is the operator's route; a story without spending is packaging.

4. The Fifth Step: A Misread Deal

The fifth step needs no waiting; it can already be seen.

On the evening the deal was announced, the media used much the same words: "split," "business realignment," "each takes what it needs," "amicable parting," and some described DFI as "generously raising its dividend."¹² None of these words is wrong, but they share one effect: they describe a transaction as two equal partners parting on good terms.

The actual structure is not symmetrical. One side takes a stable cash cow plus cash, and its share price rises that day; the other keeps its brands and control but loses its steadiest cash flow, and may have to renegotiate the favorable leases it enjoyed in Jardine-linked properties.⁸ Who paid and who was paid is invisible in the word "split."

I am the evidence myself. When I first heard the news, I thought Jardines had paid Maxim's. If someone who has followed capital moves for years can misread the direction of the money, what an ordinary reader takes from "split" is probably just a warm impression: two old partners of fifty-four years, going their separate ways.

That is not to say anyone set out to mislead. Narrative laundering never needs a conspiracy, only that everyone who passes the story along chooses the smoothest word. As with Chapter 1's loop, no step needs a villain.

5. A Shop, Not a Shell

At this point it would be easy to write Maxim's up as the shell from Who Says Games Can't Be Made? That would be wrong.

After the deal, Maxim's still has more than 1,000 restaurants and bakeries across eight markets.⁹ More persuasive are DFI's own numbers: DFI acknowledged that the deal will initially dilute earnings per share, because it will no longer book profits from Maxim's restaurants and mooncake business under the equity method, a gap of about US$35 million to US$40 million in the first year.¹⁰ That is a net figure and cannot be used to work out directly how much Maxim's earns; but it shows that, without Starbucks, Maxim's remaining businesses still make money.

As for the Starbucks business that was taken away, it has annual revenue of more than US$800 million and an operating margin of about 7% to 7.5%.¹⁰ Steady, but not a windfall. What Maxim's lost is the stability of its cash flow, not its entire lifeline.

Which Part Is Really Shrinking

The impression that "every restaurant in Hong Kong is closing" also needs taking apart. In the first quarter of 2026, total restaurant receipts in Hong Kong were 7.2% lower than in the same period of 2018, but Chinese restaurants were down 27.9%; over eight years, the number of Cantonese restaurants fell from 1,790 to 1,500.^{11 13} Mak Tsui-choi (麥萃才) of Hong Kong Baptist University has pointed out that the restaurants hit hardest by "northbound consumption," Hong Kong people crossing the border to spend in Shenzhen and elsewhere, are the mid-priced ones, while high-end and budget dining have been relatively stable.¹⁴

This is a K-shaped split, not a total collapse. The most exposed part of Maxim's is precisely its mid-priced Cantonese restaurants; fast food, bakeries and mooncakes face a different kind of competition.

Freshness Became a Performance

Maxim's cost control did not start after the split. As far as I have observed, Maxim's turned many of its dishes into semi-finished products years ago; dim sum is still steamed in the restaurants, but it has long since stopped being made there. So the decline in flavor is not the result of the capital game; it was already the background in the 50/50 years. The real question after the split is whether this cost-saving road stops, continues, or speeds up.

But Maxim's has more than one road. In March 2026, Maxim's Palace opened a new restaurant of more than 12,000 square feet in Mong Kok's MOKO mall, recreating the dragon-and-phoenix banquet hall and the hand-pushed dim sum trolley, and for the first time installing an open kitchen that roasts suckling pig on the spot; press coverage placed it against the rise of nostalgic Cantonese restaurants.¹⁵ In other words, Maxim's is itself K-shaped inside: the mass-market line keeps saving, while the flagship line sells "freshly made," a piece of common sense that has become a luxury.

