The Fly Restaurant, the Last Bite of Human Life in the Wave of Food Industrialization

Eating has been the eternal pursuit of mankind for thousands of years.

In ancient times, Su Shi was thinking about Dongpo elbow and Dongpo pork, and today, the Huanong brothers are finding ways to eat them all over the village.

Countless handsome men and beautiful women sweat profusely in the gym, just to prevent the crispy meat in the evening hot pot from turning into fat on their bodies, so that they can eat one more bite next time.

There are also uncles, aunts, grandparents who are full of energy and spirit. They queue for several hours in the cold wind and the scorching sun just to buy two kilograms of their favorite pig's trotters and braised beef.

Two or three-year-old children cry loudly because they can't eat the same popsicles as their parents. College students who are at home on vacation sneakily order a cup of milk tea in the middle of the night and have to act out "The Sound of the Wind" with the delivery boy.

Workers sit in the office eating meal packs with anger written all over their bodies, while socialites share the bill for afternoon tea in luxury hotels and have to resist the urge to eat even a single bite.

A cup of milk tea brings you instant rejuvenation; a bowl of instant noodles touches your soul; iced watermelon clears away the heat; spicy lobster dominates the hot summer.

Man is iron and food is steel. If you don't eat for a meal, you will miss it.

In this era of information explosion, all kinds of videos emerge in an endless stream. The colorful world is fascinating, and while it looks colorful, it also brings aesthetic fatigue.

No matter how beautiful a woman or a man is, if you see them too much, you will feel empty and bored.

No matter how funny the jokes are or how exciting the plot is, the same old remakes will only make people bored.

There are only various food videos, which either make people hungry or calm them down.

When the tears flowed from the corners of my mouth, who doesn’t like watching food videos?

Thanks to the convenience of the Internet, the spicy, sour and smelly snail noodle has become a well-deserved Internet celebrity, supporting many emerging online and offline stores.

Thanks to the development of technology, many online celebrities often travel on a whim. They order takeout spicy hot pot at home in the morning, and sit in a cave in Chongqing to boil tripe and Gongcai in the afternoon.

At the beginning of the epidemic, people were watching food bloggers’ videos on their phones at home, some envied the simple steamed buns, steamed bread and fried dough sticks, while others lamented the variety of cooking tools of all sizes.

People follow the tutorial videos. Today, they want to make a bowl of handmade cold noodles with the noodles at home; tomorrow, they mess around with the eggs at home, and then fail countless times to make rice cooker cakes; the day after tomorrow, they make pancakes, trying to copy the vendors on the street.

As the epidemic gradually subsided and the streets regained their original vitality, food bloggers began to visit stores again, making one big restaurant and small eatery popular after another.

How can you spend 20 yuan to fill your stomach at Haidilao, which small restaurant hidden in a residential building is most popular among the surrounding residents, and which hot dry noodles on the same street has the most authentic Wuhan flavor?

Are the takeouts I’ve never ordered from the neighborhood delicious? Why do the new products of similar milk teas from several shops taste so different? Is it true that there are no delicious foods in convenience stores? Which one is better value, Hema or Sam’s Club?

All questions can be answered by exploring gourmet restaurants.

Whether it is a roadside stall, a small restaurant, or a five-star hotel, food is the ladder of human progress. The different pursuits of taste also represent the changes and development of the times.

1If you ask people who lived in the 1970s and 1980s what food they remember most vividly, nine out of ten would answer lard.

Until now, many dishes we are familiar with cannot do without a spoonful of lard to enhance the flavor, such as Yangchun noodles and shrimp dumplings, lard is the soul of them.

Many food bloggers also make their own lard at home and save it:

Put the purchased lard in a pot, add some boiling water, and then simmer it slowly. This is the key to the lard's snow-white color.

Put a few peppercorns and soybeans at the bottom of the jar, scoop in the refined lard, and wait until it solidifies before using.

