“I am a difficult customer,” Christian Mongendre admits over the course of a 30-minute Friday chat. The CEO and founder of TREEHOUSE, a Hong Kong plant-based fast-food chain, is an enterprising businessman and determined perfectionist.
Founding Hong Kong’s fastest-growing plant-based chain five years ago, Christian’s message of healthy eating has recently expanded to Kowloon with the opening of TREEHOUSE’s fourth and fifth venues at Heath Hong Kong in Tsim Sha Tsui and AIRSIDE mall at Kai Tak.
The story of Christian’s creation of TREEHOUSE, involvement in plant-based dining, vegetarian diet, and need to innovate with fast, healthy food begins with a humble obsession with McDonald’s during his Parisian childhood.
Before his graduation from the elite Institut Paul Bocuse hospitality school and work with three-Michelin-starred chef Alain Ducasse, Christian’s youth was marked by a love for the Golden Arches. “For some reason, I thought [McDonald’s] was the coolest thing ever, yet I hated the product.”
“I loved their systems so much that I even wanted to work for them to study their operations,” he says with a laugh. “I wondered how we can find healthy food that we can really trust, just like McDonald’s do [with fast food].”
In contrast to McDonald’s, the world’s largest fast-food chain, Christian envisioned a “dream to travel and get good, healthy food anywhere in the world”, barring the heavy portions of salt, fat, and sugar found in McDonald’s meals.
Whilst a McDonald’s fiend at a young age, Christian credits his mother’s lack of cravings for meat, fish, eggs, or dairy in her pregnancy for turning him to vegetarian, vegan, and raw dining habits.
At 16 years old, Christian committed to a strict vegetarian diet after working with a nutritionist to tune his body to maximise strength and resilience, competing in national rowing competitions.
The first location of TREEHOUSE was born in 2019 in Soho with a mission to fill a gaping hole in the market for fast, healthy food in Hong Kong. QR codes, AI technology that suggests dining options, ready-made breads, touchscreen ordering systems, and efficient delivery lines at the plant-based location all mirrored the classic McDonald’s recipe.
TREEHOUSE cautiously expanded east to Quarry Bay’s finance district in May 2022 and then to Causeway Bay’s shopping district in May 2023, eager to penetrate new markets with their vegetarian-forward wraps, salads, burgers, and drinks.
What McDonald’s does for delivering consumable meals at a low cost to the mass market, Christian wants to do for healthy food of the finest quality – not just on Hong Kong Island or Kowloon, but the whole world.
“Our integrity towards our product is not making a decision based on cost, but on the quality of food and having food that I want to eat. What are good-quality ingredients? People who don’t understand our brand will tell us that we’re expensive, but we’re delivering the finest produce we can find.”
“Every single item we serve at TREEHOUSE is made only using pure ingredients and made from scratch, something I did not see in my fine-dining background. I can cut corners left and right and centre if I want, but I want to bring in investors and customers because they buy into our ideology and mission.”
Christian concedes that sourcing locally from Hong Kong farms heavily restricts the quality of the produce owing to the small scale, reliability, and cost of production in Hong Kong. All of TREEHOUSE’s products are either cooked in their central kitchen or five on-site kitchens. Ingredients are imported from Europe, North America, and Asia.
Operating an F&B business in Hong Kong is tough, more so when you’re targeting a growing yet localised demographic of diners familiar with plant-based dining. “There are so many things we would like to do better, but we’re compounded by the infrastructure of Hong Kong’s tough business environment.”
“If we have the right mindset to try our best to do it and we feel continually unhappy in a sense that we always want to improve, that is a success. We’re always improving quality versus reducing it; it’s always a step forward, never a step back.”
Expanding from two stores to five in one year is difficult, Christian notes; he has never operated five locations of a chain at one time. It’s been a lot of growth experience for the restaurateur.
The launch of TREEHOUSE’s Heath location in Tsim Sha Tsui is a test of Kowloon’s market for both locals and tourists, whilst the AIRSIDE location is an embrace of partnerships extending across Hong Kong, Christian states. “We love Nan Fung Group [developers of AIRSIDE] and their focus on sustainability. It makes sense to operate in Kai Tak.”
Opening TREEHOUSE in Hong Kong is a dream for Christian, operating a business central to his diet and passion in his birthplace, where he spent three years before emigrating to France.
“We’re positioning ourselves to be the market leader in plant-based food in Hong Kong, and hopefully around the region. I am aiming to open up TREEHOUSE stores in Los Angeles and Paris in the future to complete the circle of my life.”
Check out the newest TREEHOUSE locations at Heath Hong Kong and AIRSIDE today and try their tasty plant-based dishes.
