After opening the noodle shop for more than 30 years, Hong Gang has also witnessed the changes in urban life. The business of the store has changed from the morning market peak in the early years to the current lunch market peak year by year. Hong Gang said that nowadays, the number of people who come to eat noodles at noon is at least 30 percent higher than in the morning. He speculated that this was a reflection of the fast-paced life, "I was in a hurry to go to work in the morning, and I didn't have time to eat a bowl of noodles." At noon, I didn't like before, I could take time to go home and cook, but now I have to go back to work after eating a light meal outside. Then eating noodles is a good choice. ”
Text丨Beijing News reporter Feng Yuxin.
Editor丨Chen Xiaoshu.
Proofreading丨Zhao Lin.
This article is 4231 words and 6 minutes to read.
On the twenty-ninth day of the lunar month, the first morning of returning to his hometown of Kunshan, he usually had to eat a bowl of red oil noodles. This is the consensus of the fellow villagers, after "returning to the mountain", you must follow the "noodle", and the two are complete with each other.
Alkaline water noodles are thrown into boiling water, fished out in about 20 seconds, drained, served in a bowl, and the texture of the noodles emerges from the red soup, which is called "crucian carp back". As soon as the soup is hot, the raw noodles immediately reach their best taste. Unlike the northern gluten noodles, the Su-style noodles are thin and soft, but when you bite into them, they have a subtle spring. Paired with freshly grilled fried fish and toppings such as large ribs, this morning dish has a fresh, salty and sweet taste.
In Kunshan's local food culture, hairy crab and red oil noodles are the two most famous. It's easy to eat crab, buy it fresh, steam or boil it at home, and you don't need to use skills. The broth of red oil noodles is not easy to boil, and each noodle restaurant has its own secret recipe, and ordinary people often don't know the essentials. Therefore, when people in Kunshan eat noodles, they always have to go to a noodle restaurant to eat them.
The noodle restaurant I went to was very popular in the local area, and at its most noisy, it could sell 2,000 bowls of noodles a day, which was almost as good as any time-honored brand. The noodle restaurant is located on Tongfeng Road, so it is called Tongfeng Hotel, and the owner is called Hong Gang, 55 years old, originally from a village in the northern suburbs of Kunshan. At the end of the 80s of the last century, he moved from the township to the city to work, and in the early 90s, he sold his house and borrowed money and went to the sea to open a hotel, and it has been 31 years since then.
When Tongfeng Hotel first opened, there were rice fields in front and back, and the roadbed in front of the store was higher than the ridge, and pedestrians could only be pedestrians if they set up a board. Now, rice paddies are filled with homes and urban parks, through which Kunshan's first rail line passes. For this reason, at least one-third of the diners on Saturdays and Sundays are Shanghainese.
The noodle restaurant has grown with the city, Mr. Hong said. As the owners of the noodle shop, the family shares the city's sense of adventure and exploration.
Customers are waiting to get their noodles. Photo by Beijing News reporter Feng Yuxin.
A bowl of noodles. On the twenty-ninth day of the lunar month, a few people have taken leave, and there are still eight employees left in Tongfeng Hotel.
A two-story storefront, an extremely narrow staircase, and a few aunts wearing sleeves go up and down to collect dishes. The leftover noodle soup was poured into several large buckets, a dozen bowls stacked on top of each other, and the pagoda moved quickly towards the kitchen. Immediately someone took the pagoda and washed it.
There were three people standing in the kitchen, one of them kept going down and scooping noodles; Put chopped green onions, fried fish oil and other condiments into a washed bowl, and then put in a large spoonful of broth; There is also a small window to receive customers' face tickets, and different toppings are distributed as needed. The fried fish is placed in the middle table, the braised eggs, eel shreds, and shredded cabbage and pork are by the window, and the iron pot on the stove is constantly frying large chops.