The remaining oil residue in the pot can be put on a plate and topped with a little salt, pepper and chili powder. It will be crispy and not greasy.

Take a spoonful of the prepared lard and put it on the steaming rice just out of the pot, then pour a little soy sauce on it, and if possible, add some chopped green onions and sesame seeds. Mix well and you can eat several bowls in one go.

Lard, which many people who want to lose weight are trying to avoid nowadays, was a rare delicacy in the minds of people in that era.

Many restaurant kitchens also keep lard on hand to enhance the flavor of some dishes.

In that era, lard was so rare, let alone pork.

It’s not that some families couldn’t afford it, but in that era when pork was supplied by coupons, even if they had money and food coupons, they might not be able to buy the pork that was in short supply.

In order to buy pork, it is common to get up at three or four in the morning and rush to queue up; it is not uncommon for people to start a fight over someone cutting in line and then swearing at each other.

Many parents first ordered their children to line up, and the children gathered in groups of three or five to play games. Some people who had things to do at home would find a small stool, carve their names on it, and come back after they were done.

Selling meat is the best job. Holding a knife, carrying a scale and carrying a small notebook to keep accounts, no one dares to disobey and no one can refuse to respond when the order is given.

Only during festivals such as New Year's Day and Spring Festival will more meat be supplied to everyone.

If someone's family is having a wedding or funeral, buying meat becomes even more difficult. One has to either ask relatives and friends to help buy and queue up, or use connections to find someone to help.

So, at that time, occasionally eating a piece of steaming, shiny pork was enough to become an unforgettable memory.

At that time, fatty meat was much more popular than lean meat. First, lean meat was more expensive than fatty meat and people could not afford it; second, people were not full of fat, so eating fatty meat was easier to satisfy their cravings and addictive.

But in those days, pigs didn’t eat well, so they didn’t have much fat on their bodies, and they were probably thinner than humans. Plus, there were so many people who wanted to buy fat meat, so it wasn’t always possible to buy it.

After buying the meat, you have to find ways to make a small bowl of meat into a big pot. So now you can forget about the braised pork in brown sauce and pork with preserved vegetables. Chop the meat into small pieces, and then mix it with sweet potatoes and other things to make the so-called "meat soup". Only when there are many people in the family can everyone eat meat.

If you can't buy fat meat, offal is also a good choice, because compared with meat, pig stomach, intestines and the like are cheaper. For example, one catty of meat ticket can buy three catties of pig intestines, and the price is about one-third of the meat, only 20 or 30 cents per catty, while meat costs about one dollar.

Pork bones cost 50 cents a pair, and you can eat three times if you buy one pair:

The first time I ate it, I slowly cut the meat off and ate it. Even now, boneless meat is quite expensive.

Then put the bones without meat in the pot to make soup, add some vegetable leaves and grains, and it becomes bone porridge, which is much more delicious than drinking porridge alone;

Finally, when the smell of the bones is not so strong anymore and the porridge is finished, the bones are fished out, broken into pieces, and the marrow inside is sucked out. It is similar to the big bones we have today, but the meat on top is long gone.

For those who had food coupons and money but could not buy meat, another option was to go to a state-owned restaurant to have a bite to eat and fill their stomachs with food.

State-owned restaurants, as the name suggests, are restaurants funded by the state, or provincial and municipal commercial departments. Many of them are old-fashioned public-private partnerships. They are owned by the state, and the money they earn also belongs to the higher-level authorities. Employees receive wages according to national standards, which was a real iron rice bowl in that era.

Of course, state-owned restaurants are also divided into two types, one is popular and the other is high-end.

Italian film master Antonioni once shot a two-minute short film, "Chinese Restaurants in the 1970s", at the Fuxing Hui Muslim Noodle Restaurant in Suzhou.

This restaurant was the best restaurant in the city at that time. For only a few cents, you could eat steaming hot noodles and local pastries.

