Chapter 26 Three Relocations of Recreation

Today, Kangle Restaurant, located in the west of Jiaodaokou Beidajie Road, is not a time-honored restaurant in Beijing, but it was a well-known restaurant in the 1950s and 1960s.Business was excellent until the early 1980s.In recent years, due to the rapid development of the city of Beijing, there are many restaurants in the east, west, north and south, and the competition is fierce. The business of Kangle is also gradually sluggish, and its reputation is gradually overwhelmed by the turbulent tide of the catering industry. Kangle was first established in the mid-1950s. It is located in the north of Xinkai Road, Mishi Street, Dongcheng, Beijing. It is a few small bungalows facing the Hutong.The front door is very small, and the shop is just outside the door, with a maximum area of ​​30 to 40 square meters, which can accommodate five or six small square tables. I remember that there are also one or two private seats with curtains on the door. The private rooms are also small and can only be arranged. A round table, this kind of layout and arrangement is considered the most shabby among individual restaurants in small and medium-sized cities, not to mention Beijing today.

The owners of Kangle are an old couple named Lin. Some people say they are from Fujian.This old couple is cultured, and they don't look like restaurant owners in terms of demeanor and temperament.They were nearly sixty years old in the mid-fifties.Kangle first called for Yunnan and Fujian flavors, but the actual operation is far more than the scope of Yunnan and Fujian cuisines. Su cuisine is also Kangle's specialties. Kangle is good at making bad dishes, which have the style of Shandong cuisine and the characteristics of Fujian cuisine. For example, the fragrant bad pork slices belong to the former, while the red bad pork slices belong to the latter.Others such as jade soup, fried melon dates, peach blossom pan, steam pot chicken, bridge noodles, etc. are also very distinctive.In the middle of the 1950s, most of the restaurants in Beijing were old and time-honored restaurants. With the changes in social lifestyles and consumer groups after liberation, many restaurants specializing in entertainment business and wedding and funeral celebrations closed down one after another, and most of the remaining ones are very distinctive. Or restaurants opened in prosperous areas, such as Fengzeyuan, Tongheju, Cuihualou, Dongxinglou of Shandong cuisine, Yuhuatai, Tongchunyuan, Senlong, Wufangzhai of Huaiyang and Jiangsu cuisine, Henan restaurant Houde Fu, Guangdong restaurant Enchengju, Hunan restaurant Qizhen Pavilion, Quyuan Restaurant, Makai Canteen, Sichuan restaurant Emei Restaurant, etc., as well as Jiaomen restaurants Donglaishun, Xilaishun, Quanjude and Bianyifang which specialize in roast duck, and Roast Meat Wan, which specializes in barbecue. BBQ season and more.As for Hongbinlou, which serves Halal cuisine, and Laozhengxing, which serves local cuisine in Shanghai, both moved from Tianjin and Shanghai to Beijing in the 1950s.Most of these restaurants take their own characteristics or local dishes as their business purpose, and have been familiar to Beijingers for a long time.Kangle was first established and little-known, but it breaks the boundaries of cuisines, creates a unique style, and creates its own characteristics. Although it is located in a corner of the capital, it still attracts customers.

In the mid-to-late 1950s, many celebrities gathered in this small restaurant on Xinkai Road in Dongcheng. When I came to eat with my family, I met Chen Yi, Guo Moruo, Qi Yanming, Xia Yan and others. The car is light and easy, very casual, sometimes eating in the private room, sometimes even eating in a few scattered seats outside.Kangle was originally named "Kangle Canteen", which also means popularization.Some dishes are really cheap and popular, like "ants climbing a tree" and "stir-fried kimchi with minced meat". The name "Ants Climbing a Tree" is very unique. It is actually stir-fried vermicelli with minced meat, but it is very delicate.Another example is sweet-scented osmanthus beef, silver silk tenderloin, etc., which are also Kangle's original dishes.At that time, the furnace was mainly run by Mrs. Lin and his wife, and there were only two or three employees, but the business was very prosperous.

