Thinking back to two years ago, it seemed a new phenomenon had taken over Shanghai. Everywhere you looked you saw people eating something out of a brown paper wrapper (which you'd see all over the street, too) that sort of resembled pizzas and were often even advertised as China's first pizzas, most notably the masses were crowding around a little stall not far from Raffles Plazza. It was a fad in Beijing, too, but not on the supersized level that it was in Shanghai, yet that famous stand in Shanghai is long chai'd and you no longer see these pizza like items for sale.
I'd almost totally forgot about all this until I saw a post at On the Fringe few weeks ago. The "pizzas" that I always thoroughly enjoyed were much like what she is describing, often times also featuring cumin and other yangrou chuanr spices and pieces of "lamb". It seems that this trend is still alive and well in Qingdao, where she appears to be writing from, but why its disappearance from the streets of Shanghai and Beijing? Those brown wrappers WERE everywhere, perhaps it was so ubiquitous as to make too big a mess and so got banned?
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In Beijing and Shanghai the franchises expanded far too fast and over-saturated the market. There were reports of some store owners attempting to diversify and sell other products that would distinguish their shop from the one across the street, but most of them ended up folding. Practically all trace of them has disappeared in Bejing, except for some out-of-the-way shops near bus stations and other places where they're still a novelty. And if you look hard enough, you can sometimes spot a 2-yuan store whose facade is done in bamboo.
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