The open kitchen deserves a second look. Suckling pig can be roasted on the spot; dim sum can't. Dim sum masters in the old restaurants started work at two or three in the morning and kept going until six; each day's dim sum was made that day, and whatever didn't sell was not kept for the next. The costs of doing it that way were night-shift labor and daily waste, which are exactly the two things hardest to afford today. Customers can see the roasting oven; what they can't see is where, and when, the dim sum was made. Freshness has gone from a step in the process to something put on display.

That doesn't mean the dim sum at MOKO isn't fresh; I have no evidence of that and won't claim it. What I want to point out is this: when freshness has to be displayed, it has usually stopped being the norm. This is the restaurant industry's version of narrative packaging, and the hardest of Section 3's signals to read: the investment is real, but what it invests in may be the story itself.

In early October 2026, the same week the deal was announced, another closure in Hong Kong showed the price of this common sense. Five Guys, a premium fast-food chain built on burgers made to order and hand-cut fries, closed its branch at apm in Kwun Tong; within a year it had closed four outlets, in North Point, Causeway Bay, Citywalk in Tsuen Wan and Kwun Tong, leaving five in all of Hong Kong.¹⁶ It had launched an HK$99 set meal, breaking with its long-standing à la carte model, and then an HK$80 kids' meal; neither saved it.¹⁷ apm and Citywalk are malls that office workers pass through; there, the reference point for a burger's price is McDonald's, not one shop's costs.

This bears directly on Maxim's. Maxim's is Shake Shack's franchisee in Hong Kong, opening together in 2018; when Maxim's announced it would take the brand to Thailand, it was already running 24 Shake Shacks in Greater China.¹⁸ Shake Shack sells itself on natural Angus beef and sits in the same price band as Five Guys; Maxim's has also closed its Shake Shack at Elements in Hong Kong, officially because the lease expired.¹⁹ The wall Five Guys hit has one of Maxim's brands standing in front of it too.

6. Why Common Sense Became a Luxury

The sections above keep saying freshness has become expensive without saying clearly why. For what used to be the most basic thing to become almost impossible to eat again, at least five layers of cost have stacked up.

Five Layers of Cost

First, narrowed supply. Hong Kong's live poultry is tightly controlled under avian flu policy; since early 2016 no live chickens have been supplied from mainland China, only twenty-odd local farms remain, and total stocking is capped.²⁰ The industry told the Legislative Council that after mainland supply stopped, the supply of live chickens halved and prices rose accordingly.²¹ This layer has nothing to do with capital; it is the price of public health policy.

Second, labor. Old-style dim sum needs masters who start before dawn; roast meats need someone to tend the oven. Night shifts and craft skills are the hardest and most expensive labor to hire today.

Third, space. Preparing food on site needs kitchen floor space, and space is Hong Kong's most expensive factor of production. Central kitchens are not only about saving labor; shop rents are too high to fit a proper kitchen.

Fourth, waste. Fresh ingredients keep for days; misjudge sales and the whole batch is thrown away. Frozen ingredients keep for months. During the pre-made-food controversy at the mainland Chinese restaurant chain Xibei, pictures circulating online showed some frozen ingredients in its stores with shelf lives of 9 months, and lamb chops of 24 months.²² When the margin for error differs by a factor of dozens, so do the costs.

Fifth, scale. When most competitors switch to frozen and pre-made food, freshness becomes niche; a niche can't spread fixed costs, so its prices only rise. Meanwhile, prices in the budget market have long been capped by Hong Kong's standard of ping, leng, jing: cheap, good-looking, authentic. A burger is compared with McDonald's, dim sum with the neighborhood teahouse.

Add the five layers together and the answer is clear: original flavor is not impossible to produce; it is that no price band has room for it. The budget band can't afford it, the mid-priced band is shrinking, and only the top band is left, selling it as a luxury, even as a show.

Nor is this only a Hong Kong story. In the US, someone posted Five Guys receipts from 2011 and 2025 side by side: a bacon cheeseburger had risen from US$5.79 to US$11.17; Five Guys' explanation was that prices follow ingredient costs, and when suppliers raise prices, the register follows.²³ In 2022, the same combination of a burger, fries and a soda cost about US$6.19 at McDonald's and an average of US$19.95 at Five Guys.²⁴ Fresh beef, never frozen, peanut oil: the same principles have become a luxury in the US too.

