What is a music tea restaurant?

What is a tea restaurant? Hard to say.

Is it food, culture, customs, or human relationships? Yes, both are correct, but neither is complete.

The teahouse is like Hong Kong since 1945, like China after 1980. It embodies the collision of various cultures, so that if we use a single culture to explain it, it will definitely not be right. .

The first is the way of dining.

I remember that in the famous Hong Kong cartoon "McDull", teahouse scenes often appeared. In the second episode "McDull Story Sequel: The Pineapple Oil Prince", Mrs. Mai took McDull to have lunch. According to the boss, the lunch consists of meat and vegetables plus corn starch and gravy, which costs 20 yuan, and then you can go to school or go back to the office building. This is a tea restaurant that can use the quickest way to get things done.

The emergence of tea restaurants is actually a sign that people want to live a fast-paced modern life. It’s rare to find famous dishes in teahouses where you have to wait for several hours for a big meal. What’s written on the water sign is claypot rice, plate-top rice, cup-top rice, raw porridge, noodles, fried snacks, and Ming Dynasty snacks. Food stalls such as stir-fried stir-fries and other food stalls. The biggest feature of these dishes is that they are fast. It can be quickly formed, eaten quickly, and even packaged takeout can be completed quickly. It can be said that tea restaurants embody the real need for fast pace.

However, it is the teahouse that was born in Hong Kong that emphasizes efficiency and has become a leisure place for many old neighbors. The most common scene you can see in a tea restaurant is a few old people making a pot of tea, ordering a few snacks, and living a leisurely day. If this were placed in a modern catering company that values ??table turnover, it would simply be considered a crime. If you don’t believe it, you can take a look at KFC, etc., which also provide fast food. The seats they provide are so crappy that they allow you to eat quickly and then disappear. There are even some that directly provide takeaways (for example, Starbucks does not provide seats in some countries) of). But why can a tea restaurant that also provides Chinese fast food become a leisure place for neighbors?

This probably has to do with Hong Kong’s geographical influence. As we all know, Hong Kong is an area with many people but little land. When the economy is booming, the public space provided by the government for citizens is even more limited. Many Hong Kong people (especially the elderly) have no choice but to choose cheap and high-quality tea restaurants as a place for leisure and social interaction. In addition, tea restaurants are generally time-honored in a community, and they pay attention to human interaction with neighbors, so they will naturally not turn away these old customers. Therefore, tea restaurants have become a good choice for the older generation of Hong Kong people to relax.

When Western modern civilization, represented by fast food, enters the Eastern scene, it usually needs to carry out a series of "transformation" movements, otherwise it will be difficult to integrate with the local people. When the tea restaurant moved north, this change became more obvious. For example, the tea restaurants in the center of Beijing are basically near the China World Trade Center, in the CBD center, open all night, and free of crowds. The common people's teahouse has completely transformed into a high-consumption place. I'm afraid this can only be explained as imagination of a foreign country.

Tang Palace’s Shrimp Dumplings

Some places have also developed new methods, such as spicy shrimp dumplings, green shrimp dumplings, etc., which are generally in addition to the original shrimps. Add other fillings to make. However, personally, I still like the original the most, which is one shrimp, a little pork, a little winter bamboo shoots, plus a layer of crystal swallow skin, and "aww" a mouthful of juicy shrimp dumplings. Let’s award this most classic award to it!

Glutinous rice chicken

There is a difference between glutinous rice chicken and chicken rice dumplings. First, lotus leaves are used to wrap the glutinous rice chicken, not rice dumpling leaves. Second, a good glutinous rice chicken should have a variety of ingredients. In addition to chicken, there are bamboo shoots, bacon, mushrooms, pork, dried shrimps, etc. The more and more chopped the ingredients, the better it tastes when mixed with chicken and glutinous rice. In addition to the conventional sugar, salt, and soy sauce, a considerable amount of oyster sauce should also be added to the seasoning.

There is a joke. A friend from Guangdong went to Vietnam to travel. He was a little tired of eating local dishes. One day, his eyes lit up when he saw the sticky rice chicken on the menu, which he has been accustomed to eating since childhood. He quickly ordered it to try. taste. What’s unexpected—Vietnam’s sticky rice chicken, the glutinous rice and chicken are separate! What came up was a plate of glutinous rice and a deliciously roasted roast chicken.

My friend couldn’t laugh or cry, and finally concluded that not every country’s food is as imaginative as Chinese food!

