Image source @ Visual China
Text | The Internet refers to the north, the author | Zhan, editing | Pu Fan
Speaking of "fly houses", almost every Chinese person can give you a few words.
Some people regard it as their own "gourmet Jerusalem", is people's mouth "XXX or my side of the corrective" "this XXX is not as good as the one downstairs of my house", or appears in the cup changing cup of high-end restaurants, or appears on the road to foreign tourism, the national nature of the topic, the universality of the use of the scene, the compatibility of the scope of discussion, far higher than "tofu brain is salty or sweet", "winter solstice eat dumplings or eat tangyuan".
(A classic topic on zhihu)
Some people take it as a wealth password, so that "XX yuan takes you to eat all over XX", "XX that only old XX people can find", "XX that only operates for 2 hours a day" These characteristics that originally belonged only to "fly restaurants" have become the standard in the catering industry, appearing in a large number of small red books, public reviews, vibrato, fast shops, punch cards, planting grass, trying to rely on the law of "people to eat for the sky" in the context of traffic anxiety.
(The rice bowl series of the pedestrian street seems to have been used as a packaging case by Tiger Poker PR)
Sometimes "fly houses" don't even appear because of eating. There was once a classic love (diao) sense (yu) post on the Tiger Poker Pedestrian Street, the title was "Take girls to eat K and M when they are on a blind date, and the boys in the roadside fly restaurant are not nt (cerebral palsy)", which is used to argue the common diseases of grasshoppers: no sense of ceremony, lack of attitude, do not want to improve themselves -
You see, from identity to business model, to the three views of life and love, to apply the most popular industry words, "Fly Pavilion" is a perfect meta-universe, generously providing the most convenient interface for each public emotion.
<h2>An eye-catching "fly"</h2>
"Fly houses" are certainly nothing new, and even according to the fundamentalist definition of "shabby, small-faced, cheap but delicious small shop stalls", its predecessor can easily be traced back to the Song Dynasty more than a thousand years ago.
Meng Yuanlao, a literary scholar who lived in Kaifeng for a long time in the late Northern Song Dynasty, recorded in his notebook collection "Tokyo Dream Hualu" that "seventy-two households in Jingzhengdian, in addition, can not be counted, the rest are called foot shops" - the "main store" in the text, refers to the catering institutions that have obtained official brewing licenses, providing catering services and retail drinks for customers, and corresponding to the "foot shops" that cannot be repeated, that is, the Song Dynasty version of the fly restaurant - these two sentences can also be found in the "Qingming Upper River Map", and the main store usually has serious decoration. Foot shops may not be able to serve dine-in.
(Look closely, there is a foot shop shop Xiao Er in the delivery of takeaway)
According to Mr. Meng's observation, this kind of small shop business that takes the people-friendly route is often much more prosperous than the "main store", reaching the level of "the night market is three more exhausted, only five more and reopens again", one of which is called "Deshengqiao Zhengjia Oil Cake Shop" "foot shop", because of the hot sales volume, the scale of the back kitchen has been expanded to "more than twenty furnaces", which is a standard tabletop but the people like it.
This is still a decent foot shop, the introduction of the Southern Song Dynasty capital Hangzhou style of the ancient book "Capital City Jisheng" also recorded a more "fly color" format called "scattered hotel", into only give guests a glass of wine, regardless of the meal, the door face is a row of bamboo fences, a dark coarse cloth.
Including the view that "eating flies is the atmosphere and feeling" that seems to be full of consumerist traps, nor is it the "luxury privilege" that modern people have, there is ample evidence that at least in the Yuan Dynasty, many people were thinking about it.
For example, in the ninth episode of "Water Margin", "Lin Jiaotou Fengxue Mountain Temple, Lu Yu Waiting for Fire And Grass Field", there is such a description:
In order to buy wine to eat, Lin Chong got up and went to a small shop in the city where his colleagues in the hay farm gave him "Amway". Along the way, there was heavy wind and snow, and when I saw a cluster of people's homes, "a grass broom in the fence in the open air", I arrived at my destination. The owner of the shop recognized the wine gourd of the familiar customer at a glance, sent wine and meat for Lin Chong to eat, Quan Dang picked up the wind to drive away the cold, Lin Chong bought some more himself, and after a person leisurely wandered and ate well, he left some broken silver, and the noise disturbed, and he went out of the fence door.
