Making a Fortune in 1983: Starting as a Pastry Chef

Wang Xiangyang, a five-star hotel pastry chef specializing in both Chinese and Western cuisine, suddenly wakes up in the year 1983 as an unemployed youth dependent of a state-run pastry factory. Faced with withheld pensions and stolen employment quotas, he pulls out baking techniques forty years ahead of their time, baking a batch of sponge cakes that even veteran bakers envy. When urged to stay, Xiangyang just waves his hand—why settle for an iron rice bowl when making your own fortune is so much sweeter? Besides, his culinary repertoire is vast. From Suzhou-style Dingasheng pastries and Yunnan flower cakes to Shanghai butterfly crackers, Macanese egg tarts, French macarons, and Italian biscuits, he can reinvent western pastries endlessly, and even masters Cantonese morning tea with ease. As the tide of private enterprise begins to rise, he uses a simple letter of introduction to set up the city's very first dessert stall. While others are still making cloyingly sweet saccharin treats, his pastries become the ultimate currency for gift-giving and hospital visits. While the neighbors are still trying to figure out how to make steamed white sugar cakes fluffy, his butterfly crackers become the standard tea-time snack for receiving foreign dignitaries. From a modest street stall to a collective enterprise affiliated with a state-run factory, and eventually transforming a bankrupt state bakery into a nationwide food empire, Xiangyang uses a single oven not only to bake the sweetness of an era, but also to forge the brilliant renaissance of a true artisan in a new age.