TWTBACD Ch.75 - The Third Generation Restaurant

Chapter 75

The Third Generation Restaurant

2071

2071: Ming-Li's third generation kitchen opens

[CHEN FAMILY — Ming-Li, 25]

Ming-Li Chen opened her own restaurant in 2071. Not the Wei Chen restaurant — that was Bolin's and would be Bolin's as long as he wanted it. Her restaurant was a food systems research kitchen, attached to a small urban farm in the Yangtze River delta, focusing on dishes made entirely from locally produced, ecologically integrated ingredients.

It was not commercially oriented. It was an argument made in edible form: that the food system of the future was not the food system of the present, and that the transition was possible, and that the transition was delicious.

Yanmei came from Singapore for the opening. She was fifty-seven. She sat at the counter and watched her niece cook with the specific attention of someone recognising something they had never directly witnessed but had always known existed.

'She's like Wei Yeye,' Yanmei told Bolin.

'She's exactly like him,' Bolin said. 'Without any of the training. It just — came out.'

'That's how it was with him. He said the cooking knew itself.'

Wei came in his wheelchair — eighty-seven, frail, entirely present. He ate everything Ming-Li put in front of him and said nothing until the meal was complete.

Then he said: 'The braised lotus root. Tell me how you made it.'

She told him. He listened. Then he said: 'My father would have made it differently. But your way is right for the ingredients you're using. The dish knows where the vegetables came from.'

'Is that possible?' Ming-Li asked. 'For a dish to know that?'

'A good dish knows everything,' Wei said. 'That is what makes it a good dish.'

He left early — his energy was limited. Ming-Li watched him go and felt the weight of what she was carrying: four generations of kitchen knowledge, passed through different hands, arriving in her hands in a different world, still, somehow, intact.