Brief introduction of wine and restaurants in Song Dynasty ..

Catering in Song Dynasty was the heyday in the history of China catering. According to records, teahouses and restaurants in the Song Dynasty have spread all over the streets of Kaifeng City, and the catering business is booming. There are only 72 "main halls" (hotels) in Kaifeng city, and such hotels often "embroider each other to cover the sky"; "Foot shop" and "teahouse" (small hotel) do not count. Hotels, teahouses, karaoke bars and prostitutes are particularly prosperous. There are 13 state-owned wine depots (self-brewed and self-sold) in Hangzhou, and each depot has one or two high-end restaurants. There are also 18 famous private restaurants. These restaurants hold Chinese banquets every night and invite guests. Followed by a variety of specialty food stores, such as "tea branches", which mainly sell rice; "Steamed Bun Restaurant" mainly sells goose and duck steamed buns; The "house hotel" looks like a government official; "Garden Hotel" has an elegant environment like a garden. If classified by cuisine, there are "southern restaurants" that serve southern cuisine; "Northern Restaurant" serves northern dishes; "Sheep Hotel", mainly selling mutton, dining tables; "Sichuan Hotel" mainly sells noodle soup; The vegetarian restaurant sells all kinds of snacks. Once again, it is a retail cooked food vendor selling along the street. They haunt night markets and temple fairs, carrying baskets at the top of plates until they walk in remote alleys. In this way, a classified urban catering market network is formed.

There were many famous wines in the Song Dynasty. According to records, there are nearly 100 kinds of famous wines in the Northern Song Dynasty and more than 50 kinds of famous wines in the Southern Song Dynasty. At that time, the popular wines can be roughly divided into four categories: yellow wine, fruit wine, medicinal liquor and liquor (big shochu). The emperor wooed ministers with banquets, and the literati entertained them with wine as poems. The marriage and birthday celebrations of ordinary people are inseparable from wine. In terms of drinking tea, Song people are also very particular about it. When guests come, they should serve famous tea, which is called tea tasting. At that time, my wife and classmates had a tea party, and everyone got together to drink tea and talk about things, which became a friendship organization. Because of the habit of drinking and drinking tea, there are special tea and wine cooks and utensils for rent at weddings and funerals. In addition, there were many cold drink shops selling drinks in the cities of Song Dynasty.

During the years of Jingdezhen in Song Zhenzong, the total amount of four taxes on commerce, wine, tea and salt was 1. 233 million, of which the wine tax was 4.28 million. During Li Qing's several years in Song Renzong, the wine tax alone was 1, 7 1, and the wine tax increased fourfold in 40 years. This shows the prosperity of wine industry in Song Dynasty.

There are many famous shops and luxurious decorations.

There were many high-end hotels in the Song Dynasty, such as Renhe Store and Huixian Building in Bianjing, Wulin Garden and Xichun Building in Hangzhou, with all kinds of dishes, dishes and wine. The long corridor in the store is lined with pavilions, which are divided into seats and downstairs seats. Some restaurants, which have distinctive operations or become famous shops because of their superb cooking skills, such as Wang Lou Steamed Bun, Wanjia Steamed Bread, Meijia Goose and Duck, are all praised as "the first in Tokyo" and "the most outstanding".

The environmental layout, facade decoration and utensils display of restaurants in the Song Dynasty are extremely exquisite and luxurious. Due to the natural landscape, there are many restaurants with beautiful scenery in Hangzhou, which are close to mountains and rivers. For example, the "Fengle Building" on the West Lake outside Kinmen is resplendent and magnificent, with pavilions overlooking the West Lake. This is a place where civil and military officials often celebrate. Some hotel tea shops put up famous paintings, insert four-time flowers, or cleverly set up bonsai to attract customers. Every holiday, all shops and restaurants in Beijing have to redecorate their facades, tie silk on archways and sell fresh fruits and refined food. The night market is very lively. Many people go to The Upper Terrace, and some rich children enjoy the moon in their pavilions, or set dishes or arrange family dinners to reunite their children and chat with them. At that time, although there was no air conditioning equipment, a cooling ice basin was added in summer, and a heating water tank was set up in winter, which made customers feel warm all year round. Many restaurants use gold and silver wine vessels, and even poor families buy wine in hotels and deliver it with silverware.

