China News Service, Shanghai, February 13th: Title: The "Spring Festival Mode" of the old dumpling shop: the most delicious thing in the world is reunion
Author Xie Mengyuan Li Jiajia
"Eat Yuanxiao in the north, eat dumplings in the south." For many Shanghainese, eating dumplings is an essential ritual during the Spring Festival. Around the Spring Festival, reporters found that the Ningbo Tangtuan Store, a time-honored restaurant in Shanghai Yuyuan Mall, was crowded with people inside and outside. The queues for eating and buying dumplings stretched from inside to outside the store. The chefs making dumplings inside the glass windows also had a different look "New Year pictures".
I get up at 6:30 and arrive at the store at 7:30. At 8:30, I pack and sell the raw dumplings I just made in the morning to the long queue waiting at the door. At 9:00, the store officially opens to welcome customers. After a long day of work, it is already 9:00 in the evening when I get home. After clicking... Xu Zhengliu persisted in this "Spring Festival model" for 26 years.
"What I learned from the master is the attitude of being serious and doing one thing to the extreme." As the manager of a Ningbo dumpling shop, Xu Zhengliu joined the shop when he was 18 and has been working with dumplings ever since. Life, “When I first came here, I didn’t have any special feelings about glutinous rice balls. I started as a handyman at the beginning, and then I learned how to make glutinous rice balls from the master, and I made them for several years.”
During the Spring Festival, staff are cooking dumplings at the Ningbo Tangtuan shop in Shanghai Yuyuan Mall. Photo by Xie Mengyuan
Making glutinous rice balls requires patience. Xu Zhengliu was recognized by his master for his meticulousness in helping in the kitchen and was selected as an apprentice. Starting from grinding the flour, the most complicated process is making the stuffing. "In order to maintain the taste, making the stuffing actually requires 13 steps. The first step is to remove the pork suet, then fry the black sesame seeds and so on."
From being a stranger to making a round dumpling in six seconds, Xu Zhengliu has not only mastered the "hand skills" but also developed the "eye skills" over the years. Now, as a store manager, his daily job is mainly to coordinate the various production tasks of the store. Among them, he relies heavily on experience to predict the day's customer flow in the early morning and determine the sales volume of glutinous rice balls. "Weather and holidays are all influencing factors. , For example, during the period before New Year’s Eve, we can sell 40,000 to 50,000 glutinous rice balls a day, and during the Lantern Festival, which is the peak period, we can sell 100,000 glutinous rice balls a day.”
As age and experience grow, not only Xu Zhengliu's work ability changes, but also his feelings for glutinous rice balls. Like most young people, he had no interest in ordinary food like glutinous rice balls. “It was mainly a salaried job.”
Recalling the scene at that time, Xu Zhengliu smiled. He said that the store once had a cultural wall, and the stories recorded on it amused him. According to legend, in the 1930s, when the founder of the store was still selling dumplings on the street, the comedy master Chaplin happened to arrive. I visited China and tasted glutinous rice dumplings in Shanghai. I was very confused about how the sesame filling was sealed into the smooth glutinous rice skin. "I thought it was quite funny at the time, because this is easy to understand for us Chinese."
Just as netizens once jokingly said that at a certain age, Chinese people's "unique genes" will suddenly awaken. Xu Zhengliu also realized its special meaning and emotional sustenance from the "intimate contact" with glutinous rice balls day after day, " In fact, it is the expectation for a sweet life and reunion, and it is also a kind of inheritance of folk customs and memories. I am very proud when I think of the role I played in it."
For the past 26 years, Xu Zhengliu has insisted on celebrating the Spring Festival in the store, and has become familiar with many elderly customers. “Every year on the first or fifth day of the Lunar New Year, they take their juniors to Yuyuan to walk around the Jiuqu Bridge and visit the City God Temple. , come here to eat a bowl of glutinous rice dumplings after it is over, and many children still remember the habits of their childhood when they grow up, and they will also come to buy glutinous rice balls."
In order to satisfy these young people's pursuit of novelty and the desire to continue tradition, this old store with a history of nearly 80 years has also continued to innovate in the taste of glutinous rice balls. On the basis of retaining the classic traditional Ningbo glutinous rice balls, crab meat glutinous rice balls, etc., a number of new varieties have been added, such as matcha bean paste glutinous rice balls, durian glutinous rice balls, etc. This year, a new creative product with the theme of the Year of the Dragon "Qile Longlong" glutinous rice buns was also launched group.
Welcoming and sending out batches of customers, Xu Zhengliu blurted out when talking about the things that have remained unchanged for more than 20 years, "The best taste in the world is reunion, and what remains unchanged is definitely everyone's family concept and good expectations for the coming year." ."(over)