Who hasn't been to Huguosi Temple for snacks when you're new to Beijing?
Its branches are all over Beijing, lurking near each attraction, and tourists passing by here are eager to step into this snack museum and taste the legend of the literati and inkers.
© Snowfish Shop
However, many people want to cry after eating.
What's worse is that there is no strength and I can't cry.
There are often foreign tourists and food owners who come to visit, order a full table, eat one by one, and find the most delicious category, but the degree to which it can be swallowed.
© Ctrip.com
Compared with strange visitors, many foodies who have lived in Beijing for a long time may not take the initiative to enter its door.
And their attitude is obviously more distinct:
difficult! eat!
The anger of these "professionals" about the gokokuji snacks comes from different sources.
Some people have found that the same kind of food, whoever makes it is better than his family.
On the tofu brain, the black kiln factory street sugar oil cake home, more solid than its taste, thick and thin, more palatable;
© Foodies please close your eyes
Haggis soup is neither as delicious as Changying Li Xiaolao, nor as good as the amount of beef in Hufangqiao Zhang Ji sauce;
▲ Haggis soup snacked at Gokokuji Temple, it looks no problem
© Public reviews
▲Compared with Li Xiao's hometown, the amount is less
Sugar ears are always smaller than others, and sometimes there is a lingering smell of oil that has been left for a long time.
Even if it is worse than others, some people have found that many snacks have turned their backs on tradition:
For example, the most famous noodle tea in Gokokuji Temple, scooping a spoonful of sesame sauce, grunting, sinking into the bottom of the bowl -
The essence of the noodle tea should be to spread the tahini sauce over the bowl of noodles and keep the batter underneath warm.
▲This is the complete body!
For a bowl of gokokuji's famous bean juice, the waiter will often take out a small bag of "original juice" and pour it at the bottom of the bowl, and then mix it with a large bowl of boiling water.
▲ When stirred, the "original juice" still tumbles into wisps in the water
Maybe it is for tourists to consider, afraid that the bean juice is too thick to drink, but people who often drink bean juice know that doing so magnifies its shortcomings:
The rich sour aroma was diluted at once, and the highly volatile smell was stimulated by the hot water, which was even more pungent.
As for the green vegetables that are constantly cut in the bun filling, the donkey rolling with bean paste filling, and the cold and hard scorching circle, these university canteen operations cannot be counted.
© Keiko sauce
In a word, the snacks of the Huguo Temple are simply the old Beijing fooling master.
There are thousands of reasons to scold Beijing's cuisine, and the snacks of Huguosi May account for half.
All this is the case, what else is there to pursue for gokokuji snacks?
There is one thing to say, the once Gokokuji Temple snacks are really powerful.
At the end of the Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China, there were really no rich households around the Huguo Temple.
Lao She, who lives in the nearby small sheepfold alley, once mentioned a few words through the mouth of the character in the novel "Lao Zhang's Philosophy":
Wang De left the west entrance of the Huguo Temple, and hesitated again: To the south, or to the north? To the south? It is the West Fourth Arch Building, except for those who kill live sheep with a large knife on the side of the road, there is nothing distinctive and glorious. Going north? It is Xinjiekou, Xizhimen. It's the dwelling place of the poor, and things can be found.
▲ Lao She lived in a small sheepfold alley near the Huguo Temple as a child, and the story of "Four Generations Together" took place here
From Xisi to Xizhimen, today there is little land, and only the poor earn the poor money in those days.
Probably because of poverty, the local people are full of nostalgia for cheap snacks. They nostalgically at Gokokuji Temple, "you can sit on the same bench as the big girls and enjoy a bowl of soy juice that is sour and thicker than milk", and if you change places, you will not be treated like this.
Moreover, for about half of the three hundred and sixty days a year, Gokokuji Temple is heaven.
Since the end of the Qing Dynasty, Huguo Temple has had a temple market every seven or eight times a month, and its prosperity is lively, and only Longfu Temple in Dongsi can match it.
What does the temple market sell? The "Ji Sheng in the Age of Emperor Jing" records: "The daily necessities of life, as well as gold jewelry, cloth and satin, leather crown belt, estimated clothes and antiques, fine and coarse preparation." ”
In a word, living in Beijing, the Huguo Temple can provide all the goods needed for life——
The most famous is the flower market and the dog market, the old Beijing people have a house, all pay attention to the "canopy fish tank pomegranate tree, Mr. fat dog fat head", here in addition to mr. and fat head do not sell, everything else, there is the best.