The restaurants at that time were the same as they are now, with private rooms and lobby. Customers sat in groups of three or four, leisurely sipping noodle soup and smacking the flavor, afraid of missing any taste full of memories.

The signature dish of the shop is undoubtedly the beef pan-fried dumplings. When the pan-fried dumplings are almost done, they use a spatula to knock on the edge of the pot to make a "dangdangdang" sound to remind everyone that those who want to buy can come over.

There are both young and strong men and gray-haired old people in the store. Although there are many people, the environment is not noisy because everyone is chewing slowly, one bite after another, to taste the most precious flavor.

Of course, many state-owned restaurants also have some high-end food. In addition to staple foods such as pan-fried buns and dumplings, chicken, duck, fish and meat are also available.

Fried eel shreds, fermented bean curd meat, grilled hairtail...they are very expensive.

It is a matter of face for ordinary people to be able to eat out in a restaurant. They can only afford to have a good meal in a restaurant during festivals.

In some small state-owned restaurants, diners can only eat what is available that day. There is a shortage of supplies and no choice.

With the rapid development after the reform and opening up, we have finally bid farewell to the era of extreme scarcity of commodities, and various types of tickets have gradually withdrawn from the stage of history.

In the 1960s, my country's per capita pork consumption was 5.22 kilograms, 8.06 kilograms in the 1970s, and reached 13.81 kilograms in the 1980s.

People can finally eat meat without having to queue up late at night.

By the 1990s, state-owned hotels began to decline and various private hotels began to emerge.

When it comes to eating, the general public has shifted their focus away from fatty meat and started to pursue more.

(Comparison of China’s pork production and domestic consumption from 1975 to 2019)

On November 12, 1987, the first KFC in mainland China officially opened on Qianmen Street in Beijing.

As a Chinese who has eaten countless "chickens", I have eaten all kinds of steamed and braised beggar's chicken, but no one has ever tasted what this "gnawed chicken" tastes like.

In order to try the new product, long queues formed in front of KFC, and the sales on the first day exceeded 300,000 yuan.

In that era when the average cadre's monthly salary was only about 100 yuan, a piece of finger-licking original chicken was simply a sky-high price, and many families had to grit their teeth to afford a meal.

But no matter how expensive it is, you still have to wait in line for half an hour to eat at KFC.

As an enlightenment to "Western lifestyle" for many people, KFC is undoubtedly very successful.

In 1990, a newlywed couple got married in KFC and entertained their relatives and friends. After the story spread, there were countless imitators, and holding weddings in KFC became very popular.

KFC, which was at its peak, quickly opened stores across the country and became a top-tier chain.

In the same year, Pizza Hut opened its first restaurant in China in Dongzhimen, Beijing. For more than a decade thereafter, it has dominated the Western fast food market and has become synonymous with pizza and pasta.

In the past two years, the 158 yuan buffet event launched by Pizza Hut has attracted countless diners.

Although everyone who went there with great enthusiasm and wanted to "bankrupt Pizza Hut" eventually left with regret and remorse, many people still shed tears of the times.

In the early years of the development of the Chinese Internet, forums such as Tianya, Renren, and Tieba were filled with tens of thousands of Pizza Hut salad buffet guides.

The 25-yuan self-service salad includes lettuce, corn, cucumber, apple, and the popular croutons and canned yellow peaches. You are only given a six-inch bowl, and how much you can pile on it depends on your ability.

Since you can only take it once, the ordinary serving is not satisfying at all.

As a result, various amazing posts such as "There is no highest, only higher" and "How to make the invincible 6-layer Pizza Hut self-service salad" began to spread rapidly on the Internet.

Going to Pizza Hut to pile up salad has become a ritual.

The results of the online battle became the final battle of this salad.

What everyone is piling up is not a salad, but a battle for dignity.

It is said that a student from an architectural college in Shanghai can stack salad towers as high as his forearm every time he goes to Pizza Hut, and the structure is quite solid.

