After Xibei closed 30% of its stores, can Tianbian Clay Pot Braised Noodles help Jia Guolong turn his fortunes around?

By | Xu Jiajing

Edited by | Weizi

Source | Houlang Research Institute

Photography | Weizi, Xu Jiajing

No hype, no bashing—just a purely subjective take.

After the Xi Bei prepared-meals controversy, in early 2026, Jia Guolong officially announced that it would shut down 102 Xi Bei stores nationwide in one go, accounting for 30% of the brand’s total number of stores. After that, the company would focus its efforts on a new brand—Tianbian Clay Pot. On February 13, Tianbian Clay Pot braised noodle opened officially at 751 Art Zone. In the very first week after opening, during the dinner peak, people had to queue for more than an hour just to get a table.

On March 23, Monday—at 11:30 a.m. on a workday—we went to the store. On the first floor, there were already only a few empty tables left. More than a month after opening, business for Tianbian Clay Pot was still booming.

At noon, both floors were already fully seated, and waiting in line would mean waiting for at least half an hour. A woman from Beijing told me that their family had come all the way from the north 3rd ring with their parents on purpose. The son said the braised noodles here taste quite good and insisted that they bring their parents to try it. It seems the restaurant already had repeat customers. And when we were ordering, we also overheard two people at the next table flipping through the menu with a teasing attitude, discussing, “Is this prepared food?”—and there were plenty of customers who were simply coming to verify it.

If you open Dianping, the comment section is full of trolls who are just there for the entertainment, asking things like, “Excuse me, does your shop still use meat that’s been sitting since last year and is past its expiry date?” The restaurant’s current rating is 4.4—nothing special, pretty middle-of-the-road. But overall, there are still many voices praising the taste of the braised noodles, and quite a few people are also asking, “Are the good reviews fake?”

There isn’t any restaurant like it, stuck right at the center of a storm of contradictions, where diners walk in with a magnifying glass. They just want to see whether, after more than 100 Northwest stores fell, Tianbian Clay Pot braised noodles can calmly take over the baton from Jia Guolong.

Braised noodles really got cheaper

A pot of braised noodles costs between 49 and 59 yuan.

The cheapest is spare-rib pickled cabbage braised noodles for 45 yuan. The most expensive is sand scallion lamb braised noodles for 59 yuan. The waiter told me that one pot of braised noodles equals one person’s portion. When Tianbian Clay Pot first opened at the 751 zone, its positioning was to provide work meals for office workers around the area. Compared with restaurants around Beijing, a per-person average price of 45 yuan for a set meal in this neighborhood isn’t really expensive. It’s within what working people in a first-tier city can reasonably afford. We three ordered two pots of braised noodles and two small dishes, and in the end the average came to 55 yuan per person.

It wasn’t until after the store had been operating for a while in early March that Jia Guolong adjusted Tianbian Clay Pot’s focus to braised noodles. If you scroll down the menu, you can see the initial plan: the next column is clay-pot soup noodles, followed by clay-pot dishes, Hetao snacks, cold dishes, and braised and marinated items, and so on. At first, Tianbian Clay Pot still centered on dishes, and later they elevated the signature staple—braised noodles—as a selling point. To fit 798’s art-oriented vibe, the menu also introduced some Western-mixed items like cheese corn braised noodles, along with beef brisket and spicy Chinese cabbage braised noodles.

Actually, in the clay-pot dishes you can see plenty of familiar old faces—like clay-pot pork cutlet with sauerkraut, which is the same item as on Xi Bei’s menu. But at the Tianbian store, this dish is 48 yuan. At Xi Bei, it’s 79 yuan.

I remember that during the Xi Bei controversy, someone said that Jia Guolong still hadn’t realized that what people cared about wasn’t whether the dishes were prepared or freshly stir-fried—it was why prepared meals could sell for such high prices.