© "Four Generations Together"
Pots and pans, antique calligraphy and paintings, gold and silver jade, old book rubbings, said that the trick of cross-talk sells powerful pills, all readily available. Other places rush to the monkeys, the Gokokuji Temple is different, and people play seals.
Nearby Eight Flags soldiers, to buy office supplies have. A man named "Lingzi Zhang", born with a pair of red rotten eyes, not only sold the flower plume on the hat, but also sold the bow and crossbow waist knife, that year there were military fans, not to buy him out.
According to Mr. Tang Lusun, there was also a Guo Cub who opened a clothing shop, and his family's birthday clothes were tied with paper, and he could do the first in Beijing - from the cradle to the grave, all of which were clearly arranged for you.
Although it is a temple fair, no one here worships the Buddha, and the worldly joy is still exhausted.
But the most joyful thing is the snack of Gokokuji Temple.
At the earliest, the lamas of Huguo Temple made fasting food every New Year's Festival, including pastries, sweets, tea rice, tea soup, Laba porridge, etc., one is for the Buddha, the other is for the benefactors who come to eat incense, and at the same time, they must also leave a copy to send to the palace for the emperor to taste, which has become a rule.
▲ Qianlong may have really eaten the snacks of the Huguo Temple
© "The Legend of Ruyi"
Later, the temple cooking skills were scattered, and the enjoyment of the Buddha Emperor was sold by the poor people of The Gokokuji Temple, who finally had more than just bean juice.
Immediately after that, there is the entry of halal cuisine:
Bite a mouthful of fried head bursting gravy, pour lamb slices brine tofu brain, break open the honey twist flowers that pull straight sugar shreds, pea yellow donkey rolling sweet, no one can refuse, sell tea soup pull up the copper pot to pour boiling water, the millet noodles out of the fragrance, roasted white potatoes out of the hot air, let the noisy air sweet ...
© Kyoto Temple Fair
The pomp and circumstance continued until 1956, after the liberation, when the temple fair was suspended after the public-private partnership. In that year, it was popular for the government to organize vendors to open snack bars together, so Cha Tang Ying, Grilled Cake Nian, and White Potato King gathered in the newly opened Huguosi Snack Bar.
At that time, the Longfu Temple snack bar and the Xisi snack bar also came from this way - the fashion of the planned economy, but inadvertently provided the best one-stop punch card place for tourists decades later, commonly known as the old Beijing snack shop.
However, many years later, the one that is intact and popular is still the Gokokuji Temple.
At that time, the variety of snacks that "protected the small" was called hundreds, and to this day, this number has not changed much.
▲ Liang Shiqiu ate screw turns when he was a child, "protecting the small" and also
© TimeOut Beijing
In those years, Shu Yilai inscribed a plaque for it, Zhang Guorong came to drink bean juice, and former Singapore Prime Minister Wu Zuodong tasted the donkey roll, and then placed an order of 100 on the spot and sent it to the Singapore state banquet.
How did such a Gokokuji Temple become more and more unpalatable?
On closer inspection, this reason is very evil -
Every promising innovation of Gokokuji snacks has resulted in more and more unpalatable snacks.
It mixed up like it is today, starting from the '90s.
At that time, the old restaurants in Beijing were difficult because the competition was too fierce.
The Sichuan cuisine of Guijie Street and the Cantonese cuisine of Xisi have risen, and cheap and delicious home-cooked small restaurants have also appeared in the hutongs, and the old-fashioned brands have closed the pass, the difficulty is difficult, and the more mixed, the more miserable.
At the same time, foreign fast food also came to join in the fun, everyone's interest in the spicy chicken leg fort, obviously higher than the Roast Cake Sandwich Meat of the Huguo Temple, even the Beijing eater Wang Shixiang "jumped backwards" to go to KFC, buying more than twenty sundaes at a time to eat at home.
Cheap Gokokuji snacks, a lump of eight cents of profits, simply could not survive, until 1992, after the support of relevant departments and companies, only to breathe a sigh of relief.
The difficulties have passed, but how to survive in the competition in the future?
People who care about the future of Beijing snacks are anxious to the point of baldness:
Some people are worried that the teacher is old, there will always be a day when he can't move, and what if there is no one to succeed him?
Even if there are descendants to take over, the small business is self-financing, once it collapses, a snack is extinct, how to calculate?
Some people also protest that small shops do not even have enough sanitary conditions, what to compete with others?
