Coffee common sense coffee is still fragrant in Kunming

In 1910, the small train of the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway drove into Kunming, and many foreigners who came to Kunming for the first time found that there were authentic western restaurants. "No profit cannot get up early." while the railway was being built, some French and Vietnamese catering people had already seen the business opportunities for western food in Kunming and took the lead in entering Kunming.

However, according to records, these western restaurants are trying to make a lot of money, and the price per person is at least one ocean, which is destined to be out of touch with ordinary people. Therefore, business is limited, and there is news of closing down from time to time.

More than 20 years later, another western restaurant was opened on Jinbi Road, named "Xin Yue". As its name implies, it was opened by the Vietnamese, and the female owner was Nguyen Min Xuan, who is said to be a distinguished family in Taiyuan, Vietnam.

The interior of "Xinyue" Western restaurant is beautifully decorated, and the dining environment of train seats is not out of date today. The food is also good, and the chef can use pork to make the "clam shell meat" of seafood. But at that time, the domestic demand in Kunming could not be pulled up as well as now, and the high price was prohibitive.

Under such circumstances, Xinyue changed its name to "Nanlaisheng Cafe" within a few years, specializing in Vietnamese coffee and Western-style dim sum, and its French hard-shell bread is very distinctive. All of a sudden, "Nanlaisheng" became famous in Kunming and became a fashionable place for the general public to taste coffee.

Even during the Anti-Japanese War, although the people's livelihood in the rear area of Kunming was difficult, Nanlaisheng was still bustling. Shen Congwen of Southwest Associated University invited Hu Shi to have coffee here, and overseas Chinese leader Chen Jiageng also came. However, you may not have noticed a Vietnamese baker who was often not in the shop, and he was Ho Chi Minh, the later leader of Vietnam.

Ho Chi Minh came to Kunming in 1940 to work underground, leading the revolution of the Vietnamese people as an open baker in Nanlai. Until now, the life experience of Nan Lai Sheng's boss, Ruan Minxuan, is still a mystery to us, and the person she protected for the future of the motherland has finally become the hope of the Vietnamese people.

In 1956, Nanlaisheng was a public-private partnership, and even in the later crazy years, Nanlaisheng's "bourgeois flavor" coffee still smelled good in Kunming. Later, to "serve the workers, peasants and soldiers," Nanlaisheng added rice noodles from Kunming, and there was also a kind of Vietnamese fried noodles, which fried slightly boiled noodles and poured a spoonful of covered sauce made of shredded meat and shiitake mushrooms to smell the fragrance from afar.

Until the 1990s, Kunming urban transformation, Nanlaisheng moved to several places, then disappeared. Later, we learned that Nanlaisheng was the only restaurant recommended by the magazine in Kunming in the World Travel Magazine abroad.

Chairman Ho Chi Minh's prestige among the Vietnamese people has not diminished, and the neighboring province of Guangxi has protected the place where he lived and worked, attracting Vietnamese people to pay their respects in China. However, the name of my home, Kunming, Nanlaisheng, was diluted and replaced by McDonald's and Starbucks, and gradually forgotten.

The end of the wind old Kunming gossip series, Li Chuanzhi painting. It has been published in Yunnan Information Daily every Tuesday since January 2008. You are welcome to correct it.