[Investor]

Food investment

Capital must starve earlier than people who work hard.

Now most investors are holding domestic hot money,

Based on the lesson of "doing one thing hinders another",

Before falling to the ground,

Still hungry.

Catering has become a hot spot for new generations to collect money.

I couldn't help but call these "investors" in a slightly Hong Kong accent, which is closer to the actual "speculators". They all entered the market on the wind without exception, and then marched forward all the way. By the time they reached the peak, they were almost all the countermeasures to get rid of the hot potato have been studied.

And those who are truly successful,

Without exception,

They all entered early,

They threw the revenue from the road back into the basket.

They know that

You have to wait long enough for the sweet potatoes to become more fragrant,

Just walk without being hungry,

Lord Hu is no exception.

I met Uncle Hu, an atypical catering investor, at the dinner table. He has many identities, including an Internet person, a boxer, a former Internet celebrity B & B owner, a cook husband, a folk crosstalk actor... I even think that the latter is much more interesting than his first identity.

Many people who chatted with him would be impressed by his witty humor in "A Wonderful Story", then lowered their voices and praised him with the torture of their own fans: You are actually an investor in Tang Xiang Obscura? It's a pity not to be a talk show host!

He will probably reply sincerely and keep a low profile. At this time, if you admire the tattoo on his body,"Making a fortune in silence", you won't have the expression you have when facing a talented comedian. I admit it's the funniest tattoo I've ever seen. But unexpectedly, at the same time, you were smiling, and a flower in the dust bloomed in your heart: Oh, this boss is amazing.

Not long ago, I went to eat a meal from Tan Qiwen DeAille Tam, chef and co-founder of Tangxiang Obscura Restaurant, the first Michelin star chef in the mainland of China, and the best female chef in Asia.

DeAille's slender fingers gently pointed to the "National Trend" series that she had been playing with while hors d'oeuvres, and my saliva almost shook with her gentle voice: this is Hong Kong salty lime seven, and that is Beijing sugar gourd made of chocolate, Taiwan pineapple crisp shell is added with Yunnan Dianhong black tea, and white sugar cake is fermented with Heilongjiang Guvas...

DeAille won the Best Asian Female Chef Award in the "Asia's 50 Best Restaurants 2021" list, becoming the first female chef in the mainland of China to receive this honor.

I couldn't help but sigh, no wonder she had all the world-shaking products of "Longjing Shrimp","Fish-flavored Eggplant", and "Wowotou" in her hands, but they all seemed to be wonderful coincidences.

This is Tang Xiang's "Longjing Shrimp". It is the soul of Hangzhou, China on the inside, and it is presented in the form of Western food art on the outside, making people linger. DeAille said: "The main ingredient of this dish is Canadian peony shrimp served with hot spring pigeon eggs. Longjing tea is the most important thing. I make tea powder and tea oil to pickle the shrimps. It is added with crab shell soup, caviar and sheep grass that looks like tea leaves. Compared with traditional fresh tea leaves, the "tea leaves" made in tea soup do not have a very hard fiber feeling. Before eating, you should poke the egg yolks and eat them with wheatgrass."

Finally, my smiling muscles finally returned to a relaxed state after a bite of "Longjing Shrimp" and a bite of Robert Parker's Italian FRANZ HAAS Pinot Noir with 91 points in 2009. He still didn't let me go: "At the beginning, I wanted to tattoo a socialist core value of 'patriotism and professionalism.' This year I will also make a 'convincing people with virtue' game."

As the behind-the-scenes boss, Lord Hu's daily life is very simple, and most of his work is at work. A small amount of spare time is spent either boxing, cooking and testing dishes.

"Boxing keeps me awake and has a different perception of pain." When Lord Tiger talks about investment, he also has an unruly expression like he is playing boxing, but if you listen carefully, you can understand that every word is not a joke.

"First think about it, what would the ideal catering look like? I will set investment goals first. Then I thought, what do I really want to achieve after investing?It is what I want to maintain a distinctive character in catering. It is better to have 70% of people like it than to have 10% of people like it with 120 points.The highlights should be particularly eye-catching, or it's better not to do them." When he first decided to let DeAille take charge of Obscura, Lord Tiger was moved by the innovative spirit in her."There is a feeling of integration that I haven't tasted before, and I see possibilities."

Asked what investment valued most, Lord Hu said that he valued most potential. "I most hope that the restaurant will realize its potential with our help. The investors are not just rich people. Good management will be liked by the team very much in the process of cooperation. All new projects need a boss who can help the team and fully respects the team. I don't make much money from catering. Looking at the return on investment alone, I don't think it's appropriate. We must create, so that we can have long-term power, and of course we cannot lose money. No matter how delicious Western food is, it's completely in place, so what?"

