Chapter 51 Settling Accounts and Advertising

  A few days ago, two brothers were sleeping in the house, at this time they could usually find a powder to mix, but now they dare not go out, and their hands are tight. Suddenly hearing someone banging on the door outside, Ma Lao Da said with sleepy eyes:

  "Second elder brother, someone has come, go and open the door."

  Ma Lao Er's face was full of reluctance, muttering to himself as he put on his clothes. He thought to himself, "Who is so blind as to come knocking on the door at such an early hour? If it wasn't for something important, I'd have to give them a few slaps." When he arrived at the small courtyard outside the door, he heard two people outside discussing, "This house is really too run down, can people even live here?"

  Ma Lao Er was furious, thinking that he must take action to teach the person outside who was talking nonsense a lesson. His eyes blazed with anger as he hastily ran down several steps and opened the gate, shouting loudly:

  "That thing without eyes is placed here..."

  The sound stopped abruptly, and outside were Jiang Feng and Zhang Liang standing there. The previous sentence was obviously heard clearly by the other party. Zhang Liang's eyebrows were raised, and he was about to get angry. Ma Lao Er, although a rough person, reacted quickly, and immediately put on a smile on his face, using a flattering tone to say:

  "Look at me, this blind one, how can I put two brothers outside? Quickly come inside, come inside."

  Jiang Feng unexpectedly brought Zhang Liang to visit, which in the eyes of the Ma brothers was even more unlucky than "a cat entering a house at night". Old Man Ma heard the noise and didn't care about his sore body, hurriedly crawled out of bed, without even putting on clothes properly. Jiang Feng had already strode in with big strides, looking around at the messy room with a frown.

  He suddenly smiled at Ma Lao Da, and Ma Lao Da's body trembled slightly. He instinctively felt that nothing good would happen. Jiang Feng pushed the quilt on the kang aside, threw a stack of paper slips onto the kang, and said with a smile:

  "Ma brothers, you owe 150 taels of silver at Hui Feng Building, is this true?"

  Ma Jia's eldest and second brothers exchanged a glance, knowing that they had indeed eaten for free at the place many times before. According to the rules, this would normally require them to pay a penalty, which wouldn't be paid anyway, amounting to tens of taels of silver. Just as they thought their brother hadn't eaten that much, they saw Zhang Liang clenching his fists with a "ka-cha" sound.

  Hastily nodded and said:

  "Yes, yes, but brother, I'm also a bit short-handed, why don't we pay back thirty taels first."

  "Heh heh, Ma Lao Da, don't be in a hurry. It's been so long since then, we should at least calculate some interest. We've worked together for a while now, so I won't use the compound interest method. Let's just use simple interest instead. I promise I won't cheat you. Hmm, I calculated it on my way here - in total, you owe 800 taels of silver."

  As soon as he heard this, Ma Lao'er on the side suddenly exploded and rushed towards Jiang Feng sitting on the kang, but was caught by Zhang Liang behind him. With his arm locked from behind, Ma Lao'er struggled and shouted desperately:

  "Eight hundred taels, we two brothers will take ten years..."

  Jiang Feng's hands firmly pressed down on Ma Lao Da, his strength was even greater, and Ma Lao Da could only lie obediently on the kang, Jiang Feng handed over a rewritten IOU with a warm smile:

  "Zhang Liang, pin down Ma Lao Er and drag him out to calm him down. Ma Lao Da still signed the contract."

  The Ma brothers are now in debt of eight hundred taels, according to the official rules, they can already be sold as slaves. However, Jiang Feng did not make things difficult for them. Since there is no money to repay the debt, then work to repay it. So now the Ma brothers are honestly working in front of Hui Feng Building.

  Ma Lao Da looked at his brother who was flipping the barbecue with a pair of chopsticks, then turned around and yelled at the onlookers:

  "Go away from here for now, it's not open until after eight days, go further and further!!"

  Old Horse called out from behind:

  "Brother, the meat is roasted well, come and try it, this flavor is really good."

  His fists were no match for others, and he had even signed an IOU of 800 taels on the other party's hand. These past few days, staying at Hui Feng Lou was actually better than going to a lower-grade inn. Ma Lao Da let out a sigh in his heart, thinking that if he had to risk his life for Jiang Feng, it wouldn't be anything difficult... Looking over at Ma Lao Er, who already had oil dripping from the corners of his mouth, he couldn't help but smile wryly, and from now on, he would just have to resign himself to his fate.

  Since the soft approach doesn't work, let's try the hard way. The other party is from the Imperial Guard, and those who are anxious about whether they will receive trial dishes and opening invitations are even more flustered.

  We Chinese people have always attached great importance to the issue of face when doing things, from ancient times to the present. In recent days, in the southern city of Beijing, families with heads and faces, as long as they were actively invited by Huifeng Building to try dishes, would walk with their eyes upwards, while those who were not invited would be dejected and disheartened.

  According to Jiang Feng's plan, the first four days were spent delivering dishes to the wealthy households in front of them for trial tasting. On the fifth day, a stall was set up on the streets near Huifeng Building to promote to passersby.

  This book is the restaurant where he worked in modern times, the means used when it first opened for business. Such actions are a hackneyed way of doing things in 21st-century Chinese marketing, but transplanted to the Ming dynasty five or six hundred years ago, combined with exceptionally delicious dishes, they had an extraordinarily powerful effect.

  At the beginning, Jiang Feng's idea was that if a wine house made money, it must focus on high-end dishes and noble customers. So, according to the rich people's information passed down from the Jin Yiwei patrol street, he went door-to-door to pay visits. What he didn't expect was that, firstly, the accuracy of the Jin Yiwei's local snake (the necessary information for extortion), and secondly, the few dishes in his hand were indeed brilliant, using Guangdong's braising technique to add some flavor enhancers to enhance the flavor.

  Those dishes were all the masterpieces of the eight major restaurants in the early years of the Republic of China, which were learned during vocational school days. They were also the result of the chefs' repeated refinement. Jiang Feng himself only had a memory in his mind, and as a newly graduated student at that time, he couldn't make them either. But when he told Bao Wen about these things, the fat chef surprisingly had a set of skills and managed to replicate them, producing delicious dishes.

  But now, for many families, what they eat is no longer important, the key is whether this meal can be eaten. Trying dishes has become a monthly evaluation of Xihan in the late Eastern Han Dynasty. Whoever is sent to try the dish and receive the invitation card is recognized by everyone as a rich man, if there is a family with money but not a good reputation, after eating the trial dish and receiving the invitation card, others will look at them with more respect when they meet again.