[Photo by Sun Yuanqing/China Daily]

"Local coffee shops don't use imported equipment that costs tens of thousands of yuan, because locals don't recognize the quality of coffee anyway. But we decided to do it, because I won't give a customer something I don't cherish myself," Delong says.

"So it's also educating about quality. It's like walking with them hand-in-hand through the experience of teaching them what good coffee tastes like."

Delong's efforts have paid off. When he first started, nearly all customers needed to be educated. Some have themselves become educators.

One of the customers told him she once went to a local coffee shop and asked for a decaf, but the owner didn't know what that was.

"In the end, my customer had to explain to them what decaf coffee is. In one sense, our customers know more about coffee than the owners of other coffee houses here. Because they have been customers for a long time and came to understand coffee," Delong says.

Not only are the coffees popular, the pastries are a success, too. The Oreo-crusted cheesecakes are so well known that travelers often bring them on planes when they fly out of Guiyang.

Delong operated a high-end automobile business in his native state of Indiana before he sold it and came to live in Guiyang with his Singaporean wife and two kids in 2003.

He had traveled through East China in 1996 and returned in 2000 to travel through the western regions. While he saw the western part, especially Guizhou, was much less developed than the coastal area, he also realized there were a lot of business opportunities to explore.

"It has a small-town feel to it. You can pretty much walk to anywhere within half an hour," he says.

"I like that feel. It's small enough for you to feel comfortable, but it's also big enough to offer big business opportunities."

Delong, a lover of food himself, decided to open a coffee house. At the time, Guiyang had no Western food establishments except for a KFC. Once Delong found his niche, he insisted on honing it rather than diversifying.

"We try to keep things traditional rather than to change them to make them Asian, which can be common in international chains," he says.

"I choose to do things from my heart, things that I know about."

Contact the writer at sunyuanqing@chinadaily.com.cn.

Yang Jun contributed to this story.

(China Daily 12/08/2013 page5)