People are full of people, hot food on the end, shouting disturbing, goodbye to the rivers and lakes - art comes from life above life, maybe this description comes from the inspiration of Shi Nai'an's grandfather to chat with the old brothers one afternoon - assuming that there was a fast hand at that time, it is estimated that the most appropriate copy is this:
Hey guess what? As soon as the old jianghu opened his eyes, it was like this, and it was called a tunnel.
(Lin Chong's drinking scene in the 2011 version of "Water Margin")
However, the prototype is in the prototype, the stereotype of the "fly house" name is even used as a "taste", "culture" level of positive words, in fact, it is the past twenty years, or we can accurate the timeline to the beginning of the 21st century after the Internet began to popularize, as people increasingly show the demand for fresh content, "fly house" as a hard material with a sense of distant gaze and a sense of exploration, perfectly adapted to the communication rules built in the new media environment. Small shops have also unexpectedly ushered in a climax of development under this sudden packaging.
Especially after the Sina blog was launched and the Tianya forum had the ability to hatch Furong sister and rogue Swallow in 2005, netizens who began to taste the sweetness of "social networks" showed great enthusiasm for posts on topics such as "Chengdu Fly Pavilion Daquan", "Top 50 Fly Pavilions", "The Most Cattle Fly Pavilions", etc., and continuously held out hot posts with more than 10,000 hits in Tieba, forums, and personal blog home pages, among which the hot posts of "rising from the tall building" in the comment area highlighted the delicious and humane side of the "Fly Pavilion", and the environment of the Fly Pavilion Health deficiencies show a greater tolerance.
The earliest mainstream media that can be examined on the Internet to do the inventory of fly restaurants is "Tomorrow , Fast 1 Week", which was also born at this time node, which is a comprehensive urban life magazine founded in March 2006 by the Sichuan Party Building Periodical Group and Chengdu Business Daily.
At the beginning of its inception, "Tomorrow And Fast Week" launched the topic of Chengdu Fly Restaurant, claiming to search the city for the 50 most anticipated fly restaurants. According to the "Chengdu Business Daily" report, before five o'clock in the afternoon on the day of the news release, a total of 68 enthusiastic readers recommended their favorite Chengdu fly restaurants through hotlines and emails, and some readers also told some interesting experiences in the fly restaurants in the emails.
In the end, the top 50 list of fly restaurants had more than 5,000 hits in the Tianya community, and the comments of netizens were mainly positive responses, and "delicious", "nostalgia" and "bashi" were keywords. In an era when the domestic touch rate is less than the global average, this is a good response.
As an aside, people at that time had thought about the phenomenon of "fly restaurant fever", especially the whitewashing of the meaning of the word "fly restaurant", and this "not necessarily compliant format" attracted the attention of the mainstream media and displayed positively, and even was officially used as the highlight of the city's image publicity, which once caused many controversies. Quoting the popular culture scholar John Fisker, this process involves both popular resistance to the dominant forces (the elite) and the codification of mass food culture by the dominant forces.
Some people think that the fly house has completed the "separation of the quality wall" - in the daily context after 2005, the "fly house" and the disgusting "fly" image are decoupled, and give the scene the color of "delicious" and "market well" meaning, "fly house" The pejorative color gradually becomes neutral, even positive, so that the environmentally clean, air-conditioned grand restaurant also uses the "air-conditioned fly restaurant" to advertise - this is the best example of the "subversion is the norm" in the Internet age.
In any case, what cannot be changed is that the "fly restaurant" born in the grass cannot be reversibly ascended to the altar and began mass production.