Geisha solicit business.

Although the scholar-bureaucrat class in Song Dynasty advocated that "men are the masters outside and women are the masters inside", women can't go in and out of the house at will, but in the lower class, many women enter the business circle and live on the streets, especially in the hotel industry. Restaurants often use singers and prostitutes to attract guests and attract business. The promotion rewards and punishments of officials should also be directly related to their wine tax, so a large number of prostitutes are employed by the government to promote the wine industry. According to records, in the early years of the Northern Song Dynasty, the front of the hotel in Kyoto was luxuriously decorated, and there were hundreds of geisha in the corridor above the hotel, either soliciting or entertaining guests, which looked like a row of fairies from a distance. Song Banquet was popular in Song Dynasty. Usually, powerful people enjoy music while drinking, and when they are happy, they will improvise poems and lyrics. Geisha is also very talented, with good color, high skill, intelligence, knowledge and artistic interest. Their elegance and gracefulness captivated the elite and literati. Isn't it romantic and comfortable to sit at the same table with such a beautiful woman? According to records, Wen and Liu Yong, the "prodigal poets", had close contacts with geisha and became collaborators, singers and communicators. Therefore, many "leisure classes" spend all their time drinking and having fun in restaurants, which promotes the development of restaurants and hotels.

In addition to the wine industry, women also play an active role in the catering industry. They not only participate in production, but also engage in management and operation. Many shops are even named after them, such as Cao's meat pie and Song Wusao's fish soup. In addition, a large number of female artists engaged in song and dance, drama, entertainment, juggling, storytelling and other entertainment places appeared in the cities of Song Dynasty. The largest performance venue in the capital of song dynasty is like a shed, which can accommodate thousands of people. The audience in every shed is full every day. In the Southern Song Dynasty, the tile in Lin 'an was the largest, with 13 tick marks, and there were more female artists than in the Northern Song Dynasty.

Modern service and reasonable price.

The biggest feature of the catering industry in Song Dynasty is thoughtful service, reasonable price and a large number of employees, benefiting all sectors of society. Under normal circumstances, when customers come to the door, someone will "offer a bottle of tea". After taking a seat, he will have a drink first and pay a few dollars. This is called "official wine". Then, go to "see the dishes" (similar to the current menu), let customers see the dishes and report the names of the dishes. One person takes a piece of paper, asks what food and wine to order, records them one by one, sings the newspaper and goes to the kitchen. There is a "sonorous head" in the kitchen, which records the rotation of cooking. After a while, the waiter (similar to the current delivery man) will carry several dishes in his left hand and several bowls in his right hand. If you are wrong, you will be fined, and if you are serious, you will be dismissed. If customers are in a hurry and want to serve food quickly, the hotel will serve bibimbap first, and then fine dishes. Now it is almost a "fast food". Some customers don't eat much, and they can also order half a bowl of noodles in soup (that is, half a bowl of noodles).

According to different economic conditions and consumption levels, the highest can be nearly a hundred taels of silver, and the lowest can be tens of copper coins. Different classes have different consumption places.

In the hotel, in addition to the chefs of the main staff, there are also women in the neighborhood who wear blue and white towels around their waists and comb their hair in a high bun to change soup and pour wine for customers; Some people come uninvited, play and sing before the banquet, and rely on customers to send small money; Some automatically provide fruits, fragrant medicines and the like to sober customers up. In short, as long as customers are satisfied, it is ubiquitous and wonders. If customers entertain guests at home, there are "contractors", who rent utensils and provide dining tables, including ordering books, arranging seats and respecting former deacons. , and they are all contracted. As long as the owner pays, it doesn't take much effort. More importantly, no matter in Bianzhou or Hangzhou, there are night markets in the catering industry, which serve all night. It is really convenient for customers to provide different kinds of meals from morning till night.