Lord Hu emphasized: "DeAille's cooking process is for overseas Chinese, and returning to China is to find her roots. Our advantages find their essence faster."

For example, most guests who come for dinner for the first time will still be surprised by such "fresh fish and sheep". "Below is new Zealand mutton. The oldest year of caviar is available only for fish that are at least 20 years old. It is served with thousand-layer sweet potatoes on the side, the sauce is sufu sauce, and Laba beans and miso are used in the middle." DeAille introduced.

At this time, the famous Sichuan dish "Fish-flavored Eggplant" arrived! Tangxiang Obscura's menu dishes are all very simple. There is another world behind names such as "stir-fried bacon with green pepper","roadside skewers" and "porridge".

The "fish-flavored eggplant" in front of me is no exception. I have also written a special article about the story that there is no fish in this dish. When DeAille presented it, she started chatting with me about it. This time, she put the unseen fish back into this dish and made this "fish-flavored eggplant" with fish.

It turned out that the fish-flavored eggplant was sour, spicy and salty, but she deconstructed the taste again. The black garlic eggplant puree was flavored with fish sauce instead of salt, and Beihai red pepper was added to increase the surprise. The level was unique. "The Japanese bonito fish dried on it is pink. It belongs to fat meat pieces, and the color is more pink. Each of the orange gold beads has the aroma of fish, and you will have a strong sauce when you bite it."

The concept of combining Chinese and Western cultures gives DeAille's creation a cross-cultural mass foundation. Italian egg dumplings are stuffed with handmade cheese from Beijing. The mini side dishes are sea cucumber and Beijing onion. Opening the ice-shaped millet crispy slices, she found that the green part was extracted Beijing scallion oil, and she chose to make the scallion white into triangular layers of green onions. It is a temptation to diners from both Chinese and Western sides!

She frankly likes to combine and link various local styles and dishes. Lord Hu said: "Everyone has the weakest part. It is very sexy to reflect things from different catering backgrounds in different ways. Making a restaurant must be unique! If you don't cater to people who don't understand, your tastes will not coincide. Many restaurants see public relations meetings for negative reviews, but we don't call. This is the customer's right, and I don't refund the money.I don't want to over-cater to the market, so I can make money on my knees and be myself standing up.I myself like music and painting, and I am only excited if I have a strong personality. Everyone fans you because you have personal characteristics, but it is impossible for anyone to be good. In fact, few people have the courage to do many things that stand out from the crowd. The stronger your personality, the more interesting you can attract. The more mediocre you are, the more common the people you attract."

At first, I simply thought that this kind of thinking might be caused by his Internet genes. The deeper I understood it, I realized that the experience of Shangri-La gave him the courage to take risks under the snowy mountains.

I swallowed the sauce and felt satisfied, so I continued to ask Lord Hu what he liked in the catering. He said that he graduated from college without a job, and went to Yunnan to talk about an inn during his junior year. "I just graduated, and my classmates went to find a job. I chose to have fun first and decided to be different from others and go to work after living a leisurely life."

When chatting from heaven to earth, laughter cannot erase the strength behind it. Everything you see and taste is inevitable. The legendary thing about Lord Tiger is to deal with all challenges with a playful attitude. When he was 22 years old, he was full of blood and was bitten by a tiger when he went snorkeling in Thailand. His friends were very worried, but he laughed at the Thai people and comforted him: "You look delicious, and the tiger bites you."

The house where he once opened an inn dates from the Ming Dynasty. For more than 260 years now, it is a well-known "haunted house" locally. "He Long lives in that house. He Long is not afraid, neither am I. No one dares to live in it. On the first floor, there is a big cowshed with no courtyard walls. Thieves would come in, so I raised a Tibetan mastiff. In the end, I felt that it was also afraid and its barking sounded like crying." But this was such a place that he turned into a well-known check-in place!

One advantage of meeting Lord Tiger first is that it allows me to understand DeAille's dishes better. Lord Hu once opened China's earliest Internet celebrity beauty club in Shangri-La, a gathering place for young literary and artistic women, and also the starting point of his food career.

"The owner of an inn is usually a good cook. Guests eat at the inn, as a matter of course. Next to me is a Sichuan restaurant, so I go to learn. I also have a teacher who is a Western chef. He makes pure Italian food. The foreigner opened his own shop, but his business was not as good as mine because he followed the rules too much. One pizza, from ordering to eating, took an hour, and the customers were hungry. Our cakes are half-baked and make them taste what Chinese people like, which suits the needs of demand than dry baking. I take out one in 20 minutes and it's very popular!"