At least this advice might have been seen by him—there isn’t much he could be faulted for in terms of pricing at Tianbian. Compared with Xi Bei’s dish lists, to add a bit of protein, meat dish prices are basically all the ones starting with a “7.” Beef and potato strips are 73 yuan, a small pot of braised beef brisket is 76 yuan, and scallion-scented grilled fish is 89 yuan… Even vegetarian clay-pot lentil thread is 43 yuan. With prices like this, you can already eat pork cutlet at Tianbian Clay Pot.

As for the taste—after all, it’s hard to please everyone. This is purely my own subjective evaluation: I think it’s pretty good. In terms of texture, the braised noodles aren’t too oily, too salty, or too spicy. The noodle center is chewy, while the exterior is soft and tender. The gelatinized starch is thoroughly blended into the sauce, and it’s genuinely satisfying—already exceeding my expectations for a bowl of braised noodles.

That said, during last year’s debate, it’s also rare for anyone to question that Xi Bei tastes bad. This is Jia Guolong’s forte: by pre-processing ingredients through a central kitchen to standardize taste. All chain restaurants do it the same way. On the dishes, they’re even more aligned with an R&D mindset—they have a whole system for research and development.

In differentiated taste experiences, he can raise “hard to please everyone” to an average level. For example, the store sells lemon tea for 9.9 yuan. It doesn’t taste as sweet as the lemon tea on the market, and it’s not as light as lemon water that costs just a few yuan. It’s just right—good for both old and young.

Of course, no one can guarantee that everyone in a restaurant will think it tastes good, but at least, the odds that you’ll think it’s good are pretty high.

And choosing braised noodles as the new track is actually a pretty smart move, because it naturally sidesteps the prepared-food controversy.

In the Xi Bei prepared-meals controversy, a major problem is that the core is stir-frying. The soul of stir-frying is the wok heat—the “锅气” (wok-hei) generated by high heat and intense tossing—like how some people specifically love eating rice that has a bit of scorched, clinging texture. That’s something you can tell just by tasting. But most diners never bother to figure out the definition of prepared meals versus pre-processed ingredients. If you can’t taste wok-hei, then in everyone’s minds it equals prepared food—and that simple equation is all people carry in their heads.

But braised noodles are naturally sitting on higher ground of advantage. Nobody has to worry about whether the stewed ingredients have wok-hei. With braised noodles made by simmering over low-to-medium heat, people are eating soft, tender, and well-seasoned noodles. That texture can’t be “diagnosed as prepared in one bite.” You eat braised noodles: ingredients like spare ribs and lamb can be pre-frozen and pre-processed; when they’re simmered and braised at the store, isn’t that basically made fresh and eaten right away? In the process, it’s also closer to in-situ preparation rather than unwrapping, reheating, and serving immediately.

After ordering and getting seated, I went to the condiment bar to grab some Laba garlic and chili oil, and then I was back in about five minutes. The clay-pot sauerkraut pork cutlet and the braised noodles with spare ribs and green beans were already on the table. I asked the waiter, “How come the dishes come out so fast?” She said, “We have one chef managing one pot. Each type of noodles is cooked/braised in big pots. Then we make them anytime based on foot traffic.”

Think about it—if it’s stewed dishes, at minimum you need to stew for half an hour to an hour. The kitchen would prepare the noodles in advance, and when customers arrive, it’s reasonable to ladle them out of the pot. If you say dishes come out fast, that means they’re prepared, then that interpretation is just too stupid.

Testing for “fire-and-flame”

Walk around the Tianbian store and you can see this kind of “stress response” that comes from the prepared-meals controversy everywhere.

At the end of last year, Jia Guolong clung tightly to the line that “Xi Bei isn’t prepared food,” insisting that Xi Bei only pre-processes ingredients through a central kitchen, then delivers them to stores where they’re cooked fresh. According to national standards, this isn’t prepared food. But in reality, the public doesn’t even care about the definitions. As long as the ingredients aren’t freshly stir-fried on-site at the store, then in people’s eyes it’s prepared food.

