The celebrity story of gourmet Chen Xiaoqing

The celebrity story of veteran gourmet Chen Xiaoqing

On April 18, after the premiere of the second season of "A Bite of China", the chief director Chen Xiaoqing greeted a wave of people in the office of CCTV Documentary Channel After a wave of media, he was a little disinterested, and his face was full of exhaustion.

Only when he talked about eating, his dark face suddenly started to glow.

Sweeping Street

Chen Xiaoqing has many legends in the world. For example, he has a ready-made food map of Beijing in his mind. When he can't find a place to eat within the Sixth Ring Road of Beijing, he just needs to send him the address. In less than 5 minutes, a text message recommending a restaurant will come to you.

According to research, these legends are quite reliable. One day, Zhang Lixian, Editor-in-Chief of Duku, strolled to Nancheng. Seeing that it was time for dinner, he called Chen Xiaoqing to ask what he should eat. As soon as I hung up the phone, a text message came: Xiaoxiang Restaurant, please order a large pot of cauliflower, old bacon, pickled pepper fish head, pickled radish, blood duck, water celery, red cabbage...

Another time , another good friend of Chen Xiaoqing, Wang Xiaoshan, wanted to treat his college classmates to dinner and asked him to recommend restaurants. Five minutes later, they received a text message reply. When they arrived at the designated restaurant, the dishes were already on the table. It turned out that Chen Xiaoqing had "telephone controlled the restaurant and ordered the dishes on his behalf", but "unfortunately, even after eating for a long time, he didn't know the name of the dishes." ".

None of this can be accomplished in a day. When Chen Xiaoqing had nothing to do, she started a "carpet search" along the streets and alleys of Beijing. If she looked interested, she would go in and try it out. At the most, his phone had stored more than 700 pieces of restaurant information, including names, addresses, directions, phone numbers, and main dishes, as well as which dishes needed special reminders and which waiters were cuter. This was inspired by Shen Changwen, the old manager of Sanlian Bookstore. Mr. Shen once had a "Business Guide", which was full of restaurant notes. It is Chen Xiaoqing's ideal to be able to eat as carefully as Mr. Shen and have the same sense of accomplishment.

Chen Xiaoqing doesn’t even let go of the corners. Zhang Lixian once went to a dinner party organized by Chen Xiaoqing. Following his text message instructions, he made many twists and turns before finding him in a community near Lianhua Bridge. It was an ordinary unit, purchased by the Anhui Chizhou Liaison Office in Beijing. This place is not open to the public. If you want to eat, you need to make a reservation in advance and report the number of people. They will transport the ingredients from the local area. According to Chen Xiaoqing's statistics, this community alone has more than 20 authentic flavors from various places. Because of this, Chen Xiaoqing's colleagues gave him the nickname "Street Sweeper".

The audience can see so many mouth-watering delicacies in "Bite of the Tongue", which is inseparable from Chen Xiaoqing's running footsteps on the road of foodie. Most of these foods are carefully selected by him using his own taste buds.

For example, in the first episode "Footsteps", three Taizhou delicacies appeared: Wangchao, jumping fish, and pancake tubes. This originated from a taste-seeking trip that his foodie friend Chen Li took him on. "Most of the things we eat have weird names, but they taste great." After a few years, Chen Xiaoqing still recalls it endlessly, "It's like a pancake tube. The taste is different with every bite. It feels like Forrest Gump's Chocolate, you never know what it will taste like next, it might be eggs, it might be bean sprouts, it might be dried spices, it might even be the tide... it’s so wonderful.”

Throw away all foreplay that has nothing to do with food

Chen Xiaoqing’s tongue is not satisfied with China either. In Japan, their family of four took the train twice just to eat authentic Japanese ramen. The ramen shop is called Inoue, and it is an open-air noodle shop facing the street. Two meters away is the busy lane, and a long queue has formed here. To the left of the noodle pot are two tables as narrow as benches with no seats. The customer stood there eating the noodles wholeheartedly, and all the compliments could only be read from the expressive faces.

Chen Xiaoqing likes this kind of place. It throws away all the environment, conversation, face and other foreplay that have nothing to do with food, and goes straight to the climax of food. For him, when it comes to eating, he can eat in a hall but not in a private room, on the roadside but not in a restaurant, in the open air but not indoors, and while standing but never sitting down.

He often went to a five-star hotel in Beijing to drink the mutton soup from his hometown, because he knew that the owner specially hired a cook from Xiao County. Every time I go there, I don’t look at the menu and just order a bowl of mutton soup and two crispy buns? The waiter froze there and tried his best to recommend other dishes - if he did this too many times, he would become thin-skinned and embarrassed to go back.

He still prefers to go to small restaurants, he likes the sharp and unmistakable taste of pleasure, and he likes the comfortable and casual market atmosphere there.

