Coffee from Shanghainese

Drinking coffee in Shanghai, the sense of taste and moisture provided by coffee seems to instantly enable a Chinese to approach and feel the world around them with Western taste, and have a tacit understanding with the human and physical scenery there. Under the swaying of the Indus green shadow, in the dusky and dumb building, that moment is elongated and stretched down.

Shanghai will never be a tea city, nor will it be beer or Erguotou, it is a coffee city. A few years ago, when I was in Australia, I told an Italian I knew well that I should open it in Shanghai, where the coffee can be sold for four times the price. The man wondered: do Shanghainese really love coffee so much?

I think, really like Europeans, drinking coffee into their daily eating habits, if you don't drink it, you will feel that your pores are clogged, which does not seem to constitute the mainstream of the population. Once when a friend from Hong Kong came to admire the coffee shop in Shanghai, we took a taxi around. At about 11:00 in the morning, except for Starbucks, all the small famous cafes were turned away from us.

Shanghainese may see coffee as a symbol of middle-class life, which is more accessible and accessible than Western-style meals, villas and cars. Young people who fall in love and date have to drink coffee in order to find the password of a common ideal from each other's eyes and imagine the future together.

A friend of mine is very particular about coffee. he has a machine for grinding coffee beans, a pot for making coffee, and Brazilian coffee beans brought to him by his niece in the United States. Of course he doesn't go to cafes and doesn't drink coffee very often, but he has to be fastidious in drinking it. His request is easy to say, and it must be fragrant. When he drinks coffee, he wants an aroma and his soul is out of his body. Because the moment the fragrant coffee rushed into the throat, all kinds of unrealistic things became a reality.

One day I stopped at Menon on Tongren Road in Shanghai. There is a middle-aged man sitting next to him talking about coffee. What is more, what is less, where the time is longer. I don't know. I only remember that at last he said that the taste of the coffee was so close that the taste of the coffee was different. I don't believe you go back and try it. With regard to coffee, Shanghainese have an "hypocritical" side. Drinking coffee is a small matter, but you can see the big in the small, but the problem of temperament should not be careless.

In Shanghai dialect, "eat" means "drink". It seems hard to get around the details of "eating coffee" to explain the atmosphere in Shanghai. Besides, bypassing the coffee, there is no mood. Coffee, sentiment and Shanghai have not been implicated in one day. The word sentiment, which was simple twenty years ago, could not be covered up in this city, but now it is rampant.

What is the sentiment of Shanghainese? That year, when my father went abroad, when he was tired of playing outside, he took him to a cafe to sit down, which was a bright and plainly decorated place. Father said that so bright, there is no mood, there is no mood cafe is what a coffee shop.

Sentiment is an euphemistic thing, can not be direct, can not be bright, there must be a little bit of shelf, and ambiguous. The mood must be somewhat artificial, so it is related to the light, sound and smell, and coffee provides the possibility for this spirit.

Nestle coffee, which is scoffed by "drinkers", is still very popular in Shanghai. Nestl é is a precious commodity in the 1980s, which is the coordinate of living standards.

At that time, the bottle of Nestle on my shelf was used to entertain guests. for a while, the coffee in the bottle dropped too fast. The old father asked, have a lot of female classmates come here recently? Yes, as a new Shanghainese, how can I be free from vulgarity? some people always have to pay attention to the atmosphere.

Shanghainese love coffee, or some of them are really fastidious, but most of them just to avoid losing their virtual identity, they gradually get used to the taste. This is why Nestle Coffee can raise the price of hospitality, while the American coffee business of "Starbucks" is so prosperous that Shanghainese feel romantic when they sit in chain stores.

Coffee has been fiercely romanticized in Shanghai, just like Shanghai itself, and is increasingly romanticized on the outside. What does coffee mean to me as a Shanghainese? When I went to the streets when I was a child, on the North Sichuan Road, the grocery store piled the once-used coffee grounds in the washbasin, put it in front of the store and put a sign to sell it cheaply. In the era of material lack of wealth, coffee is fragrant all over the street. Later, when I lived abroad, I made a few cups of coffee a day, just like making tea in our office. Coffee was the cheapest thing in the market. It was used to cheer me up, that's all. Back in Shanghai, coffee has countless added value. Perhaps, the coffee of Shanghainese has never been so simple.