Chapter 41 Chinese Own Western Food

In every major Chinese city, there will be one or two Western-style restaurants run by the Chinese themselves.These few restaurants, especially in Chinese society from the 1950s to the 1980s, have always been in a very delicate position. For example, in Shanghai, he is called "De Da", "Donghai" or "Red House"; in Beijing, he is called "Xinqiao" or "Moscow", and so on.The names are different, but the functions are highly consistent: 1. Provide a number of Western-style meals; 2. Provide a taste imagination material for Western-style life. The latter function has far-reaching significance in the generally poor life and generally rich imagination of Chinese people.The experience of Western food in the Cold War era is an exciting and safe adventure for the taste.Most of the people engaged in this adventure are couples. Visiting western restaurants used to be a necessary ritual of love, which is equivalent to the necessary setting of the Eiffel Tower or the White House when shooting wedding portraits in studios today.

Since the mid-17th century, there have been Western-style restaurants run by Chinese in various treaty ports.As the earliest treaty port, Guangzhou began to have local western food called "Fan Cai Restaurant" around the 1860s.Since the 1870s, Guangzhou's "Fancai Restaurant" has successively moved north to Shanghai and Beijing.Most of the first batch of "fancai restaurants" concentrated in Beijing's Dongjiaomin Lane, Shanghai's Hongkou and Xujiahui were run by Cantonese. The earliest Fancai restaurant in Guangzhou is no longer available, and the only one with relatively complete records is the "Taipingguan Restaurant" that is still in business and has a name that is not westernized.Speaking of the history of the Taiping Pavilion, you have to cough twice, because it really happened during the Xianfeng period.In the tenth year of Xianfeng (1860), the Taiping Pavilion opened in Taipingsha, the most prosperous place in Guangzhou. In this year, the "Beijing Treaty" was signed, and the Qing government ceded the Kowloon Peninsula south of Boundary Street to Britain.

To apply today's fashionable words, Taipingguan is likely to be China's first out-and-out "Western restaurant for Chinese people". In the sense of "connecting with the standards", Mr. Xu Laogao, the founder of Taipingguan, should be regarded as the first person who provided the Chinese people with the resource of "opening your mouth to eat the world". Mr. Xu Laogao, who used to be in Shamian's American-owned "Qichanghang" (running shipping and financial business, at the turn of the 23rd year of Guangxu, the government-supervised commercial enterprise Steamship Merchants Bureau presided over by Li Hongzhang and Zeng Guoquan acquired the company's Eighteen Ships) worked as a cook, and after Xu Laogao was fired, he set up a stall in the Taipingsha area of ​​today’s Beijing Road, selling his specialty "Western-style fried beef", which was delicious to passersby in Guangzhou. Lao Gao's "Western food" became famous because of this, so he moved from the outdoors to the indoors, named the restaurant after the place where he made his fortune, and opened the first Western restaurant "Taipingguan" in Guangzhou (probably the whole country).

After the National Revolution, near the Finance Department on Beijing Road (that place has always been called "Finance Hall", "Finance Hall" used to be a fashionable Western-style building, and now it is the Finance Department of Guangdong Province) opened a fashionable name "National Finance Department". "Restaurant", in 1926, Xu Laogao's son bought the "National Restaurant" and put up the signboard of "Taiping New Restaurant". This is today's Taiping Restaurant.Therefore, at one time there were two Taiping Pavilions that appeared on the same road in the most prosperous Guangzhou, and they were not far apart, which seemed like a chain operation.

According to Xu’s descendants, at that time, the price of the Taiping Pavilion was calculated in silver. Roasted pigeon was 1 yuan each, Portuguese chicken was 5 yuan, and baked crab cover was 6 cents.The monthly food of ordinary Guangzhou citizens is about four or five yuan. It seems that those who enter and leave the Taiping Pavilion are either rich or expensive, and they should also include a group of the latest trends.However, the heroic Zhou Enlai and Deng Yingchao would never have imagined on that afternoon in 1925 that seventy years later, on the north wall of the second floor of the Taiping Pavilion, there was a huge black-and-white photo of the two of them in Guangzhou. , the front page of the recipe, impressively printed with "Prime Minister's Set Menu" and "Prime Minister's Wife's Set Menu".

On August 8, 1925, the first Kuomintang-Communist cooperation and the honeymoon between Zhou Enlai and Deng Yingchao had just begun in Guangzhou. In order to celebrate their marriage, Zhou and Deng, who live in Wendru, and their friends gathered at the Taiping Pavilion (supposedly the one in Taipingsha) to drink "Western tea" this afternoon. bought it online. Afternoon tea was presided over by Peng Pai, and the witness was Deng Yanda, director of the Political Department of Whampoa Military Academy and a famous general of the Northern Expedition a year later (the deputy director was Zhou Enlai). President Jiang Zhongzheng happened to pass by, and it is said that he also came to sit for a while. (Fifty-eight years later, Mr. Li Jianhua, a 70-year-old graduate of the 17th batch of the Whampoa Military Academy, became the Hong Kong partner of the Taiping Pavilion.)