Of the five layers, labor, waste and scale are shared worldwide; what Hong Kong adds is a live poultry supply narrowed by policy, extremely high shop rents, and a mid-priced clientele taken away by northbound consumption. So Hong Kong is not an exception; the same trend has simply moved faster and further there.

Inflation That Isn't Counted

Nor is this only about Cantonese restaurants. A burger that insists on fresh meat, prepared to order, has become a selling point. The McDonald's I ate as a child and the McDonald's of today differ in size and in taste. When I used to have dinner at Café de Coral in Hong Kong, the steak was a whole cut of meat; there was no such thing as reconstituted meat then. Today, a tender steak cut from a whole piece is a premium luxury.

As long as you don't mind, life doesn't seem to have got worse. But if you want to buy back the same service at the same quality, much of it is now astronomically expensive. Many people sense this vaguely without being able to say what is wrong. There are at least three reasons.

First, official figures don't capture it. Inflation statistics measure the price of "a steak," but a whole cut and reconstituted meat may both count as "steak" in the basket. Shrinking portions (shrinkflation) at least have a chance of being counted; declining quality (sometimes called skimpflation) is almost invisible. The figures say prices rose only a little, but buying back the same thing has long since moved to another price level.

Second, there is a pattern to what gets cheaper and what gets dearer. Things that can be copied at scale, such as electronics, information and entertainment, really have become much cheaper; things that need real materials, labor, time and land, such as freshly cut meat, handwork, housing and education, keep getting more expensive. Compare this with the five layers above and nearly all of them fall into the second group: labor, space and waste are exactly the costs financial statements most want to cut. So the market splits in two: basic quality is upgraded into a "premium product," and the mass market is left with substitutes.

The third reason is memory itself. That is left for this chapter's last section.

So has the world got better? The honest answer is that it depends on which basket you count. Phones, medicine and access to information really have got better; but on the side of "real things," many people maintain an appearance of unchanged living standards by accepting substitutes. The costs companies save here go to the same place as the savings taken from R&D departments in Chapter 1 (Chapter 3 will connect the two lines).

7. The Brand's Other Old Account

When Maxim's comes up, the first thing many Hong Kong people think of may not be flavor but a remark from 2019. That November, Annie Wu, the eldest daughter of Maxim's co-founder James Tak Wu, told the Global Times in an interview that society had lost two whole generations of young people, and that she would give up on them.²⁵ Earlier, in September, after she spoke at the UN Human Rights Council, many Maxim's outlets were spray-painted and vandalized; Maxim's quickly issued a statement that Annie Wu held no position in the company and had no part in its management.²⁶

What is most worth recording here is not her political position but governance. A family member with no position and a limited shareholding could directly move the value of the whole brand, because the brand carries a surname, not a share percentage. This old account also weighs differently on the two roads: on the operator's road, Maxim's has to face Hong Kong's next generation of customers; on the capital road, how heavily this mark weighs may vary widely from buyer to buyer, and that can only be speculation.

But I don't treat it as the main cause of Maxim's decline. The effect of 2019 is tangled up with falling quality, northbound consumption and the shrinking of mid-priced restaurants, and there is no data to separate them. My judgment remains: the problem is first and foremost that the food isn't good enough.

8. The Framework's Limits

Here I have to admit honestly that the four-step script fits Maxim's badly in three places.

First, the players are different. The cases in What Is the Capital Game Playing? involve outside capital taking over a company with no attachment to its long-term survival. Maxim's is controlled by its founding family, with seventy years of brand and reputation at stake; its incentives are entirely different from a private equity fund's.