Someone wrote a paper based on this titled "Analysis of Pizza Hut Salad Tower Stacking", using geometric formulas and detailed practical illustrations to create "salad architecture".

More and more people are becoming obsessed with this activity, setting new records. The popular "architecture students eating buffet" series in contemporary short videos is nothing compared to the Pizza Hut salad tower at that time.

Ultimately, this competitive craze ended with Pizza Hut canceling its salad bar in 2009, but it was enough to show the general public's yearning and pursuit for self-service at that time.

In 2003, Yuan Changping targeted the prosperous mainland market and opened Golden Leopard in Shanghai.

This restaurant, whose name carries a metaphor of luxury, has been the leader in buffet restaurants for the next decade or so.

The catering categories at that time were far less abundant than they are today, but Golden Leopard provided a very complete range of dishes, including common stir-fried dishes, rare seafood, as well as fresh "foreign goods" such as steak, sashimi, caviar, etc., which attracted the attention of countless people.

The popular Golden Leopard brought the first year of high-end buffet in China.

The lunch price was 180 yuan and the dinner price was 220 yuan, which were unprecedentedly high prices for the catering industry at that time.

People began to use leopards as a way to show off in social situations. After all, not everyone is willing to spend such a huge amount of money to eat some "fresh seafood" that sounds like it might cause diarrhea.

The Golden Leopard advertisements were also everywhere. At that time, Haagen-Dazs had just entered China, and the slogan "If you love someone, take them to eat Haagen-Dazs" moved countless boys and girls, and the Golden Leopard, which provided unlimited Haagen-Dazs, became a symbol of love.

In addition to high-end buffets such as Golden Leopard, various mid- and low-end buffets are also emerging.

Haolongge took advantage of the buffet trend and opened China's first American pizza buffet restaurant. For only 39 yuan, you can enjoy all kinds of pizza snacks.

In addition, there are various Korean barbecue, Brazilian barbecue, and other similar buffet restaurants.

The popularity of buffets can be said to be a result of the times.

After experiencing a period of material scarcity and gradual abundance, China's catering consumption has entered a stage of "overeating", and people have begun to pursue the dual accumulation of quality and quantity.

The buffet with a wide variety of dishes gives guests more choices, and the unlimited supply of food also gives people hope of "eating back their money".

2012 was a turning point for Golden Leopard.

Starting from this year, Golden Leopard began to turn from profit to loss and started to go downhill. The failure of listing and blind expansion put Golden Leopard in an embarrassing situation.

The subsequent series of news, such as unfresh ingredients and fake shark fins, undoubtedly made the situation worse.

In 2017, with the closure of Golden Leopard’s last store in Beijing, an era of catering came to an end, shocking the entire catering industry.

Those young people who have not saved enough money seem to have lost their love.

But the decline of the clouded leopard is not without trace.

As people's economic level continues to grow and their consumption power increases, "walk in with the help of the wall and walk out with the help of the wall" is no longer applicable to the general public.

At today's buffets, customers usually choose for the variety of ingredients and out of the mentality that when you don't know what to eat, you might as well have a little of everything.

If you want to eat barbecue, just come to the barbecue buffet. If you want to eat barbecue, there is also a barbecue buffet, and skewers and hot pot are of course no problem.

Some buffets have become a la carte options, or the unlimited Boston lobster that can only be found in high-end restaurants has become the signature dish of buffets.

Even a buffet that costs hundreds of dollars may not be satisfactory.

Service, environment, and ingredients have all become standards that the public values. Buffets that meet these standards are still popular.

Taste has become the first factor for most customers when making a choice.

This is why, as hotels become more and more fancy today, small restaurants have emerged as the white moonlight in people's hearts and the best place to eat.

3 When it comes to cheap restaurants, everyone has a restaurant they want to recommend:

The fried skewers shop next to my school when I was a child, surrounded by countless children after school, where a skewer cost only a few cents, was enough to make you sweet on the way home;

Outside the university gate, there is a street full of restaurants of all sizes. Whether it is braised chicken with rice or cross-bridge rice noodles, they are the best choice when you are tired of eating in the cafeteria.