Later, he met true love there. When a friend asked him about it, he finally felt like he belonged: "The requirement for choosing a wife is to eat better than me." "What happened?"
"As a result, I couldn't afford it..."

He talked about his wife with a model figure,"The first time I met her, I ate a girl's meal for a week and a half in one night. Sometimes, I fight three or four places in one night, eating 2 - 3 people's portions each time, and I haven't eaten enough yet. But the figure was still very good. I thought, Wow, this girl is so cute!" It may seem like a joke, but it is actually a show of love!

His wife has become an uncontrollable fan on the road to delicious food. Therefore, Lord Tiger's usual family banquet looked like the following:

Lord Hu has gradually shown his skills in the field of cooking. He mixes his own sauce with saliva chicken, stewed Sichuan-style beef ribs at low temperatures and slow-boiled, pepper tofu, cold eating rabbit, roasted sea cucumber with onions, east star spot, abalone braised pork, ginger duck, Guangxi sour radish stewed large intestine, fried crab in typhoon shelter... Nothing can defeat him! His signature dish is stir-fried kidney flowers that test the heat.

He pays attention to details when cooking, such as frying the lobster in half with pepper. And Fujian braised noodles in his "One Shrimp and Two Eats" are also a masterpiece. How can it not taste delicious if the shrimp heads are boiled to make braised noodles soup?

"When I went back in 15 years, my friend over there asked me, were you with that woman who could eat very much? Is your wallet okay now?" When Lord Tiger took out photos of the family banquet, the other party understood the meaning.

Lord Hu laughed and said that he was a good eater in the Internet circle. "I understand these things better, and I am willing to spend money on food and taste online. Western chefs are different from Chinese chefs. I think the former is more comfortable to work together. Chinese kitchen management sometimes has bad habits, PUA boss. But I am not a PUA employee. I hope to give them a big enough stage to create."

"I respect the chef's wishes and cannot be framed. When doing this, give your teammates full trust and let go. Although this is very difficult for many catering owners, I think it is better to be an athlete than to be a referee, and a referee is better to be a promoter. Try not to leave the field yourself."

As a native of Fujian, Lord Hu said: "However, I will also introduce some Chinese ingredients to DeAille. Only by living in the local area for many years can you know that, for example, the Fujian blue crab has the pseudo-cave crab and the saw-edged blue crab. One has no pattern, the other has it. Delicious food requires time to study. Regional ingredients really can't just rely on telling them. It takes time to try and cook them, and you need to understand the table stories of local people."

His love for food also deeply influenced DeAille: "The boss will come to share, and the locals are talented and inspired."

"I think those dishes are emotional and can be felt by the guests. The guests themselves have their own experiences of growing up and their feelings, so try to understand them from their perspective. You can still feel what you add and change. The essence of different dishes is absorbed from others."

She admitted that the epidemic has also brought catering development opportunities on another level, and felt that catering in the mainland market has made great progress in recent years. "First of all, due to changes in import and export, this year I have clearly seen that well-known restaurants are paying more and more attention to tapping the value of local Chinese ingredients, not only relying on imported ingredients, but also appreciating domestic things. A few years ago, it was not imported. Now the restaurant is willing to tell you that the beef is a Chinese specialty. They are very dedicated to promoting it, but the supply chain of good ingredients is relatively difficult, and prices sometimes soar, hoping to reach a balance point. It is difficult for catering people, and special domestic good ingredients are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain, and everyone is competing for it."

Lord Tiger encouraged DeAille to go to more places in the mainland to dig for "treasures". She is really constantly understanding every touching detail of new ingredients, seasonings and presentation, and then transcending it. This whole process is inseparable from her usual meticulous observation. Even this pair of "tableware" is DeAille found in the stream of Jingdezhen. After disinfection, it becomes a unique existence like art.

She can make the Western-style "ginger duck" to perfection, and she can also make the best Western-style woowou from the entire China to the northernmost tip! "If Lord Hu didn't ask me to go to Shenyang, I would never have been able to do it."

"Northeast China eats soy sauce, just like southerners eat soy sauce. Traditional families will pickle it themselves. I switched to mountain grapes for the ketchup inside, which has a sweet and sour flavor. Use local hazelnuts and roast them. They have the aroma of truffle. The flavor of hazelnut is a special flavor of Northeast China, which is in line with the truffle season. The paper is mulberry skin paper, Anhui craftsmanship, Chinese intangible cultural heritage, and this paper is also used in the Forbidden City. Use this paper to wrap it into a small burger."