Second, the assets are different. A game company's assets are IP and talent, which can be packaged and sold; a restaurant's assets are its premises, its staff and its flavor, most of which can't be moved and won't fetch a good price. The taste of chicken in the prologue is exactly this kind of asset.

Third, the reasons for shrinking are different. Tech companies lay people off amid record profits, so the layoffs are themselves evidence of the script. Maxim's is in a sector that is genuinely shrinking; its contraction may not be the script at all, only survival.

So the only reliable test of the framework here is Section 3's signals: is each contraction meant to keep Maxim's alive, or to make Maxim's easier to sell?

9. Two Roads

"Saving Maxim's" needs defining first. It cannot return to the glory of its partnership with Jardines; but as long as it remains a chain, even a smaller one, that is better than shrinking down to a single shop that survives in name only.

Seen this way, Maxim's has two roads before it. One is the operator's road: cut the mid-priced restaurants, put resources into the businesses that can still compete, and shrink without dying in a shrinking market. The other is the capital road: clean up the ownership, dress up the books, bring in new shareholders or break it up for sale, and let the family exit at the best valuation.

I have always opposed involution, the endless race to outdo each other for no real gain. But Maxim's is already in the game, with no option of not competing. Not competing leaves only the capital road. Choosing the capital road is not necessarily a bad business decision; it is just a pity.

The Most Likely Path: Private Equity First, Then a Listing

As it is structured today, Maxim's really is an attractive shell: clean ownership, a famous brand, still profitable. That is a different thing from the hollowed-out shell of Who Says Games Can't Be Made? The question is not whether it can be sold, but how.

A direct listing is not easy in the short term. A Hong Kong main-board listing generally requires a three-year track record, and Maxim's figures for the past three years include Starbucks; once the prospectus came out, investors would see a big chunk of revenue missing, explained only by pro forma figures. The cleaner approach is to spend two or three years producing standalone results without Starbucks, which means 2029 or 2030 at the earliest.

Listing also means inviting the illness back. The Wus have just paid HK$2.65 billion in cash plus Starbucks to free themselves of a shareholder that answered to public investors; once listed, the pressure would come straight from public shareholders, and every branch closure and every quarter's profit would have to be disclosed. And listing is not an exit but a slow one: founders face a lock-up and can then sell down only in stages. If the aim is a clean exit, a private sale to a strategic buyer or private equity is much faster, and the price includes a control premium; the cost is one more headline about "a Hong Kong brand falling into mainland hands."

So my estimate is that the most likely road lies in between: bring in private equity as a minority shareholder, let it send in a CFO, clean up the accounts and write a good growth story, list in three to five years, and have the private equity investor exit at the listing.

What makes this road interesting is that it runs the four-step script from start to finish. Personnel replacement, dilution, precision cuts, narrative packaging: every step can be explained as "preparing for the listing," with no one needing bad intentions. The script need not be carried out by predators; it can also be a standard procedure that passes for "professionalization."

There is, of course, another possibility: the family sells nothing and keeps collecting dividends. They have just paid real money to buy back full ownership, so this is far from unlikely. Which road it takes depends on the family's succession plans and its need for cash, neither of which outsiders can see. The earliest signals will be whether Maxim's hires an investment bank, and whether it brings in a CFO with listing experience.

What to Watch a Year On

The deal is expected to close by the end of the first quarter of 2027. These are the signals to watch in the first year after it closes:

What to watch	Operator's road	Capital road
Management	Family stays in charge	A CEO from private equity or finance parachuted in, or a CFO with listing experience
Outside advisers	No investment bank involved	Investment bank hired to prepare a restructuring or listing
Ownership	Stays wholly owned	Private equity brought in as minority shareholder, listing in three to five years; or an outright sale
Financial reporting	Unchanged	Standalone results excluding Starbucks prepared, paving the way for a prospectus
Brands	Kept together	Individual brands sold or licensed separately
Closures	Loss-making branches closed	Profitable but low-return branches closed
Central functions	R&D, purchasing and chef training kept	Departments that don't directly produce revenue cut sharply
Capital spending	Real investment in new stores, factories, markets	Growth story without spending

If it matches, the script can travel beyond the tech industry; if it doesn't, a founding family's choices in a shrinking market can't be explained by the same framework. Both outcomes are worth writing down.