Known as Chengdu's most well-known fly restaurant Mingting Hotel, the first large-scale media coverage of it occurred around 2010, with "Chengdu Business Daily", "West China Metropolis Daily", "Chengdu Daily", "Sanlian Life Weekly" and other traditional media, when it just formed a certain influence, from sina blog, Renren, Tianya Forum of the self-media participated in a large number of it, together "Mingting Hotel" defined as Chengdu food, fly restaurant representatives.
In 2010, Sanlian Life Weekly published a "Special Issue on Gastronomy" to inventory 100 innovative dishes from hundreds of restaurants in five major cities, and Mingting Hotel's "Brain Flower Tofu" was introduced as one of the representatives of Chengdu's taste. After the Chengdu Municipal Government's official microblog "Chengdu Release" exceeded one million fans in 2011, Chengdu Daily reported on the "Top Ten Hot Posts" of the official micro, including "Chengdu Cuisine: Mingting Hotel".
(A 2010 Blog Post on Planting Grass at a Mingting Hotel, the author characterized it as "Fly Pavilion")
Before this point in time, the dirty, messy and poor "fly house" was more emphasized. Many people think that these stalls and vendors have a bad service attitude, food hygiene problems, occupy the street, damage the image of the city, newspapers and the Bureau of Industry and Commerce will receive reports from the public on the fly restaurant, often as the focus of the food safety regulatory department's surprise inspection - Zhu Shimao played such a role in "Lamb Kebabs", ignoring Chen Peisi's statement that "the license is not licensed, first taste it or not", but first draw a clear line:
"(Other vendors) are licensed! They enrich the market in our capital and we should support them to protect them! "And you operate illegally, a fine of 20!" ——This is a skit on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala in 1986. Three years ago, another divine work "Eating Noodles" also emphasized that "making movies is to serve the people", it is difficult not to think that this bridge section is not a shout borrowed from literary and artistic works: the catering service industry needs to respond to the improvement of social living standards and meet the people's demand for "food first".
It was also in those years that China's food safety legal system was constantly improving: in 1995, China passed the first food safety and sanitation law, the Food Sanitation Law of the People's Republic of China, and in 2004, the Decision of the State Council on Further Strengthening Food Safety Work was promulgated.
In such a context, many people fully understand and integrate into the atmosphere of public opinion that is unfriendly to fly restaurants based on the background of the times: it is about to enter the new century, and where can restaurants related to "flies" enter the stream?
For example, in 2010, the Caojia Lane Vegetable Market, where Mingting Hotel is located, opened a private brine product shop in Caojia Lane Temporary Vegetable Market because there was no anti-mosquito and fly measures, and there was no hanging health permit ordered by the relevant government departments to rectify. The Ming Ting Hotel is not alone, and now a September 2010 penalty decision can be found on the Chengdu Municipal Government's information disclosure website, because of "the unauthorized use of coal in the Chengdu Coal Control Zone, polluting the atmospheric environment."
<h2>Favored "flies"</h2>
"Fly houses" can get rid of old labels, but it is inevitable that new problems will be ushered in, and there are many "serious debates" on the platform.
For example, the fly house and the "big Chinese food chauvinism". The so-called "big Chinese food chauvinism" simply refers to a kind of custom: Chinese food is invincible in the world, foreign food is wasted food, that foreign people eat Chinese food immediately fell, everywhere is full of "cooking Chinese food in a foreign country to conquer neighbors / roommates / classmates / teachers / mother-in-law" legend. Among them, because people often put forward "XXX downstairs in my house" and "XX corrective in my home" when expressing this view, many people directly refer to "big Chinese food chauvinism" as "fly house chauvinism".
(Discussion published in the mainstream media)
Critics argue that this "fly house chauvinism" hinders the development and internationalization of high-end Chinese cuisine.
There is a "how to view the chauvinism of chinese food?" Just as some people think that the popularity of hot pot has promoted the degeneration of Chinese food (accelerating the disappearance of the back kitchen and simplifying the cooking process), people's excessive respect for "fly restaurants" may kidnap people's impression of Chinese food, resulting in people's "big Chinese food" often just a corner of the fly restaurant.
In this case, it is really sad for the chefs and gourmets who want to see high-end Chinese cuisine on the table and go out.