Some people also suggested that the types of snacks in Beijing are too scattered, the best bean juice is in the Temple of Heaven, and the best sugar fire is in Tongzhou, so it is better for everyone to gather together, the unity force is great, and it also saves tourists from running and breaking their legs.
The final result is that "snack standardization" has become a common obsession of everyone, to unify management, standard production, the best way, three words:
open! join! lock!
Today, it seems that this decision is likely to ruin the reputation of the small guard, but it was the most ideal way to put it in that year.
The Beijing snack industry is really psychologically shadowed by chain foreign fast food.
After 2007, the Gokokuji Snack Branch opened more and more and became more and more prosperous. However, things began to go in unexpected directions.
Within a few years, they started working on a central kitchen.
In February 2013, the Beijing Huguosi Snack Distribution Center was officially put into operation. Later, 80% of the food of Gokokuji Snacks came from the central kitchen.
© "This is Beijing"
Why do this, one is the inevitable result of the development of standardization, and the other is also forced by the times:
Beijing is so big, the space to open a store is getting smaller and smaller, and the kitchen cannot be very large;
Hundreds of snacks are served every day, and the demand for each store adds up to a terrifying number;
More and more tourists, more and more demand, how large kitchen to feed?
However, even if the distribution center undertakes most of the production, the rest of the meals still need the chefs to start work at three o'clock in the morning and drive enough horsepower for eight hours to ensure the supply.
With such a high load, it is difficult to ensure the taste, and the machine production in the central kitchen cannot be as dedicated as the chef's own production.
Every day, after the death congestion of Beijing's traffic peak, it is difficult to transport delicious food to the store, and it is difficult to be as delicious as when it first came out of the pot.
To avoid food safety problems, you must reduce fresh vegetables and fruits in the ingredients, and the pasta is more stuffed than less...
Despite the best efforts, the solid fried tofu soup, the continuous cutting of greens, and the hard scorched circle were reluctantly born.
© Little Red Book
The unpalatable "protection of small" has countless histories of helplessness, but when eaten into people's mouths, the taste is everything.
Tourists wanted to eat all the old Beijing snacks in one stop, and only the low-end version of each snack was eaten.
Can people not scold!
If your first meal in Beijing is these, you must feel that Beijing is really a food desert.
Beijingers' feelings for protecting small children are complicated: their thrifty and comfortable personalities will not run out of half the city for a mouthful of sugar oil cakes, and the affordable and convenient care of their own downstairs is also guaranteed, and although the taste is almost bad, it is enough to eat.
▲In fact, the old neighbors still have feelings for protecting the children
And foreign tourists, after tasting it, may turn their heads and leave, no longer want to eat Beijing food.
No way, today's Huguo Temple snacks, there are too many things to carry:
It is a museum of Halal snacks in Beijing, a façade for Beijing cuisine, and a convenient restaurant downstairs in the community...
But it can only afford to take on the basic function of a restaurant: taste.
Here, we can only hope that everyone has eaten a small meal, and don't rush to scold Beijing food for not being worth a penny, because it is difficult to represent the true quality of Beijing snacks.
At the same time, we hope that the snacks of Gokokuji Temple will become more and more delicious every day.
After all, no matter what, there are still so many people in this city who can't live without it.
Resources:
Jude Huatian Holdings Co., Ltd. Beijing Huguosi Snack Bar. Huguosi Snack Bar Beijing Halal Snack First Store[J].Times Economics and Trade,2010,(06):133-135.
Wang Mingzhen. Huguo Temple and Huguosi Snack Street[J].Beijing Archives,2011,(01):52-53.
[3] JADE, Zonglian Seed. The Past and Present Life of Gokokuji Snacks[J].Food And Beverage World,2019,(07):14-17.
Shan Zhiming. Beijing traditional snacks waiting for nirvana[J].Chinese Food,2004,(09):34.
Yao Zhensheng. Dongsi People's Market and Temple Fair[J].Journal of Beijing Business School,1982,(03):71-48.
[6] Full Brother. We dug deep into the old brand of Beijing Xicheng and discovered this earth-shattering secret. Fu Tao nine points full, 2019.5.29.
Tang Lusun. Also talking about Huguo Temple[M].GuyuanQing,Guangxi Normal University Press,2013,(01).
[8] BTV- News. Old Beijing Survey of Who Is Doing Early[Y].Here is Beijing, 2015.4.13.
[9] BTV- News. Huguosi Snack 24 Hours Break through[Y].This is Beijing, 2016.1.14.
Author - VJ
Design - Director Mao
EDIT - VJ
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