In January this year, in an interview with China Newsweek, Jia Guolong seemed to reflect as well: “It’s my problem. A lot of things got cursed in a way that’s hard to judge. But next, I’ll go transparent. Everything that should be disclosed will be disclosed. We will proactively inform people, ensure ingredients are traceable, and make the process open.”

In preparing the new Tianbian brand, he changed his approach—at Tianbian stores, everything is open and transparent “fire-and-flame.” It seems Jia the boss had already prepared for guests to come and tour and inspect, almost openly saying, “Come on—go ahead and check me!”

As soon as you walk in, the open kitchen is right across on the first floor. The chefs are busy and closely watching the clay pots, and even while eating, you can see hot white steam rising in the kitchen.

The overall layout of the Tianbian store is very much like a mountain market. The little stalls near the entrance are arranged like street booths, selling braised and marinated items specifically. Braised pig trotters are 12 yuan per piece, and the trotters are being kept warm in a high-pressure pot with its lid open.

Near the corner on the second floor, you can find shelves stacked with Inner Mongolia specialty local farm produce—red pears and iron-skin strawberries/persimmons? (红梨和铁皮草莓柿子), plus red pickled vegetables and Hetao corn—things you definitely won’t see in Beijing’s vegetable markets. We bought some red pears to try; they were juicy and lively, and very fresh. The staff said these ingredients are flown in from the Hetao region.

And right in the middle of the second floor, there’s a counter with cutting boards laid out—freshly cut carrots and green beans stacked neatly. A staff member is preparing to put them in the pot.

It feels like Jia the boss is responding from afar to the issue that frozen ingredients are stored for too long. At Tianbian, they display freshly cut ingredients and sauces in as unaltered a way as possible—so that customers can see just how fresh my ingredients are. “Please rest assured and enjoy your meal.”

You can even tell this kind of “stress response” from the store decoration. Tianbian’s design theme is clay pots. On the second floor, the entire wall is covered with clay pots, silently reminding diners, “Our method isn’t stir-frying on the spot—it’s slow-braising.”

The corridor is also decorated with Inner Mongolia-style sand-tempered porcelain and folk crafts. By the staircase, there are bags of Ba Meng snowflake flour. Even the big posters hung inside the store show ingredients like potatoes, green peppers, carrots, and chili peppers exactly as they are—or farmers who harvest them in the fields.

During the first month after opening, every day at 6:30, there would also be an Inner Mongolia rock band performing live on the second floor.

In visual language for film and TV, directors often influence viewers’ subconscious by repeatedly adding a certain kind of imagery in the frame. Tianbian store also has layers of fire-and-flame elements everywhere.

No matter what, the displayed ingredients—and the ones you actually taste—are indeed fresh. Just talking about two dishes: sand scallion lamb braised noodles and cold tossed sand scallion. When dining out in Beijing, it’s rare to get sand scallions, an Inner Mongolia specialty. Sand scallions are much more expensive than regular scallions, and preservation for air transport is difficult—if you wait two or three days, they start to wilt. But Tianbian’s cold tossed sand scallion and the sand scallion taste I had in Hohhot didn’t seem any different. One bite tells you it’s fresh.

Xi Bei’s central kitchen system has long been proud of its supply chain that seamlessly connects to the original sources: to ensure ingredients are transported in a full cold chain from the origin, with no break in between, so that ingredients can arrive fresh at the stores.

Now it seems Tianbian Clay Pot braised noodles has done everything possible to live up to that line—“ingredients are traceable, processes are open.” It’s like after an online mob attack: the people being attacked often develop an overcorrective defensive counterattack. The entire store is essentially a vigorous effort to prove itself.

At first, I was still wondering why a restaurant would set up so many “viewing points” around the store for customers to walk around. But then I thought: every day, there might be lots of people like me who come to “inspect” prepared food with a critical eye, walking around everywhere.