The common pattern of fly houses tied to stories is another controversial place. Many fly restaurants that mainly promote regional specialty diets often choose to tell a "food story" in the process of brand upgrading (or to cooperate with marketing communications) to complete the corresponding "brand premium" - at least to increase the price, increase the material of the vibrato kuaishou, and become a regional specialty brand - the more common is the famous "folk food three masters' private visit Kangxi, lost Qianlong, fleeing Cixi'" "."
(Douban netizen Cai Bubai shot in Shanghai, you must have seen similar copy)
But the problem is that many of the stories are fake, derived from historical dramas rather than histories. Some people have made friends with small shops with "Qianlong" and "Kangxi" brand stories on the street, and found that most of these small shops were born in the late 90s, more precisely after the national hit of "Prime Minister Liu Luoguo", "Iron Tooth Copper Tooth Ji Xiaolan", "Kangxi Micro Service Private Interview", and like Zhu Yuanzhang, Liu Bei, Liu Xiu, who really served as a "dick silk" at the grassroots level, it is really possible to eat blindly in the folk, but rarely become the emperor who bears the screen traffic, and the appearance rate is much lower.
Liu Bei was even inferior to his courtier Zhuge Liang, who may have been too deeply rooted in the image of "cleverness" and was long posthumously regarded as the inventor of various snacks such as steamed buns and pot helmets.
These stories often also logically reconcile with the irrationality in the story. For example, some people have questioned that if the emperor really eats any food in the folk, he should find traces in the "Notes on Living", but the teachers are very good at explaining this problem with human nature:
The only reasonable place in these stories is that "literary and artistic works and folklore do not need too much information reserves, and applying them to marketing is the shortest way to understand consumers", but whether marketing can allow falsehood and exaggeration, and where the boundaries of consumer feelings are, is another level of the problem.
Other similar controversies include the "experience of the stomach" of the fly house. This is a clichéd topic, as mentioned earlier, the food hygiene problem of the fly restaurant has been widely criticized since its infamy, and it can be seen from its other names such as "dog food restaurant" and "rice restaurant", and this trait is largely contrary to the mainstream mood of "healthy eating" at present.
According to the "2020 Healthy Catering New Trend Insight" launched by the CBN Commercial Data Center and Ele.me, the online sales of low-sugar snacks and low-sugar coffee have increased year by year since 2017, and there are more and more "three low" foods with low sugar, low fat and low salt on the market. From 2018 to 2019, the amount of light food salad consumption increased by 63%, and the number of takeaway vegetarian consumers increased by 20%. In addition, the "2019 China Catering Industry Big Data Monitoring and New Business Model Research Report" released by the Ai Media Report Center said that in the future, the development of China's catering industry should shift to a branded and large-scale development path with the help of new technologies such as 5G on the basis of attaching importance to food safety.
The keywords of "healthy dining" and "food safety" are the dead holes of traditional fly restaurants, and "taste is important, life is also important" has become a common stem for teasing fly restaurants now.
In short, when it comes to "fly houses" today, compared with the coroners and followers of the nascent social networks at the beginning of the century, more and more disenchantes of "fly houses" have emerged, and playing with terriers is an important symbol of this new group, and its essence is a folk rebellion against the excessive marketing of fly houses by businessmen.
Of course, "marketing" was initially seen as the icing on the cake of the fly restaurant, and did not cause public anger, and even had a certain progressive significance in a specific period.
For example, in 2013, an article titled "Alternative O2O: WeChat Marketing of a "Fly Restaurant"" once completed the brush screen in the advertising marketing circle, the main content is that Chengdu Zhang Aunt began the WeChat marketing of her own fly restaurant under the "instigation" of her son and his colleagues, and the four corners of the eight tables in the store were pasted with the two-dimensional code of the WeChat public account, and the number of fans exceeded 900 after online and offline promotion, and the profits of the restaurant doubled.
The article emphasizes that the core competitiveness of marketing is the product, not the concept, and the silk soup carefully boiled by Aunt Zhang and given to the fans of the account has played an important role, and it is this flesh-and-blood image and sincere food that converts the weak relationship between the restaurant and the customer into a strong relationship to achieve the marketing effect.