There are both "teahouses" and vendors carrying pots.

In Song Dynasty, drinking tea was also an important part of people's life. Tea drinking places are also divided into teahouses and tea shops, and people with different identities have their own choices. In addition to the fixed tea drinking place "teahouse", there are people carrying pots to sell. In Hangzhou, there is also a mobile tea carrier and tea stall called "Tea Company", which serves the general public. Top grade Longfeng tea in Song Dynasty sold for 22 taels of gold per catty. Cities before the Northern Song Dynasty were generally divided into squares and cities, that is, residential areas and commercial areas were strictly separated. In the Song Dynasty, with the development of the city, the boundary between the square and the city was completely broken, and "tiles" (entertainment places) appeared in the city, including "Goulan" (performance places), restaurants, teahouses and so on. In the Song Dynasty, tea shops in Beijing were all over the streets, spreading from the city to the countryside.

In the Song Dynasty, teahouses were employed, and tea owners hired people who were familiar with tea-making technology, called "Dr. Tea", to carry out daily business. Dr. Cha is a highly professional and technical employee in the city, and he is one of the most distinctive people in the citizen class. In order to attract customers, tea shops in the Song Dynasty attached great importance to decoration, and in the Southern Song Dynasty, they were carefully decorated. According to records, Hangzhou tea shop was: "arranging flowers at four o'clock, painting celebrities and decorating the facade." The big teahouse is magnificent, paying attention to cultural decoration and creating a drinking environment. Su Dongpo also has a poem, "It is not evil to taste tea and look at pictures".

In order to attract customers at different levels, the services provided by tea shops are increasingly diversified, and various entertainment activities have emerged. Hexian songs are common in entertainment activities, which can be roughly divided into three types: one is to hire prostitutes to sing, which is one of the important means for tea shops to attract customers. Second, tea drinkers come to tea shops to learn music and sing; Then arrange rappers to tell stories and play chess. In addition to tea, teahouses also began to serve cakes. Tea was first used as a medicine to accompany meals and quench thirst in China. After a long process, we began to have a clear drink, that is, tea brewed with boiling water without any seasoning. However, the way of mixing drinks has always existed. The method of frying tea was popular in Tang dynasty, and ginger and salt were used when frying. This custom still existed in the Song Dynasty, but people preferred green tea.

Generally speaking, there are all kinds of teas and soups for customers in the teahouse. The big teahouse in Lin 'an in the Southern Song Dynasty "sells strange teas and different soups in four seasons", selling cold drinks such as sweet noodle sauce, coconut wine, bucket water, deer pear pulp, stewed plum water, ginger honey, papaya juice and heavy fragrance. The tea soup mentioned in Water Margin is well known to women and children, and it is also colorful. When Pan Jinlian visited the tea shop in Wang Po next door for four times, he mentioned four kinds of tea soup: plum soup (made by frying several dark plums in tea), mixed soup (a kind of sweet tea), ginger tea and Ye Er tea. In the Song Dynasty, some tea shops engaged in other businesses besides selling tea, such as hotels or bathrooms.

In the Song Dynasty, there were many people coming in and out of the teahouse. Princes and nobles, literati and scholars, rural villagers and even the supreme emperor in the world will come to visit on a whim. Although many people like to go in and out of the teahouse, in the eyes of the literati in the Song Dynasty, the teahouse is still a vulgar place. There is a difference between literati drinking tea and ordinary people drinking tea: ordinary people are good at mixing wine, so there are all kinds of tea soups in the teahouse; Scholar-officials are still drinking. Ordinary people drink tea with seasoning, which is fragrant and practical, and can quench their thirst and satisfy their hunger; When a scholar-bureaucrat drinks tea, he focuses on quality, which lies in pondering the artistic conception of tea, water, utensils, environment and people.