Outside the kitchen, there is a master who slaps the pork chops into the flour, rolls the front and back, compacts them with the palms, and stacks them in the box to be fried. Outside of the line, there are two columns, one team at the cashier, pay, get the ticket, then form the other team, wait in front of the kitchen window to get noodles.
Dapai noodles are the best to sell, and fried fish and eel silk are also often ordered. Hong Gang sat in the cash register, handing out tickets non-stop, and until the end of the afternoon, he rarely had time to talk to me. On this day, a total of more than 1,000 bowls of noodles were sold, which was a mediocre performance. Hong Gang recalls that the hottest day in the store's history was last year's National Day, when the queue in front of the cash register lined up from the store to the outside of the store, and after turning the corner, it stretched into the neighborhood. Two thousand bowls of noodles were sold that day.
Today, the Tongfeng Hotel opens at 5 a.m. and closes at 4 p.m. every day, with dozens of toppings to choose from. Every day at two o'clock in the morning, the staff will go to the store to prepare food, and more than 20 kinds of toppings such as large ribs, fried fish, large intestines, shredded eel, beef, and stewed meat are freshly made every day. The broth is also prepared in a pot every day, boiled with pork bones, fish scales, eggshells and other materials, and fried fish oil to enhance the flavor.
When Tongfeng Hotel first opened in 1993, two of the chefs and helpers invited were retired from Kunshan's time-honored Aozao Noodle Restaurant, and they were well versed in the art of making red oil noodles. When the masters were making noodles in the shop, Hong Gang and his mother were always watching. His mother, who was especially a clever person, learned it on her own after a few looks, and left the skill behind.
Hong Gang stood in front of the cash register. Photo by Beijing News reporter Feng Yuxin.
A shop. Hong Gang grew up in a village in the town of Shipai on the outskirts of Kunshan, and his family made a living from farming. In the 80s of the last century, he was admitted to the town's vocational class to study mechanical design, and after graduation, he worked part-time for a year. In 1987, he went to Kunshan to work in the urban area of Kunshan and did mechanical maintenance work in the workshop of Sanshan Group, with a starting salary of 44 yuan per month.
By the early 90s, his whole family went to the city, sold the house in the countryside, and together with the original savings, he scraped together 30,000 yuan, borrowed another 30,000 yuan, and spent a total of 60,000 yuan to buy a façade on Tongfeng Road. His father planned to divide the façade into two rooms, and first opened a grocery store on the west side, which was operated downstairs and lived upstairs, which could also be used as his son's wedding room.
At that time, Hong Gang had been transferred to the equipment department of the factory, and his salary had risen to two or three hundred yuan per month, and his life tended to be stable. On several occasions, he went to his father's shop to help, and found that although it was a small business, from time to time there were five or ten yuan in the account, and it seemed that the money was better than in the factory.
The storefront on the east side was still idle, and Hong Gang had a change in his heart at first, and secretly thought of several plans: either to open a building materials store, at that time Kunshan was undergoing great development, and building materials were to be used everywhere; But he has neither capital nor connections, and he is afraid that he will not be able to do it. Either open a real estate agency, which is a new concept he saw in the newspaper, and vaguely know that Shanghai already exists; But the rules of this new industry are complicated, "I don't know the procedure, I don't know what to do with the license." "In the end, I decided to open a restaurant, the cost is small, and the procedures are simple.
The first 10 years of the business were not smooth, Hong Gang's family slept upstairs in the store, got up in the early morning to prepare food, and stayed until late at night before closing, but the business has been tepid. At that time, noodles were only made before 9 a.m., and then they were in the stir-fry business until late at night. In the 90s, most of the people who came to the restaurant were official banquets of companies or units, and Hong Gang's restaurant was small in scale and average in decoration, so there were not many dinners. And at that time, most of the meals were signed, and collecting the accounts at the end of the year became an annoyance, and there were also those who did not pay off the credit for several years.