Lord Hu said that there were osmanthus trees in their backyard and they smelled it every day. Later, they had this dessert in front of them. "Everyone in Obscura works hard, and I'm really grateful to have such a good team."

Even desserts, DeAille will introduce them in detail: "This is snow bean paste. Add tangerine peel and green citrus tea to make red bean filling. The orange juice is a little sour. If you like sour taste, you can add it."

This Miscadai sweet wine is currently very rare and rare. The sommelier behind him said in a gentle baritone: The Italian pottery collection comes from France, and the aroma is different from the past. Apples, peaches, apricots, honey, and flowers are all very uniform and the aroma is concentrated. It is recommended to drink slowly, with an alcohol content of up to 15 degrees. There is no alcohol flavor when drinking it and is better with desserts. I can drink until the bright acidity in it is just balanced with the sweetness, which is really comfortable.

So, Lord Hu looked at me and said, if we were in Shangri-La, we would have barbecue now. Fortunately, Tang Xiang has... I said, it's a good thing you didn't say eating with yaks.

The following is an excerpt from the blog that Lord Hu wrote in Tianya Community in 2006:

Get up every day. Squatting on the stone steps, watching the clouds rolling and relaxing in the sky, my mind was empty. What should I spend today, how should I spend tomorrow? The wood of the house has been 170 years old and has the luster of history. Witness every passer-by in this house, former slave owners, former slaves, He Long who once lived in this house, those who were assigned to this house after the land reform, as well as me today, tomorrow's people.

In the courtyard under the sun, those stones have long been polished smooth. Sometimes I suspect that facing these stones can reflect my past and present life.

Fresh green grass grows wildly in the yard, between the gaps in the stones.

After graduating from college, I came here and left the bustling big city. I don't look for a job because crowded between the bus station and the subway with them is not the life I aspire to. Maybe I am too idealistic, as many people have said. But I still have no regrets about this choice. I can't tell if I abandoned the city or if the city abandoned me. In short, I left there and found a house with a history of nearly 200 years in the ancient city of Shangri-La, realizing my dream. Looking back on my college, I gained a lot and lost a lot. What I do every day now has nothing to do with everything I learned in college. I left home and was admitted to a so-called key university. I didn't know what to say in class and spent my youth in my dormitory. Then, I left school alone and came to this place. Came to this old house to run my dream. I have been resisting at school. I don't want to be made into a screw, a part that goes wherever I need it, without personality. Therefore, when I graduated, I discounted the school's employment rate. I just want to stick to my beliefs until everything is shattered.

It was a very old house. It took me a long time to tidy it up. The original owner put a lot of effort into this house. I thank him. I renovated the house according to my wishes. As I transform my life. What do you do every day? Photography, walking dogs, receiving guests, yawning, drinking and talking with guests, and watching movies together. No. 17-18 Cangfang Street, Shangri-La Ancient City, Diqing, Yunnan, I often look at this address in a daze. In the future, this address will be a symbol of my existence.

The big rotating scripture barrel opposite is the coordinates of the ancient city and the coordinates of my courtyard.

-----

I often ride a bicycle, speed on the road, and find a grassland. Not those scenic spots, but the most ordinary pastures.

I lay down and closed my eyes, but the sun could still pass through my eyelids and illuminate my vision. Yaks were eating grass lazily. I faced them and spoke loudly to them. They ignored me and only cared about themselves. So I continued to tell them many things because they were the most loyal listeners. So when you pass by the grassland, you can always see a person squatting on the meadow, muttering something to a cow... I told many things, such as the hustle and bustle in the city and the loneliness in Shangri-La, as well as the stories of some people far away from home. Yaks don't know this. They just chew grass in front of me and then walk slowly.

Everyone has their own opinions about loneliness. Sometimes I often think of Guangzhou and of my good friends who are far away. Then ask yourself again and again if you made the right choice this time. Many people have asked me why you are here. I also ask myself time and time again whether I am simply avoiding pressure. I admit that there is pressure in the city, but in fact, sometimes I need to shoulder more burdens for the choices I make now. And these burdens can only be carried here or finished with the yak.

Sometimes I also come here with my guests to talk to yaks, and the guests are also very happy because they have told out many things that they dare not say. If you want, I can accompany you to the grassland and tell your worries to the yak. Let's talk nonsense.

The goddess asked

What do you think about the hot food and drink?

"Before the flowers bloom,

Enjoy the infinite leisure first."

--Li Yu

Food Bless You!

Consultant for China International Food Expo

Producer of "God's Table"