10. Baseline

When it comes to money, Hong Kong people's most common standard is ping, leng, jing. Few remember that original flavor was once just the passing grade, not something you paid extra for. Today, that it can't be had again is taken for granted; in Hong Kong a boycott can break out over one remark, but rarely over pre-made food or a plate of dim sum that has lost its taste.

Mainland China, by contrast, has seen one. In September 2025, the entrepreneur Luo Yonghao complained that the restaurant chain Xibei served almost entirely pre-made food; Xibei's business fell off a cliff, and one Beijing branch had 5 occupied tables out of 43 at lunch.²⁷ But the outcome was that Xibei cut prices across the board by 20 to 40 percent,²⁷ and later was reported to be closing 102 branches at once.²⁸ Consumers' anger ended up landing on price, not on flavor.

This is the third reason left over from Section 6. The fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly proposed the idea of the "shifting baseline": each generation takes the ocean it first saw as normal, so the fish keep dwindling and no one feels there are fewer.²⁹ Flavor is the same. People who have eaten a whole-cut steak find reconstituted meat a step backward; for people who grew up on reconstituted meat, it is normal. Those who never ate free-range chicken don't feel chilled chicken is missing anything; those who never ate dim sum made fresh at dawn don't feel central-kitchen dim sum lacks anything. The loss exists only in the people who remember.

Children today grow up on chilled chicken; for them, "the taste of chicken" has no reference point. "The biscuit tastes of biscuit" was once dismissed as nonsense precisely because everyone took original flavor for granted; by the time the joke became true, no one remembered what original flavor was. When no one remembers, no one asks for it; when no one asks for it, no one needs to save it.

As for the taste of chicken, probably neither road will bring it back.

Afterword: The Clock on This Forecast

The original draft of this chapter was written on October 3, 2026. The table above has two checkpoints: October 2027, a year after the draft, when the deal may have just closed; and around the end of the first quarter of 2028, a year after closing, when the signals in the table will have completed one full round. When this book is published, neither checkpoint will have arrived. So the table is not a conclusion but a scorecard handed to the reader: when you read this, you can look up the news yourself and see which column Maxim's has followed. I will also publish my own comparison on the Mythogen Engine website, whether it matches or not.

Summary

Looking back over this chapter, the Maxim's split, the four-step comparison, the five layers of cost and the inflation no one counts are, in the end, what Chapter 1's structure looks like on the dinner table. Inside the company, what gets cleared out is the people who say "no"; outside it, what gets cleared out is original flavor. Neither needs a villain, neither shows up in the accounts, and the loss stays only with the people who remember.

But the chapter leaves a question unanswered. If original flavor really has no price band left to hold it, why are there still small shops in the world that keep selling cheap, honest, delicious food?

The answer is not in the flavor but in something more fundamental. The next chapter begins with a few small shops on Bentenjima, in Japan.

---

← Chapter 1: What Financialization Cuts Is Not R&D, but the Word "No"	📖 Back to Contents	Chapter 3: Every Exit Charges the Same Entry Fee, and It Is Called a Floor →

Footnotes

1. Hong Kong Internet Encyclopedia (香港網絡大典), "Chua Lam" (蔡瀾), entry on "the biscuit tastes of biscuit" [in Chinese]. ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Aha Moment, "Chicken Tastes of Chicken: Just a Joke?" (〈雞有雞味，只是笑話一句？〉), 2021 [in Chinese]. ↩ ↩²

3. Wikipedia: "Chua Lam". ↩

4. Nebula Walker (星忘塵), What Is the Capital Game Playing? (Case Files: The Games Industry) (《資本遊戲玩什麼（實例檔案：遊戲業）》), Mythogen Engine [in Chinese], July 9, 2026. ↩