Another issue that needs to be addressed is taste. In the first ten years, how the master of the time-honored brand taught, Hong Gang's family's red oil noodles were used, "There is not much difference from other stores outside." "For this reason, the stickiness of customers is not very high. He and his mother began to debug, and also thanked his mother for having a good tongue, and tried many bowls of noodles, "The guest said that the noodle soup was oily, so we put less oil, and said that the noodle soup was sweet, so we put less sugar, and felt that the fragrance was weak, and there was no taste, so we studied the recipe of the spices." "Slowly, the taste of the noodle restaurant is set today.
Then the problem of quality control needs to be solved. In the old saying of Kunshan, to eat noodles, you have to eat the first pot soup, because the first pot is often the strongest, and the subsequent soup is added with water, which is always lighter. In other words, noodle soup in a noodle restaurant is prone to inconsistent quality. To solve this problem, Hong Gang, who has studied machinery and entered the factory, has played a role. With the assembly thinking on the assembly line, he standardized the secret recipe developed by his mother, how to boil the broth, how to mix it with water, and there are unified and quantitative requirements to ensure that the taste of the soup is stable and there is no change in saltiness.
After 10 years of operation, all these efforts have finally brought about a noticeable effect at the beginning of the new century. Guests began to pour in like a tide, and there were more and more repeat customers, and even tourists from other cities in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai gradually drove or took the train to eat bowl noodles.
Because the noodles in the store became famous, Hong Gang followed the advice of a relative and extended the ** time of the noodles. He soon discovered that there were many people ordering noodles at noon and in the afternoon, and during lunch, there would even be scenes of people eating noodles and ordering food competing for seats. As a result, he decided to only make noodles and no longer make stir-fried dishes, "so that we can focus more and don't have to study how to cook so many small dishes every day, and we don't have to worry about not receiving an order from the unit's dinner." Because noodles are sure to be eaten by everyone. "Tongfeng Hotel has actually become a noodle restaurant.
In the kitchen, the chefs are busy mixing soups. Photo by Beijing News reporter Feng Yuxin.
Life needs toss.
Halfway through the family to sell noodles, from obscurity to well-known, and accumulated some wealth for the family, Hong Gang's business experience has some "successful experience in the 90s". One of the most important is not to rest on our laurels.
The family buying a shop together was the first "restless" attempt. At that time, Hong Gang's father's annual income from a part-time job was only 2,000 yuan, and it was a bit risky to sell a house, borrow money, and scrape together 60,000 yuan to buy a shop.
Even more desperate was that Hong Gang was going to resign from the factory, which met with strong opposition from his father. The father thinks that the family can do a business, and the son should stay in the factory to sit in the office, be admitted to the engineer, and live a stable life with an iron rice bowl. In the early nineties of the last century, Hong Gang's Sanshan Group was a famous enterprise in Kunshan, with great influence, opening a restaurant and being a self-employed person was not as decent as working for the former, and the future was uncertain - a bowl of noodles was only sold for one or two yuan at the market price at that time, and no one could tell whether it could make money.
But Hong Gang insisted on breaking the kettle, "so noisy that the table was overturned." Eventually, the father relented and built a coal-burning stove for his son's restaurant, and when the grocery store wasn't busy, he went to the restaurant to help.
Less than two years after the store opened, in 1995, the store was developed and built a vegetable market, and a number of new stores were launched, "The house price is about 150,000 yuan, I calculated, there is a small one in another vegetable market in the city, and the rent will be 70,000 yuan a year." In other words, if I bought it that time, it might have been out in about two years. Hong Gang immediately made a decision to rent out the restaurant for a year, quickly exchanged tens of thousands of yuan for rent, and scraped together 70,000 yuan to buy the shop in the vegetable market.
In 1999, Kunshan had a small property right land**, and the asking price was 90,000 yuan. Hong Gang's money is actually very tight - he bought a commercial house in the first two years, sold it after living for a while, and bought another new commercial house; There is a lot of movement, but there is not much spare money, and everything is "card-deducted" (the middle point of the dialect is just right, not rich). In order to make money, he rented out the shop for another two or three years, and in exchange for a sum of money, he bought the land and built a small villa on it. After the new century, he also tried to co-establish a non-woven factory and open a restaurant with his friends.