Of course, most of the people in the store are still just there to have a good meal. On March 25, I went again. At 11:30 a.m., we arrived in time to catch the queue. People at the entrance were chatting about how they heard this place is really good and that getting a meal there is so hard. No matter what the online controversy is, the praise people say out loud once seated in the store—whether it’s really true or not.

Xi Bei’s mess may be, ironically, a lesson for Jia Guolong in hitting a bottom and bouncing back.

Take smaller steps

This could also be a good thing. Actually, Jia Guolong has been exploring a second growth curve beyond Xi Bei, but he has already gone through eight failed attempts.

The Xi Bei oat noodles launched in 2016 were shut down by the end of that year because the positioning was too niche. Next, oat noodles quietly switched to the “Maixingcun” branding. This blatant act of copying/copycatting McDonald’s lasted only three months before it cooled off. In 2018, Xi Bei targeted Shake Shack with a super meat夹馍 (Chinese-style sandwich), sticking with it for two years. Then in 2019, Xi Bei’s yogurt shop and in 2020, Gong Changzhang, didn’t survive even a year.

For the later brands, he still kept his own name all over them—Jia Guolong Kung Fu Cuisine, Jia Guolong Chinese Burgers, and Jia Guolong Small-Pot Beef. In 2022, Chinese Burgers opened more than 50 stores in Beijing all at once. A year later, they entered widespread closures, then transformed into small-pot beef. Now, even small-pot beef has shut down all stores.

The root cause is that, as chain fast food, these new brands have long had a problem where pricing doesn’t match consumer expectations. For Chinese Burgers, people complained: “One bull’s meat air-muffin thing costs 23 yuan—more expensive than McDonald’s.” And for small-pot beef, the average ticket price is 60 to 80 yuan, while fast food of the same type might only cost 30 to 40 yuan.

When it comes to building chain fast food, Jia Guolong has always had strong ambition. In 2023, when Xi Bei’s revenue was 6.2 billion yuan, he even said that by 2026 he would make it a listed company with a market cap of one trillion yuan, and build a globally well-known big chain fast food brand. He kept following a style of boldly expanding and opening stores aggressively, but the result was that everything ended quickly, then he started a whole new venture again. In an interview with “Foodies’ Conference Room,” Jia Guolong said that in the first seven years of doing fast food, he invested 500 million.

Now it’s March 2026. Up until earlier last year, he still hadn’t figured out the core reason, and wanted to make a big move and sing at top volume as he advanced. Little did he know, it backfired—by the end, even Xi Bei, the foundation of his success, ended up catching fire.

Xi Bei’s prepared-meals approach using a central kitchen has also long been unable to keep up with the middle-to-high-end market segment it positioned itself for. Today in the restaurant world, the cheap-and-filling route that prioritizes value for money isn’t being criticized—like Mixue Bingcheng. Every year around March 15 it ends up on the list, yet year after year consumers still defend it: “A big cup of lemon tea for a few yuan—besides Mixue Bingcheng, who else would spoil me like that?” If you really want to go after the middle-to-high-end market, at the very least, customers walking into the restaurant will consider freshly cooked and prepared on-site as basic sincerity.

High-priced prepared-food taste definitely can’t retain customers. It wasn’t until Luo Yonghao finally ripped open that window of hypocrisy, and the backlash became so loud that no one could ignore it anymore, that Jia Guolong was forced to confront this reality—the voices of real consumers.

Only now is it truly time to take smaller steps. When building the new brand, he considered opening hot pot shops, barbecue shops, and snack shops—until he chose braised noodles, a hometown dish he’d loved since childhood. In 1988, when he just quit school and started his business, the first stall he rented in Linhe, Inner Mongolia sold heluo noodles and beer. This time, he didn’t keep shouting about how many stores to open. He only said: “Xi Bei will close some of its stores. I hope a new brand can take over part of the stores and employees.”

A Jia Guolong who returns to the origin and is willing to listen to advice—could he really make it this time?

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责任编辑：江钰涵