5. Nebula Walker (星忘塵), Who Says Games Can't Be Made? (《誰說遊戲做不起》), Clear-Eyed Records, Case File 2, Mythogen Engine, July 2026 [in Chinese]. ↩

6. Metro Finance (新城財經), "DFI Retail Exits Maxim's Caterers Stake; Wu Family Becomes Sole Shareholder," September 30, 2026 [in Chinese]. ↩ ↩²

7. Jiemian (界面新聞), "How Maxim's, the Restaurant World's 'Trendy-Brand Buyer,' Plans to Handle the Rise of Delivery and Weak Consumption" [in Chinese]. ↩

8. Sing Tao (星島), "Wu Family's Restaurant Empire Born of Discrimination; Maxim's–DFI 'Breakup' Long Foreshadowed, May Clear the Way for a Sale" [in Chinese]. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

9. HK01, "DFI Retail Sells Maxim's Stake, Takes Over Starbucks Business; Wu Family Pays US$340 Million" [in Chinese]. ↩ ↩²

10. Hong Kong Economic Times (香港經濟日報), "Why Did DFI Retail Sell Maxim's?" [in Chinese]. ↩ ↩² ↩³

11. HK01, "Hong Kong's 2026 Closure Wave: More Than 60 Shops Closed in the First Half" [in Chinese]. ↩ ↩²

12. Economic Digest (經濟一週), "Maxim's and DFI Retail Announce Business Realignment" [in Chinese]. ↩

13. HK01, "Cantonese Restaurants Down a Net 290 in Seven Years" [in Chinese]. ↩

14. Sing Tao Daily (US edition), "Scholar Analyzes Trends in Hong Kong's Restaurant Market," September 20, 2026 [in Chinese]. ↩

15. Sing Tao (星島), "Maxim's Palace Bucks the Trend With 12,000 sq ft Mong Kok Opening, Recreating Dragon-and-Phoenix Hall; Trolley Dim Sum From $36" [in Chinese]. ↩

16. Hong Kong Economic Times (香港經濟日報), "Five Guys Closes Kwun Tong apm Branch, Fourth Closure This Year" [in Chinese]. ↩

17. Sing Tao (星島), "Five Guys at Kwun Tong APM Closes: Four Shops Shut in a Year as Discount Sets and Kids' Meals Fail to Save It" [in Chinese]. ↩

18. Inside Retail: "Maxim's to launch Shake Shack in Thailand". ↩

19. Winshang (贏商網), "Shake Shack Faces New Tests in China" [in Chinese]. ↩

20. FoodNext (食力), "Avian Flu Prevention and Local Chicken Farms in Hong Kong" [in Chinese]. ↩

21. Legislative Council of Hong Kong: submission by the World's Poultry Science Association, Hong Kong Branch, on the future of the poultry industry, 2017 [in Chinese]. ↩

22. Central News Agency (中央社), "Influencer Accuses Upscale Restaurant of Using Pre-Made Dishes; China to Introduce National Standard," September 13, 2025 [in Chinese]. ↩

23. Yahoo: "Here's why Five Guys is pricier than other burger chains". ↩

24. AOL: "Five Guys customers say its prices are 'out of control'". ↩

25. Hong Kong Economic Times (香港經濟日報), "Maxim's Heiress Annie Wu: Young People Have Been Brainwashed; She Will Give Up on Them," November 2019 [in Chinese]. ↩

26. Wikipedia (Chinese): "Annie Wu" (伍淑清) [in Chinese]. ↩

27. World Journal (世界日報), "Hit by Pre-Made Food Controversy, Xibei Cuts Prices 20–40% to Save Itself" [in Chinese]. ↩ ↩²

28. Commercial Times (工商時報), "Reports of a Wave of Xibei Closures," January 15, 2026 [in Chinese]. ↩

29. Daniel Pauly, "Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries," Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 10(10), 1995, p. 430. ↩