The sages in the seat are all Westernized cool people.It is said that regular visitors also include Zou Lu and Lu Xun, and the status of the Taiping Pavilion can be imagined. In 1959 and 1963, Zhou Enlai came to Guangzhou twice, and both times he ordered to eat at the Taiping Pavilion.Some people remember that he ate roasted squab and shredded chicken fried rice.That time in 1963, I ordered Swiss roast pigeon, but I only ate one bite.Therefore, the "Prime Minister's set meal" (including corn and chicken cream soup, roasted squab with seasonal dishes, shredded chicken fried rice, ice cream, coffee or tea) on the menu board of the Taiping Pavilion now has shadows, and the "Prime Minister's wife set meal" ( Including fresh tomato cream soup, grilled Florentine beef tenderloin, ice cream, coffee or tea), these are today's delicacies.

However, the roasted pigeons in Taipingguan are really delicious, even better than all the Chinese restaurants in Guangzhou that are famous for their roasted pigeons, and the quality of the products is also very stable.It is said that because Taipingguan’s young pigeons are easy to sell, pigeon dealers in Qingyuan (a mountainous area in northern Guangdong that produces famous breeds of chickens and meat pigeons) will let Taipingguan be the first to pick up their goods every time they come to Guangzhou. When roasted pigeon appears in Cantonese restaurants, it belongs to Chinese food, and its name is often changed to "红烤". Once it appears in Western restaurants, it belongs to Western food. The foreign name is roasted young pigeon, "红烤" is absolutely to be avoided.

The taste of roasted pigeon and "Portuguese chicken" in the Taiping Pavilion always reminds me of the atmosphere in Macau. Macanese cuisine is often referred to as "Portuguese cuisine".On the eve of Macao’s handover, a domestic news agency wrote in a special article on Macao’s cuisine: “Macao restaurants serve dishes such as African spicy chicken, Portuguese chicken steak, roasted pigeon, Xishi beef, and assembly soup. They are all famous European dishes.” Authentic Portuguese cuisine is not popular in Europe, let alone mainstream, although Chinese fans of Gomez and Figo are still more inclined to accept the term "European cuisine".In fact, half of the so-called "Portuguese cuisine" in Macau cannot be eaten in Lisbon. "Portuguese cuisine" is the result of the Portuguese colonization activities in the past four hundred years.In today's "Macao Portuguese Cuisine", materials and spices that the Portuguese have continuously loaded in Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and South Asian colonies are mixed in, plus the traditional cooking of Macao aboriginals (including Fujianese and Cantonese) and The Portuguese who were born in Macau have distant memories of their motherland...the prefix "Macao-Portuguese" was born in this way.Of course, this is a very tasty "prefix".

The roasted pigeons in Taipingguan are the closest to those produced in Macau, but the taste is still slightly inferior.The reason may be related to the latter's more "European" production. Although both are accompanied by lemon on the plate, the latter uses olive oil and a large amount of minced garlic is stuffed in the belly of the pigeon in advance.In 1971, in Hong Kong Taiping Pavilion (operated by the fifth generation of the Xu family), in a sculpture made by the Italian artist Casadei with a lot of money, the image of the pigeon’s Western food was once again strengthened and integrated with the “Western style”. Strengthened and completed the final exit from Asia and entry into Europe.

"Swiss Chicken Wings" is also a famous dish shared by the Taiping Restaurant in Hong Kong. The "Swiss sauce" (Swiss sauce) whose main ingredients are minced garlic, pepper and sugar gum is the key to the success of this dish.According to Xu Xi'an, the fifth-generation successor of Taipingguan, the barrel of "secret Swiss juice" was brought to Hong Kong from Guangzhou and has been used for more than a hundred years. Swiss chicken wings are also unavailable in Switzerland.Of course, this does not prevent Chinese and foreign diners from acclaiming it. Although the West no longer needs to be imagined, in the western food lounges in Shamian and Tianhe, there are more authentic "Westerners" who order and serve us hospitablely, and even sing and dance, but there are still them in the Taiping Pavilion. The replacement, just changed its name to "Lvyin Pavilion" or "Monte Carlo", continues to attract fashionable men and women with Chinese and Western food. The origin of most Chinese and western food may be traced back to the "Taipingguan" in a broad sense. However, in the past 140 years, the history of Taipingguan has been repeatedly interrupted. The third-generation owner Xu Hanchu fled to Hong Kong to take refuge and handed over the business in Guangzhou to his assistants; during the "Cultural Revolution", all Western-style dishes in the Taiping Pavilion were ordered to be replaced by Chinese ones, and all parts that could arouse Western imagination in the store were completely removed. .However, the Taiping Restaurant in Hong Kong has led and participated in the entire process of the growth of Hong Kong-style western food in the past sixty years. Hong Kong-style western food has become its own system and has its own complete history, complete enough to provide complete nostalgic material.The three Taiping Museums in Hong Kong survive today with nostalgia as their market positioning, and they can maintain a kind of expensive reserve.In contrast, as the originator of "Chinese Western food", Guangzhou Taiping Restaurant has been excluded from the mainstream of "Lvyin Pavilion" or "Monte Carlo". Pulse" but cannot "inherit". Chinese-style Western food generates its own discourse, its own way of expression, and its own values. When "Chinese Western food" becomes an integral part of Chinese people's own history, it thus gains the authority to speak and evaluate by itself.For example, it has named a Russian restaurant at the junction of Tianhe Road and Guangzhou Avenue "Russian Western Cuisine". Napoleon, who was accustomed to talking with cannons, once called Moscow an "Asian city".And the "Russian western food" in our Asian city is made by people from the Northeast.As for the history of the transformation of Russian cuisine in the Northeast, that is another similar topic.