After leaving home for work, I dragged my tired body back to the old rental house late at night. The big iron pot under the street light became my only comfort, and it even had the taste of my hometown.

Young people who were meeting each other sweetly, whispering to each other, occasionally saying a few words in private;

The couple sitting nearby exchanged food in their bowls and talked about family matters.

Uncles, aunts, and grandpas, fanning themselves with palm-leaf fans, carried their own pots and pans, packed up the dinner they had booked long ago, and went home to have a simple meal with their grandchildren who had just finished school.

The special snacks are well-deserved, and the home-cooked meals are delicious.

On Hupu, a post titled "Eating All the Rice Bowls" has been widely circulated. The poster eats at a Chengdu snack bar every day and is determined to eat the entire menu.

There is a new variety every day, with marked prices and pictures, which makes many JRS cry with envy.

The boiled pork slices at 18 yuan are absolutely amazing; the green pepper and pork rice at 11 yuan is classic and has no regrets; the pork with garlic sprouts at 14 yuan has tender garlic sprouts and juicy meat, and goes very well with rice.

Everyone was cheering and selecting the most valuable ingredients, creating a carnival.

Internet celebrities’ restaurant visits have also made many small restaurants popular, gaining popularity on various platforms and becoming more and more popular and loved by everyone.

Many customers will travel far away to check in, and small restaurants are the favorites of tourists.

When looking at the food in a place, it is not enough to just look at the big restaurants, you also have to look at the small restaurants.

The most authentic things are often hidden in deep alleys and residential buildings.

The term "fly restaurant" is not a derogatory term. It was originally a humorous self-deprecating term used by Sichuan people.

They call small restaurants that have good food but small space and simple environment but good food "fly restaurants".

The so-called flies, firstly, refer to the restaurants hidden in the streets and alleys, as if there are mosquitoes and flies scattered around; secondly, refer to the shops being shabby and indeed easy for flies to appear; thirdly, no matter how small the shop is, as long as the food is delicious, diners will chase and find the shop like flies.

The environment may not be satisfactory, but the products are definitely of good quality and low price, and the bosses are all warm and enthusiastic in dealing with people. It has the most urban and down-to-earth flavor.

While people were busy going to Pizza Hut to pile up salad towers, another type of post was quietly developing on the Internet.

Posts such as "A Complete List of Chengdu's Flea Restaurants" and "Top 50 Flea Restaurants" have received over 10,000 hits.

In 2010, many traditional mainstream media also began to get involved in the Internet, and joined the self-media in defining "Mingting Restaurant" as the representative of Chengdu cuisine and fly-in-the-wall restaurants.

In 2011, the official Weibo account of Chengdu Municipal Government @成都 released a report on "Chengdu Cuisine: Mingting Restaurant". The "brain flower tofu" of this small restaurant was promoted to local residents and tourists from afar as one of the flavors of Chengdu.

If, before this, some people were skeptical about fly-in-the-wall restaurants, thinking that they were symbols of dirtiness and disorder, then after this, fly-in-the-wall restaurants gradually became synonymous with delicious food, that is, authentic.

In the past, fly-in-the-wall restaurants were so popular because they were inexpensive, tasted good, and had a special flavor of the city and the everyday.

Now, there is another reason why fly restaurants are becoming popular on the Internet. That is, as the degree of food industrialization becomes higher and higher, the public's love for handmade food is also rising.

When migrant workers feel distressed and in tears over having to eat a variety of not-so-fresh meals delivered from meal kits every day, they forget that even if they sit in a magnificent hotel, the food they taste may not necessarily be authentically handmade.

The rapid expansion of hotpot is a testament to the prosperity and development of food industrialization.

Big data shows that as of December 2020, Chongqing ranks first in the country in terms of the number of hot pot restaurants in cities. Chengdu, Beijing and Xi'an rank second, third and fourth respectively.