Most of these attempts and investments have proved to be effective, and have brought him a lot of wealth gains. This made him more and more convinced, "Life needs to be tossed, and tossed can be better and better." ”
In fact, Kunshan was also in the same atmosphere at that time. Just talking about the surroundings of Tongfeng Hotel, in the past ten years, great changes, office buildings, libraries, swimming pools, parks have been built, clothing, restaurants and a large number of self-employed businesses have opened for business, the real economy has developed very well.
Hong Gang's entrepreneurial history is actually quite consistent with the development history of Kunshan, "As long as you are bold, there are opportunities everywhere at that time." He has always been grateful for the adventurous spirit of his youth.
A large pork rib of red oil noodles just out of the pan. Photo by Beijing News reporter Feng Yuxin.
It's all for this bowl of noodles.
After opening the noodle shop for more than 30 years, Hong Gang has also witnessed the changes in urban life. The business of the store has changed from the morning market peak in the early years to the current lunch market peak year by year. Hong Gang said that nowadays, the number of people who come to eat noodles at noon is at least 30 percent higher than in the morning. He speculated that this was a reflection of the fast-paced life, "I was in a hurry to go to work in the morning, and I didn't have time to eat a bowl of noodles." At noon, I didn't like before, I could take time to go home and cook, but now I have to go back to work after eating a light meal outside. Then eating noodles is a good choice. ”
There is also a change in customer preferences for toppings. In the early years of Hong Gang's business, the most popular ones were Yangchun noodles, poached egg noodles or single-topping noodles, and now he eats double-topping and three-topping noodles the most. He remembers that a customer once ordered eleven toppings at a time, and he couldn't fit a single table.
In the early years, the customers were all locals, and in the past ten years, listening to the accent, more than half of the customers from other places accounted for it; There are also a few Japanese and Europeans who are regular customers; Since the completion of the Kunshan rail line, the proportion of guests from Shanghai can account for one-third on weekends. Hong Gang also said that there was a gold shop owner on the same street who came from other places, "At first, he said that he couldn't get used to eating this bowl of noodles, but after eating it for a while, he said that he couldn't eat this noodles anymore......."Eating habits can be cultivated. ”
Last year, after believing that the conditions for experience, capital and other aspects were ripe, Hong Gang and his family opened the first branch of the noodle restaurant, which was run by his sister. He still guards the old shop. He imagined that he could take care of the old store for another twenty years. Twenty years later, he passed on the secret recipe to his daughter, who took over his management.
On Chinese New Year's Eve, the hotel closed, and Hong Gang was finally able to sit down and talk to me about his experiences over the years. His mobile phone is connected to the landline in the store, and ** calls come in every few minutes, and the conversation triggered is almost uniform:
Are you still open today? ”
Today our old store is closed and the new store is open. If you're interested, you can eat at the new restaurant. You take notes, the address is ......”
After receiving forty or fifty inquiries**, Hong Gang decided to take the time to help out at the new store, even if it was to get a noodle ticket - in a Soviet-style red oil noodle restaurant, involving dozens of permutations and combinations of toppings and noodles, cashier is not a simple job. Hong Gang is the person who is most familiar with the cashier, customers increase and decrease toppings, change the type of toppings, and he can quickly feedback the accurate ** and noodle ticket, "After all, I have been for this bowl of noodles all my life." ”
The day before, I saw a line of people waiting in front of the window to pick noodles in the old shop. One customer poked his head out of the window and said, "Noodles are hard to open!" He brought his own two bowls to pack. The raw noodles shook down, and the white gas poured out, condensing into a halogenous, fried mixed fragrance. Customers take off their hats in the heat as a courtesy.
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