On Shangchi Main Street there is a noodle shop called Shangchi Noodles. It was once an ordinary little place, known only to people nearby for being tasty, until food accounts on social media suddenly made it famous. Shangchi Main Street itself is a short lane, barely a hundred meters long, lined on both sides with neat rows of Chinese banyans. The noodle shop sells noodles only in the morning and at noon, and only in limited quantities, closing as soon as everything is sold out.
Even when the shop is not open, passersby can still smell a thick, seductive aroma of meat sauce. The whole street smells as though everyone at once were eating double-pepper beef noodles. At first you assume the scent is simply drifting out from the shop’s kitchen, but if you pluck a leaf and smell it, you discover that the banyan leaves themselves give off the fragrance of braised topping. The noodle shop explains this by saying that after decades of frying its meat sauce beneath the trees, even the trees have absorbed the smell.
Yet busybodies tell another story. They say that if you take a few of those leaves home and throw them into a stir-fry, the result tastes astonishingly good, with exactly the savor of Shangchi Noodles’ topping. These days the leaves are protected by local food associations as a kind of magical foliage, so much so that even Shangchi Noodles can no longer obtain them easily. And yet the flavor of the shop remains unchanged, and still there is only one Shangchi Noodles, quietly open on that same short street.