TWTBACD Ch.2 - The Kitchen That Never Closed

Chapter 2

The Kitchen That Never Closed

Shanghai, China — 1978–2019

Ch.2 opening: Shanghai's transformation and the Chen family's kitchen

Wei Chen's father opened the restaurant in 1978, the year Deng Xiaoping announced Reform and Opening Up, the year China decided to become a different kind of country.

The timing was not intentional. Wei Senior — Chen Jianguo — had been planning the restaurant since 1974, which was not a good year to open a private business in Shanghai. He had been waiting. The announcement in 1978 meant the waiting was over. He found a space in Jing'an district, which was then a neighbourhood of peeling plaster and communal kitchens and the smell of forty years of rationing. He signed a lease that gave him twenty years of occupancy in exchange for payments that were modest by any standard except his savings.

The restaurant was called, simply, Chen Jia: the Chen Family. No further description was offered. The food was Shanghainese — the specific cuisine of the city, which was neither the heat of Sichuan nor the delicacy of Cantonese but something in between: rich, precise, savoury, built on the pork and fish and winter vegetables of the Yangtze Delta. The braised pork belly had been Jianguo's mother's recipe. He made it the same way every day. People came back for it.

Wei Chen was born in 1979, the year after the restaurant opened, which meant he had never known a life that did not include the smell of cooking — of soy sauce and star anise, of pork fat rendering, of the specific combination of aromatics that his father used in the braising liquid and which Wei had memorised before he could read.

He grew up in the kitchen. Not because he had to — by the mid-1980s the restaurant was successful enough that the family did not require child labour — but because the kitchen was the most interesting room in his world. His father was a different person at the stove: focused, exacting, present in a way he wasn't at the dinner table. The kitchen showed Wei the version of his father he found most comprehensible and most worthy of emulation.

He learned to cook the way kitchen children learn: by watching for years before touching, by touching only when the specific task was small enough to allow for error, by receiving corrections that were wordless — a repositioned hand, a removed ingredient, a flame adjusted — until the wordless corrections became internal and the internal corrections became the cooking itself.

By thirty, Wei ran the kitchen. By thirty-five, after his father's retirement to Zhejiang, Wei ran the restaurant. He married Lihua in 2003 — a woman from Suzhou with a degree in accounting and a quality of absolute numerical clarity that had been conspicuously absent from the restaurant's management in the Jianguo era.

Shanghai by 2019 was a city of twenty-six million and a skyline that had been redrawn three times since Wei's childhood. The Pudong skyline — invisible from Jing'an but present in the city's self-image like a collective memory of ambition — had grown from warehouses and farmland in the 1980s to the most dramatic urban skyline in Asia by 2019. The city had been transformed at a speed that the human ability to adapt to change was barely adequate to process.

The transformation had costs. The air in Shanghai in 2019 was the worst it had been in a decade — the manufacturing expansion of the inland provinces had given Shanghai a particulate problem that the municipal government addressed with odd-even traffic restrictions and public health warnings and, more slowly, with the renewable energy transition that was beginning to show results but had not yet shown enough. On bad days the skyline disappeared. On very bad days, Wei opened the restaurant windows only after checking the air quality index.

The Yangtze Delta, which fed the restaurant's ingredients, was also changing. The winter melon that Wei's father had sourced from a specific farm in Jiangsu for thirty years was harder to grow — the seasonal temperatures had shifted, the rainfall patterns had shifted. The farm adapted. Wei adapted. The dish continued. But it required more attention, more sourcing effort, more willingness to pay for the extra care the changing conditions required.

Wei was forty in 2019. His daughter Yanmei was fifteen and showed signs of a mind that was going somewhere other than the kitchen — which was correct, which was as it should be, which was what he had educated her for. His son Bolin was three and showed signs of being, temperamentally, exactly the kind of person who would always find the kitchen the most important room in any building.

The restaurant had forty years of history in its walls. The braised pork belly had not changed since 1978. The city around it had changed beyond recognition. The kitchen, which was always changing and always the same, remained the constant around which everything else rotated.

Ch.2 close: Forty years of cooking, a world that changed faster than recipes