Shijiazhuang memory
17. Memorabilia of Muslim restaurants
The location of the International Building, which stands on the west side of the south end of Guang'an Street, originally had a Muslim restaurant, which was built at an unknown time, and I remember it. It has a small door face, facing southeast, with a dozen square tables inside, serving soybean milk fritters in the morning, Tianjin people call "pulp", "dumplings", noon and evening stir-fried vegetables. Sometimes in the morning my mother would let me buy soy milk fritters, where the soy milk was freshly ground and sold, which left a deep impression on me and made me think of them often.
The shipping window is not big and not high, adults have to bend down and look up, I am a teenager, the height is about the same as the window, you can look at everything inside. The big iron pot for cooking soy milk is very close to the window, and further inside is the place where the soy milk is filtered, a cross hangs the four corners of the filter cloth, and the same big iron pot is freshly filtered out of the raw soy milk. The fritters are fried in the back kitchen, brought to the window with a large plate, one person is responsible for collecting money and issuing fritters, one person specially beats soy milk for customers, catching up with someone who wants to put eggs, the master puts the bowl on the table, one hand knocks the egg open and beats into the bowl, while the other hand uses an iron scoop to flush the hot snow-white soy milk into the bowl and hand it to the customer. The soy milk in the cauldron is always tumbling, he scoops a scoop of raw soy milk from time to time to join it, and the tumbling soy milk calms down a bit, and instantly rolls up again. The soy milk there is moderately thick and emits a unique aroma of soybeans, which I especially like, so I never add sugar and only drink the original soy milk. Nowadays, the soybean milk in the early shop is rarely ground and sold, it is packed in the insulated barrel, I don't know whether it is freshly ground, or washed with soy milk powder, I always feel that the aroma of soy milk is missing.
The only time in my life that I "went down to the restaurant" with my parents was in the Muslim restaurant, I only remembered eating and eating my parents mixed my mouth, and finally I left the restaurant without being angry.
Speaking of which, there is one thing that I regret for the rest of my life — I never invited my parents to a restaurant for a meal. Although there are various reasons such as economic conditions and living habits and busy work, in the final analysis, it is because Pingsu does not have the heart of Ciwu to feed back, and always feels that coming to Japan is long. The coming day is not long! Shortly after I returned to Shijiazhuang in 1990, my mother suffered a sudden cerebral hemorrhage and left serious sequelae, which made it inconvenient for me to go out, and I never had the opportunity to share food with my parents in the restaurant. "The son wants to be raised but does not wait" has become an eternal pain in my heart.
In 1986, when the International Building was prepared, the Muslim Restaurant was demolished, and some of the personnel were transferred to the Preparatory Office, of which Zhang Yulan was in charge of infrastructure finance, and later served as the manager of the finance department and the manager of the securities capital department of THEA Shares; Cui Jianmin was the manager of the purchasing department when he was preparing for the construction and opening, and later the deputy general manager of the Guoda Real Estate Company, and they all became the elders of the International Building.
On September 23, 1988, Shijiazhuang International Building was grandly opened, opening a new era in Shijiazhuang's catering and hotel service industry.
(Schematic image selected from the network)
