Chef at the University Canteen-Chapter 397 - 253: There Are Two Kinds of Cuisine in This World_4

Since Du Guangning started learning to cook, his workload has decreased a bit each day. He wasn’t very busy to begin with, and now he’s even more at ease.

Since he doesn’t feel tired, naturally there’s no need for him to rest.

Every day after meals, he goes to the first-floor private room to drink tea and rest. It has almost become a habit; if he doesn’t come by for a while after eating, he feels uncomfortable all over.

After entering the private room, Jiang Yu placed the steaming hot teacup on the coffee table, pulled out his phone from his pocket, and sat on the sofa ready to play a few rounds of chess.

Lately, he’s been playing one or two games with the computer every day. Although he often loses and rarely wins, it hasn’t dampened his enthusiasm for chess. In fact, he keeps fighting and losing, and losing but fighting again.

Even Lu Shuwu can’t help but tease him, saying he’s "bad at playing yet loves it."

Just as he opened the game app and hadn’t started playing yet, someone suddenly pushed open the private room door. Jiang Yu turned his head to look and saw that it was the little old man, Jia Dequan.

"Hey, you’re here too!"

Jia Dequan was holding an insulated cup, and the bright red goji berries floating in the tea were particularly eye-catching.

After entering, Jia Dequan casually closed the room door, came to the sofa opposite, plopped down with a smile, and said,

"Xiaojiang, I’ve noticed lately that the work intensity upstairs isn’t high. After a lunch rush, you act like there’s nothing going on.

When I was younger, I had it much tougher than you. A whole day in the kitchen would leave my arms swollen."

Jiang Yu looked up at the little old man and jokingly said:

"How can I compare to you? You’re a master chef, and I don’t even have a basic chef’s certificate right now."

Although Jiang Yu’s cooking skills, from an outsider’s perspective, had reached an extremely high level, and he was a bona fide master chef, to be honest, ever since he started running the "Jiang Family Steamed Bun" store at the second cafeteria last September, he never thought of taking any chef certification exams.

For now, he’s quite literally "working without a license."

However, although a chef’s certificate is important, not all chefs have one, and you can still be a chef without it.

"It’s just a piece of paper. If you don’t plan to work in restaurants or hotels, whether you have it or not doesn’t matter,"

Jia Dequan waved his hand dismissively, saying,

"Besides, many chefs without certificates make dishes much tastier than those with certificates."

Pausing for a moment, as if recalling something, he continued,

"I once saw a private restaurant in Beijing, specializing in herbal cuisine. Even though the pricing was steep and the private rooms were hard to reserve, it was in high demand.

Of course, the target customers for this private restaurant are mainly the high-end crowd with money and leisure, ordinary people can’t afford it.

You still have a few empty private rooms on the second floor every day, and you’re not too busy now, so you have enough energy.

My suggestion is that you could try specializing in a few herbal cuisine dishes to attract those high-end clients."

"Herbal cuisine?"

Jiang Yu, hearing Jia Dequan’s words, couldn’t help but frown slightly. He thought for a bit and then said,

"Isn’t this kind of thing hard to make? I don’t understand Chinese medicine and I’m clueless about the properties of various herbs.

I’ve heard before that herbal cuisine isn’t something you can just eat casually. Even if you want to eat it, you have to follow the principles of traditional Chinese medicine diagnostics and treatment."

After a pause, he continued,

"For example, for cold diseases, you need warm herbal cuisine, and for hot diseases, you need cold herbal cuisine.

If you don’t understand anything and give a cold herbal dish to a guest with a cold disease, wouldn’t that be adding insult to injury, worsening their condition?"

On the topic of "herbal cuisine," they discussed for a long time in the private room but eventually left it unresolved.

Because the matter of herbal cuisine is very significant, it’s not as simple as ordinary dining. It’s more within the health care domain, not to mention needing another certification, at least you’d need to have someone knowledgeable in Chinese medicine to assist.

Instead of being so complicated and potentially harming people, Jiang Yu would rather not do it than take that risk.

However, Jia Dequan’s suggestion about herbal cuisine did serve as a reminder for Jiang Yu, making him think of something else.

Why is it that his own dishes can even appeal to anorexia patients?

Is it just a coincidence that Wu Wenle and the others happen to love the food he cooks, or do these dishes actually "break through" the eating barriers of anorexia patients?

Previously, he didn’t have the time, so he always set this question aside. Now, with Du Guangning’s assistance, he finally has some free time to delve into it.

If his dishes really can "break through" the eating barriers of anorexia patients, and these patients can’t resist their deliciousness...

Then there are so many things he could accomplish!