Our Story
It all started with a stray dog and a trip to Guangzhou. It was the summer of 2022, I had been out of work for a few months and the end of COVID wasn’t completely in sight.
At this point we had already had our dog Roxy for two years. We adopted her from the local animal shelter in Haikou.
The best burger
Me and my wife were in Guanzhou for a weekend visit. During the trip we visited a place called 13 Factories which is a bar/restaurant offering Cajun style foods and drinks. I had ordered the burger, taking the first bite I had realsied that if I could make anything similar to this I could make money. It was the best burger I ever had in my life.
Upon return to Haikou we said “Let’s open a burger restaurant” being British I was already a dab hand in the kitchen. So I started to practice making brioche burger buns and homemade beef patties. I would then test these on friends, recevieing feedback each time and making adjustments to the recipe.
Opening Roxys 1.0
In the next month or so we were looking for a location and working out all the legalities of starting a restaurant. It didn’t take us long before we found a small place near our house. It was on a backstreet no less than 200 meters from where we lived. With lockdowns still going on it was the perfect location for us.
We started on the construction straight away. It took around 1 month to complete. We opened our first restaurant on 10th September 2022. Originally we were a craft burger restaurant. We would make our burger patties and bricoche bread buns every morning.
A little while later we added full english breakfast, fish & chips and a few snack foods to the menu. Business was booming!
Over the next two years we had really focused on building up the community around our little burger bar. We held charity events, sponsored sports teams, pub quizs, bring your own food nights among a number of other community based events.
We’re gonna need a bigger boat
It wasn’t until early 2023 that we realised we needed to move to a bigger space. We also came to the realisation that in just one year since opening there were now a ton of ‘craft burger’ places in Haikou offering “Handmade Burgers”. We wanted a to make a new product. We wanted something that was easier to make than burgers and offered higher margins……..it had to be pizza!
We had previously made pizza at Roxys 1.0 it was a great success with customers but our kitchen was too small to cook pizza, burgers, fish & chips at the same time. We decided to move to a new space and with the new space it would be a fresh start. New space, new menu!
A fresh start
Just some 200 meters down the street we found the new location for Roxys 2.0. It was twice the size with two floors and a much better view. It was perfect but needed alot of work. I should also mention that at this time my wife is 7 months pregnant.
We went for it! All I could think was “this is what we need now” and how great it will be to show my future child what mum and dad did before you were born.
For the construction of Roxys 1.0 we hired a decoration company which was quite costly and came with a bunch of other challenges. To keep costs down we decided to do most of the construction of Roxys 2.0 by ourselves.
We quickly drew up some plans and started smashing walls down straight away. We were lucky that some of our regular customers jumped on board to help.
Construction took around two months to finish and we opened our doors on 15th December 2024.
Roxy's Pizza Haikou 