However, Chen Xiaoqing was somewhat vain in the initial stage of being a foodie. His deep concern for food began in 1987 at the China Food Festival. It was his first time making a food-related documentary. He did photography and ate a lot of "high-end" dishes that he had never seen before. That time, he ate shark fin for the first time. When the shark fin was served, the lighting engineer said, "I don't eat vermicelli." Everyone laughed at him, including Chen Xiaoqing.

At that time, he felt that the most delicious food was what he could not afford or eat.

A chef at a high-end restaurant advised him not to eat bluffing things like abalone wings: "In my lifetime, a chef, like me, has been exposed to these things countless times. You can count them all. How can you cook them well without practicing a few times? Don’t believe those high-end dishes. I suggest you eat more pork and beef. We don’t deal with them every day.” Chen Xiaoqing became even more excited after hearing this analysis from her brother. Feel confident.

Quanzhou’s radish rice appeared in "Tongue 2". Many viewers in Quanzhou are unconvinced. There are so many famous delicacies in Quanzhou, why make a bowl of carrot rice? In fact, the old man gave Chen Xiaoqing more than ten kinds of delicacies, including peppercorns that had been stored for ten years, abalone, tiger shrimp, etc. But only when eating carrot rice, the old man was particularly happy to see Chen Xiaoqing. "The more common people's food is, the closer it is to the true meaning of food."

This is also the overall value set by Chen Xiaoqing for the episode director: Don't shoot famous dishes, don't shoot big dishes, shoot what my mother cooked for us when we were young. of gourmet food. "We never say that the food in "A Bite of China" is the most delicious. What we choose is what most people can eat and afford every day."

Fireworks in the World , the most comforting

During the more than a year of filming "Bite of the Tongue 2", Chen Xiaoqing did not develop a new restaurant. "I'm too busy and eat box lunches every day." However, he still goes to a Korean cold noodle restaurant on Fuyou Street in Beijing once a week. "Every time it is done very quickly, and I leave in 20 minutes. The taste is no longer important, what I eat is memories." Sometimes, when his son Chen Le sees that he is in a bad mood, he will suggest: "Dad, why don't we eat today?" Let’s go eat cold noodles.”

This is a noodle restaurant owned by Chen Xiaoqing, who has been eating it for 32 years. It carries his life experiences and memory moments after arriving in Beijing. For him, this restaurant cannot be summed up simply by the word restaurant. "The most delicious food is the food that can comfort your soul."

Behind an unforgettable food may be a person or a past event. In fact, it doesn't matter when to eat, where to eat, what to eat, or how to eat. For him, the most important thing is who to eat with. He has always had a regular old man dinner party, where several friends get together from time to time and just chat, or say nothing at all. He used to often attend food-centered meals, called food tastings to be precise. But he never wrote about the food he ate in such a place. He didn't like it. Later, he stopped going to such gatherings if he could.

What is rare is purity and warmth. In his food articles, the beauty of food is always inseparable from the warmth of people's hearts and full of human fireworks: the old couple who came to Beijing to open a restaurant for their son from Beipiao, the scolding small shopkeepers who insisted on traditional methods, and the small shopkeepers who only had to take care of their children to go to school. Opening a maocai restaurant for a long time...

He wrote that he would take his son back to his hometown to have breakfast. The sky was bright and he couldn't wait to get up and drink sauteed soup. The so-called sauteed soup is actually a chicken skeleton hung out, a civilian food, simmered slowly over low heat, and fried with pepper when served. He asked for soup for his son and went out to help him find other food along the way. Sugar cakes, sesame seed cakes, vegetable boxes... He sent food back over and over again, and his son was sweating profusely and enjoying it with satisfaction. This warm sense of accomplishment seemed to take him back to a certain morning in his childhood. At that time, his father brought him here for the first time. The taste memories of childhood come back in an instant.

Chen Xiaoqing believes that everyone’s intestines and stomach actually have a door, and the key is the food code given to you by your parents and elders in childhood. No matter where you wander, the door may have been dilapidated, but the combination lock on the door is still closed, waiting for the awakening of your childhood taste imagination.

The theme of the Tip of the Tongue series has always been to explore the relationship between people and food.

"Previous food documentaries were all about 'three days in the kitchen, washing your hands and making soup', but what we want to highlight is 'if you don't know your sister's food habits, let her taste it first'."

The story behind the food Subtlety is a deliberate presentation by the director team. However, the audience was not entirely convinced. This episode of "Family Life" also encountered the most violent criticism. In the film, a working-class family from Henan Province goes to Shanghai to study piano for their daughter. The two places have been separated for five years. My father works alone in his hometown to support the mother and daughter's living expenses in Shanghai. In the past five years, my father has not been to Shanghai, my grandmother is critically ill, and my children have not returned home to visit. Such stories were criticized by the audience as lacking in humanity, and "the food program turned into a sad drama."

Chen Xiaoqing said that this is part of reality, "In China, which is changing rapidly, this is helpless. I don't want to judge the quality of this matter, I just present it." He hopes that through food, he can see the current living environment and attitude of Chinese people. "If a food lover is insensitive and cannot understand these things, then he is a loser." ;