Food: Selling Boxed Meals at a Construction Site

At noon, after the delivery riders left the Hai City Library entrance to make their rounds, Xu An didn’t stay idle. He walked two kilometers to scout out a new location.

That’s right—he was looking for a new spot to expand his delivery range.

Although the area around the Hai City Library was slated to become the future CBD, the office buildings were currently concentrated within a 1.5-kilometer radius of it. Beyond that, there were only scattered shops.

Given the current scale of Xu’s Fast Food Restaurant, it was wise to pick a new base of operations.

The place Xu An was scouting this time was a creative park. This park was primarily home to the design industry, filled with individual creative studios and design firms of around a hundred employees each.

The creative park was huge. It took Xu An an hour just to walk down its central axis and back. Based on the density of the buildings, he estimated there were over a hundred companies inside.

It was lunchtime, so crowds of people were milling about the park.

Of course, there were even more food stalls outside the park. Between the restaurants and the stalls, there were at least forty or fifty of them.

Every stall was swarmed with people, and the restaurants were packed to the gills.

The competition was fierce, but Xu An was still very confident in his own lunch boxes!

To expand his business, he would need to upgrade his staff and equipment. The first thing that needed an overhaul was the kitchen.

The current kitchen equipment was all cobbled together from various sources. The first things that absolutely had to be replaced were the three gas stoves.

He needed to replace them with professional-grade stoves, the kind with much higher heat output. That alone would increase their cooking speed by two or three times.

Next were the rice steamer and the noodle boiler.

As the name suggests, a rice steamer is for steaming rice, but it could also be used to make steamed dishes.

However, the one they were currently using was a second-hand, six-tray model that could only steam enough rice for ninety people at once.

To cook enough rice by 10:30 AM, Liang Dani had to start a relentless cycle the moment she walked in the door: wash rice, steam it, let it cool, pour it into a bucket, then wash more rice, steam it again...

Even if one batch took only half an hour, cooking seven hundred servings required eight batches. That was a full four hours, during which Liang Dani had to constantly monitor the steamer while doing other work. It was incredibly draining.

The noodle boiler was used for making soup, which took even longer. Their seventy-liter, double-pot boiler had to be run three times in a row, without a break, just to barely meet customer demand.

Even then, customers who arrived too late during peak hours had to wait for their soup.

There were plenty of restaurants and hotels in Hai City, but smaller fast food joints were typically run by couples or families who did everything by hand and rarely used such heavy-duty kitchen equipment.

Larger restaurants and hotels had this kind of equipment, but they rarely went out of business. Even when one did, if a competitor took over the location, the equipment wouldn’t hit the second-hand market.

Xu An had been incredibly lucky to find the equipment he had. This time, when he visited several large second-hand shops in Hai City, all he could scrounge up were miscellaneous items like meat grinders and garlic presses.

In the end, he had to go to an appliance market and find a company that specialized in commercial kitchen equipment.

A 24-tray rice steamer, a 90-liter double-pot noodle boiler, three high-power stove tops...

This new equipment completely filled the kitchen of Xu’s Fast Food Restaurant, leaving not a single inch of free space.

The result of this venture: Money -8,400 yuan.

His wallet was now empty.

Jiang Xiaoyan was a designer at a firm in the Red Brick Creative Park.

She had been working for two years since graduation. After an initial phase of spending lavishly, Jiang Xiaoyan had finally learned how to save money.

The first step to saving money was packing her own lunch!

Every day after work, no matter how late it was, she would prepare a lunch box and put it in her refrigerator. The next morning, she’d bring it to the office fridge, and at noon, she could just heat it in the microwave for five minutes and eat.

A meal out cost ten yuan or more. A lavish homemade lunch cost at most ten yuan, and a normal one only cost five or six.

By investing just a little time and effort, she could save eight to ten yuan a day. That added up to three hundred a month, or thirty-six hundred a year—an entire month’s salary saved! Yay!

But today at lunch, while she was heating up her food, the microwave broke down. She reported it to HR, but they came back and said the repairman couldn’t fix it.

And because several colleagues had complained about the microwave before, the company decided not to buy a new one.

For Jiang Xiaoyan, this was a bolt from the blue!

’She knew the complaints were just an excuse. The company was just being too cheap to buy a new one. If she offered to buy a microwave for the office with her own money, they definitely wouldn’t say no.’

’But that was impossible! You go to work to earn money, not spend it!’

No microwave meant she could no longer bring lunch to work. She would have to eat out.

’The thought of the scorching sun outside, the long lines at every restaurant...’

What was worse, Jiang Xiaoyan was short. When she walked through a crowd, she was at the perfect height for the smell of sweat and body odor to hit her right in the face.

’The more she thought about it, the more desperate she felt. Why was heaven so cruel to her!’

At 5:30 PM, it was time to clock out.

Jiang Xiaoyan dragged her exhausted body out of the office, walking listlessly to the entrance of the creative park.

Someone was handing out flyers at the park entrance. As Jiang Xiaoyan passed, she took one without thinking and continued trudging home, her head hung in despair.

’Maybe I should just stash a case of instant noodles at the office. I can eat that for lunch from now on. It saves time, effort, and worry. Plus, no dishes to wash! It’s a win-win-win!’

’But that was just a fleeting thought. If I ate instant noodles every day, my body would break down from malnutrition. It’s not worth it. Really, it’s not.’

That evening, bored while blow-drying her hair after a shower, her eyes wandered around the room. Suddenly, she spotted the flyer she had mindlessly accepted that afternoon.

’Wondering What to Have for Lunch? — Xu’s Fast Food. Delicious meals with home delivery.’

Hm?

The two words "home delivery" caught Jiang Xiaoyan’s attention. She picked up the flyer and began to read it carefully.

Braised Pork Belly, Steamed Pork with Preserved Mustard Greens, Scallion Oil Chicken, Lion’s Head Meatballs, Braised Chicken with Mushrooms...

She glanced at the price—only 8 yuan! Even with the delivery fee, it was just 8.50 yuan!

Then she saw Xu’s Fast Food Restaurant’s delivery policy: a minimum of two orders. ’That means I need to find someone else to order with... but who?’

Jiang Xiaoyan picked up the phone on her desk and started scrolling through her contacts, hoping to find a like-minded partner to complete this grand mission.

Just then, her phone chimed with a notification. A chat bubble popped up at the top of her screen, and she tapped it open.

’Hey Xiaoyan, I got a flyer this afternoon. It’s for Xu’s Fast Food. Eight yuan for three dishes and a soup, delivered right to the office. Want to try it together tomorrow?’

’Yes!’

Delicious Restaurant.

After Jin Dayong was taken away, his son Jin Wu, the chef at Delicious Restaurant, simply shut the doors, tossed the ingredients he’d bought for the day into his car, and nonchalantly headed back to his village.

His old man had been in this situation before. Usually, he’d just do a few days in lockup and get out. The longest it ever took was about a week.

’Running a restaurant is a huge responsibility. I can’t be making any rash decisions. Better to just wait for Dad to get out.’

Back in the village, Jin Wu sat behind the counter of the local convenience store, a fan blowing on him as he played on his phone, feeling completely at ease.

’Working the register here is so much more comfortable than slaving away in that hot kitchen!’