So how did the icing on the cake of marketing get to where it is today? Can't the Fly House have the ambition to become a "goshawk"? This pot may have to be handed over to the "new fly house" to carry.
As the punch card and grass planting related to the fly restaurant become the most popular content in the social network, and the content platform refines the popular content into quantitative tags through algorithms based on "operational considerations" to speed up the popular recommendation mechanism, the "fly restaurant" begins to inevitably formula words, similar to "the fly restaurant = the owner who is not very good-tempered, the grade is not too small, and does not speak Mandarin + the storefront without decoration + strange store rules (can not be taken away / can not add coriander / only open for two hours) + not easy to find address + Dare to make dishes with ingredients + ingredients from the footage."
There is no way to refuse to "apply" a formula.
According to the 19-year business interview of "Business Community", often the price of 30,000-70,000 yuan can find a small shop for transfer in the lime city of the Liberation Monument in Yuzhong District, Chongqing, and it can be opened after simple decoration. At present, the promotion price of the WeChat public platform is on average 3,000 yuan-10,000 yuan, and the promotion price of the Douyin platform is 5,000-20,000 yuan. After several rounds of marketing promotion, and then launch the takeaway platform, a "net red" restaurant can start business.
Judging from the reflections of netizens, the net red fly restaurant cannot be guaranteed in the taste of the meal, but the "broken, old, dirty" and the boss's domineering people are all available, which constitutes the gimmick of the concept of "fly house", and the grumpy boss on the vibrato and the environment that is broken beyond imagination are the common output of the fly restaurant.
If after the reform and opening up, because the understanding path is the shortest and the compulsion is high enough, "Qianlong" has become a hot marketing gimmick for the fly restaurant, then after whitewashing and early marketing, now the "fly restaurant" itself has become a marketing gimmick that understands the path is short enough to replace "Qianlong has eaten", opportunistic people have hyped it up, and the gimmick marketing of decades ago has become flooded, and even the noise has become dominant.
(What is the significance of a fly house that can universally copywriting?) ）
The consequent is that consumer trust is quickly consumed.
It is said that ten years ago, the top 50 fly restaurant manual published by the city magazine "Tomorrow Fast 1 Week" was hot to the point of "one book is difficult to find", and now the inventory ranking of "top 50 fly restaurants" has been rotten, that is, it is searchable, but consumers no longer buy it easily. "You call XXX a fly house?" "XXX is not on, it seems that no money is given" "The hottest and most difficult to eat on the vibrato", "flies p, dozens of shareholders behind the scenes" and other comments are everywhere.
The fly house is now often 10w+ or even tens of millions of heat mixed with impurities, more than a decade ago, the "fly" label that was not easy to decouple began to fight back, as some people said, now the fly house "only altar, no God", the myth of the fly house that began with feelings may finally be hyped.
<h2>epilogue</h2>
In fact, "Fly Restaurant" does not need to be worried, because it is not a shop, but an industry. For the industry, the market adjustment is "late but late", the future bad fly restaurant will eventually disappear, or the market will passively "tend to be rational" after being cold, and eventually return to its original positioning, becoming one of the choices to meet people's differentiated consumption.
But "fly restaurant" is not just an industry, people always need a street corner, do not spend much money can be hungry conscience restaurant, what the name is, whether there is a "fly restaurant" certification does not matter, this is the "fly restaurant" of the real body, help them escape the health exposure and healthy diet these theoretically more serious than "over-marketing" crisis - no one harshly accuses consumers of double standard favoritism, guess why.
Therefore, the biggest crisis of the "fly restaurant" is that the grassroots that picked it has now become the backbone of the spit, and it is also likely to determine its fate: "If you want to wear a crown, you must bear its weight", if you can't bear the crown, the "fly restaurant" may sink into history, no longer have anyone crazy in the comment area to seek the name and location of the store, and the real "fly restaurant" will re-select its fans in this process, and continue to show its hidden true body to the people who need it in another identity.