The number of hotpot restaurants is also increasing year by year. In 2013, there were 406,000 hotpot restaurants in China, and in 2017, the number reached 601,000.

Compared with 2017, the per capita consumption price of hot pot products in 2020 increased across the board in cities of all levels; among them, first-tier cities had the highest increase, with the per capita consumption price reaching 67.39 yuan, an increase of 44.4% from 2017.

All kinds of stores are springing up everywhere, including Sichuan hotpot, Chongqing hotpot, Beijing hotpot, Chaoshan hotpot, as well as Japanese and Thai hotpot. There are all kinds of hotpot dishes.

The reason why there are so many hot pot restaurants is that a complete and comprehensive product supply chain has been formed:

The base ingredients are all produced by the manufacturer, with only the brand difference, and there is not much difference. The scene of frying the ingredients on the spot only exists in the old shops on the street;

Meat dishes can be customized, cold chain transportation is in place, and they can be directly thawed, unpacked, and plated for use. Otherwise, how can we guarantee that chain stores in different places have the same taste? The same is true for soy products.

Vegetarian dishes can be purchased locally and cut by machine, or you can find a supply chain and have them delivered pre-packed.

The whole process does not require a chef, just enough food preparers.

Celebrities have joined hotpot restaurants one after another, although it is mainly for financing and making money, not because they really want to make a lot of money from the hotpot restaurant business.

But it can also be seen from this that hot pot restaurants are indeed the first choice for opening a store because they are trouble-free and have stable quality.

But even if you don’t order takeout or eat hotpot, most restaurants that mainly focus on frying, stir-frying, and deep-frying also have corresponding cooking packs.

Main dishes, side dishes, snacks, rice and buns can all be ready-made semi-finished products.

Even if it is freshly squeezed juice, there are concentrated juice packets. Just add a little water and mix well.

Especially for well-known chain brands, most of the dishes actually come from central kitchens and distribution supply chains, so as to ensure the uniformity of taste and stability of quality standards.

Only a few seasonal vegetables, or fresh seafood that must be killed and eaten immediately, will be prepared on-site in the kitchen.

Of course, he doesn’t necessarily have to be a real chef, after all, there are such things as cooking robots.

Semi-finished products and cooking packages allow restaurants to sell themselves as factories, just like when you go to the supermarket and buy frozen semi-finished dumplings. The principle is similar, but the restaurant allows you to enjoy more advanced services, and you don’t have to wash the pot after eating.

In this way, small restaurants become valuable.

After all, the boss waving the spoon in his hand is the only person besides your mother who cooks for you personally.

It is true that many small restaurants have been suffering from the huge traffic brought by Internet celebrities. Although their business has suddenly boomed, they are unable to bear the burden and their quality has declined. After the excitement, the original customer flow is easily lost.

There are even some so-called fly restaurants, which are actually built up with the same old marketing tactics: hot-tempered bosses, limited food, diners who rave about their food, and tiny stores with nowhere to step... In essence, they just want to take advantage of this favorable situation and make a quick buck.

This is why short videos about cooking are becoming more and more popular than those about visiting restaurants.

Chen Xiaoqing, the director of A Bite of China, once wrote in his book: "I don't quite understand how cities develop, but what the earth lacks is not cities made of steel and concrete, but the daily necessities of life."

But in fact, it is the development of economy and society, especially urbanization, that has shaped the change of Chinese people's taste in "eating" over the past few decades. Nowadays, countless people are beginning to pursue the unique urban atmosphere of fly restaurants. Perhaps this is not some kind of "return" to the ancient times, but a postmodern reflection of the city's development to a certain stage.

Taste is our only competitive advantage, and this is the only thing that has never changed.

References:

FoodWine Eat well and drink well: The demise of the buffet

Titanium Media: A brief history of the fly restaurant

Some answers to the Zhihu question "Can Chinese food be industrialized?"