Chinese restaurant chef grows ingredients right next to his shop

myojyo

The title is how traditional media would describe it but that is not quite what I saw.

On my cycling commute route there is a Chinese restaurant which stands in the middle of nowhere. It is located along a busy highway like road, with an open field at the back (real mountain view).

I have been there a couple of times before and I like the shop since it seems to stick to the line of conventional Chinese food proper without adding any fanciness to it. They are dedicated to Sichuan cuisine.

The owner is in his seventies but he cooks all the dishes by himself. He only hires young girls as his assistants and keeps calling them “cute” at all times…

One morning, when I cycled past the shop, I noticed an elderly looking guy in black sportswear talking to someone who looked familiar.

It was the chef standing in a farm land right next to his restaurant. Not in a gardening costume, but in his pure white usual uniform.

The co-location of a farm land and a cooking uniform visually clicked my brain in a nanosecond, making me intuitively understand his radical practice.

Extreme local production and local consumption in absolute secret!!!

The way his dishes are cooked makes you think as if they were made by following the formal procedure (sourced via processional farmers, logistics, and agricultural cooperatives), but in fact the chef cuts off all the intermediaries and directly puts the ingredients on his plates.

I may try to develop this kind of visual language that transmits essential information much more quickly than the conventional headline based media.

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