I am sincere in saying this. The deliciousness of glutinous rice chicken lies not in the stickiness of the glutinous rice itself, nor in the aroma of the chicken itself. The glutinous rice is glued to the chicken, giving it a kaleidoscope-like gorgeous flavor. The chicken is wrapped in a layer of glutinous rice, which makes it appear subtle, tender and multi-tasty. It’s unclear whether the glutinous rice completes the chicken, or whether the chicken completes the glutinous rice. All in all, glutinous rice chicken means eating chicken wrapped in glutinous rice. One of them is indispensable, and it will be tasteless and boring if separated. This is the most lingering award, and the flowers naturally fall into the home of Nuomi Chicken. There is no dispute.

The food in tea restaurants can better display the characteristics of various cultures.

Some people say that tea restaurants are the "public dining halls" of Hong Kong people, while others say that tea restaurants are Hong Kong's "ancestral halls in the city." As the most grassroots and local eating place, teahouses are still deeply loved by Hong Kong people after many years of popularity. A survey shows that nearly 50% of Hong Kong people surveyed said that tea restaurants are the places they visit most often when going out for lunch; and in the "Ten Most Representative Designs of Hong Kong" selection held in Hong Kong, tea restaurants ranked No. 1 in votes First, it has become the “most Hong Kong” design in the eyes of Hong Kong people.

Hong Kong also has some food with unique characteristics of tea restaurants. Among them, "Yuanyang" may be the drink of "the most Hong Kong-style tea restaurant". The so-called "Yuanyang" is a mixture of milk tea and coffee. This kind of Chinese and Western combination The original drinks in the teahouses best reflect Hong Kong’s urban characteristics of blending Eastern and Western cultures.

What can better appreciate the magic of traditional Chinese food is soup dumplings or soup dumplings.

Soup dumplings or soup dumplings are a work of art. I have read a joke. When foreigners first came to China a hundred years ago, they felt it was magical when they ate soup dumplings. Everyone began to study how to get the soup in. Finally, someone came up with an idea and used a syringe to inject the dumplings into the dumplings. As you can imagine, the dumplings turned into soup. This story tells us that foreigners have very broad ideas, are single-minded, and have a single train of thought. They have no idea what transformation is. How can they be as smart as the Chinese nation? This is why foreigners don’t want to leave China when they come to China. This country is so AMAZING. People who eat soup dumplings are certainly not scheming. Anyone with experience knows that when eating this kind of food, it is important to retreat before advancing, and to advance slowly. The result of rushing forward is to burn your throat. There is a lot of Eastern wisdom in it. Can you imagine an American blue-collar worker who has been hungry all day and holds a burger in his hand, and someone next to him tells him: "Hey, brother, you should take out the vegetable leaves and eat them to experience the meat." It's fragrant but extremely refreshing, and then you lick the sesame seeds on it, and then take a small bite of the beef patties and bread, and a sense of satisfaction will instantly fill your body. Otherwise, eating it in one bite would be like feeding a pig." This old man can spit out national curses. This is our art, the art of making simplicity into complexity, the art of Sima Yi relying on Zhuge Liang, the art of waiting, the art of city government, how can a group of foreigners be able to see it?

Not only are there a variety of purely Chinese meals, but they also have coffee and cola from the West. In fact, they are even more delicious than those cooked in their place of origin. Various foods come to the same table in time and space, making you dazzled. Therefore, no matter whether they are peddlers, footmen or rich and young, they are all willing to come here to look for delicious food because the choices here are so abundant.

It seems that there is no more ridiculous place to eat in China than a tea restaurant. Because the rules here are just that - there are no rules. To define a tea restaurant, it seems more reasonable for us to use a negative sentence. Because it comes from Hong Kong, the place with the most abundant cultural exchanges between China and the West. Secondly, the tea restaurant is originally a product of cultural integration, and what it embodies is more of a combination of Chinese and Western styles. Moreover, in the tea restaurant, cultural differences are secretly surging. We were surprised by the inclusiveness of the tea restaurant, and even more surprised by its variety. When someone points out that a Hong Kong-style tea restaurant has ten basic conditions for becoming an "intangible cultural heritage of mankind", including: it is a restaurant unique to Hong Kong people, it provides Western-style catering with Hong Kong characteristics, and it is a popular eating place. While waiting, these reasons are actually not entirely valid. Because as tea restaurants move north and west, who knows what their future will look like?