The best place for Mongol cooking in Peking is an old restaurant in the heart of the city; it is in the covered market of Tung-An, always swarming with customers who forage among the widely varied stands which include stalls selling foreign-language books. The restaurant in question is relatively small and its “productive capacity” is limited by the fact that it offers its patrons not just one private room for a party but often two. In the first room you eat the dishes that have to be boiled (you do this yourself on the self-service principle); in the second there are miniature charcoal stoves on which you grill mutton that has already been cut and prepared for you. By European standards the succulent meals served here are not very expensive (five yuan per person at the most), but for the Chinese they are obviously a luxury.
But a few years after the Liberation (I was not given the exact date), at the time of the socializing offensive, the authorities suddenly become worried about the “select” character of this restaurant and decree that it must be opened to a wider cross section of the people. There is one way to do it — serve many more meals and thus bring down the prices. The old chef, who has always cut up the meat himself and, when necessary, helped out the less dexterous customers, flatly declares that he cannot accept the new working conditions. He is a man of principle, remarkably uncompromising, and no one is able to change his mind. So he is replaced by younger, more dynamic cooks who agree to the lowering of prices, which they think will be offset by a big increase in the number of customers. At the start there are, indeed, crowds of new customers, then fewer, and finally practically none at all; even the regulars no longer come. No one can understand why; indeed, the Mongol restaurant serves only raw ingredients which are still supplied by the same wholesaler and are therefore of exactly the same quality. So an investigation is carried out, and eventually the reason for the customers’ dissatisfaction is revealed — the new cooks do not possess the right touch with a kitchen knife and fail to cut the mutton into thin enough slices, which are absolutely essential for good Mongol cooking.
It turns out that one of the disappointed regular customers is a friend of Chairman Mao and that he has told him about the whole affair. Mao gives his view: “The old cook must be reinstated and allowed to do things his own way. It’s much better to progress slowly than to sacrifice quality. As for the young cooks, they shouldn’t be dismissed but should learn from the old chef how to slice mutton properly; and when they have mastered the art, it will be possible to open the restaurant to a wider clientele.”
This Solomon-like judgment of Mao’s was known not only in Nan Hai (the park next to the old imperial city where the country’s top leaders live). It was also familiar to all the cadres, who applied its moral in their own particular spheres — so one is told; and no doubt it is true, for according to the Chinese (and for the Chinese), basic lessons can be taught by simple examples. Thus (according to the Chinese friend who told me this story and guaranteed its authenticity) Mao, by his judgment in the case of the Mongol restaurant, had recalled an idea that he had propagated during the heroic Yenan days: “All that the old China could do, the new China will do — and
better.”
– K.S. Karol, “China: The Other Communism”