The first relocation of Kangle was in the early 1960s, when it was moved from Xinkai Road to the north of Xikou Neilu, a messy Chunshu Hutong (now changed to Baishu Hutong) in Dongcheng.This is an unqualified courtyard house, but it has been renovated and is much more spacious than the newly opened road house.The three north rooms are connected to serve as a restaurant.The two small rooms in the east room are elegant seats, and the small room in the south room is also a restaurant.The two rooms in the west room are kitchens, but they are also very neat.At this time, Kangle seems to be a public-private joint venture. I have eaten here many times, and I have never seen Mr. Lin again. Sometimes I see Mrs. Lin, who has aged a lot.At that time, Ms. Chang Jing had joined Kangle and became the head chef.Later, Chang Jing became a well-known chef all over the country, and that was in the late 1970s.

Kangle was in its heyday in the era of Chunshu Alley. The number of chefs and service staff doubled compared with the time when the road was newly opened.It can accommodate forty or fifty people for dinner at the same time.Although it is still opened in the alley, the business is by no means worse than the restaurants facing the street.At this time, Kangle still does not advertise a certain cuisine. In addition to Kangle’s traditional dishes, there are some innovations, such as the signature dish Peach Blossom Pan. In addition to using shrimp and tomato sauce as toppings, it is also decorated with diced fresh pineapple and diced magnolia slices. With green beans, it forms a visual effect of red, white, yellow and green, and the taste is also good.

At that time, I often met with a friend who was in the third year of No. 25 Middle School (Yuying Middle School) to go to Kangle for lunch. I wanted a fish fillet and a sweet-scented osmanthus beef for dinner. It was only two yuan. If you don't go with the elders in your family, you dare not ask for such dishes.Once at noon, after going to the exhibition hall of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Wangfujing Shuaifu Garden, I walked to Bamiancao and thought of going to Kangle for dinner. It was almost noon, and the north room was full, and the small room in the south room had just been vacated. One table, this square table leans against the wall, and it is said that only three people can sit.We had just ordered a good meal, and two Russians walked in, who spoke fluent Chinese, and asked if we could share a table. We asked them to sit casually, so four people squeezed a table.They asked the waiter to order, and in fluent Chinese, ordered two fried rice with eggs (this is not on the menu, they asked to make a special one), a bowl of yellow croaker soup and a plate of kimchi.It seems to be a regular visitor here, very natural and informal.They chatted with us during the meal and asked what the dish we wanted was called?taste good or not?etc.They use spoons for fried rice, but they use chopsticks for kimchi, and they use it very well.They ate very quickly. We left our seats first, and the waiter told us when he was packing up the belongings that the taller and older one was Chervonenko, the Soviet ambassador to China at that time.

The second relocation of Kangle was in the early 1970s, from Chunshu Hutong to the east of Wangfu Avenue, next to the original "Salvation Army" not far from the Capital Theater.This place has been a small restaurant since the mid-1950s. Over the past 40 years, it has changed owners several times and has been rebuilt several times. Now it is Minghua Shaomai Restaurant.Kangle has been in business here for five or six years in the 1970s. At that time, it was already a situation of ground floor and ground floor.I don't have a deep impression of the happiness of this period, I only remember eating here three or four times.

The third relocation was at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, that is, to the three-story building on the west side of Andingmen Inner Street Road today. It was the time of reform and opening up, and a lot of waste was waiting to be done. At the beginning of the opening, the business was also very good. .There are scattered seats on the first floor downstairs, which are always overcrowded, and the second and third floors are reserved tables, which were also overwhelmed before the mid-1980s.I have entertained guests from Taiwan and Hong Kong here, and they all spoke highly of it.I remember that Ruan, the deputy general manager of Vietnam Stamp Company, once had a banquet at Kangle, and she actually said that it was the best dinner she had ever had in her life.

In the late 1980s, with the fierce competition in Beijing's catering industry, the leisure business became increasingly sluggish. They came up with a new way of ordering dishes by looking at photos, which was to take photos of various dishes, put them in an album, and write below The name of the dish is for customers to refer to when ordering.This approach can also be described as ingenious and well-intentioned, but after all, dishes are for eating, not for viewing. It has been 40 years since Kangle was established. It has changed its location three times. The original owners, Mrs. Lin and his wife, have long passed away. Later, Ms. Chang Jing, the chef, also retired for many years. Now part of the store has been turned into a karaoke hall and entertainment city. The way out and the maintenance of characteristics need to be seriously considered.