The 1970S Food Tycoon

In the winter of 1977, Su Wanwan is reborn just before her fate takes a turn. Faced with overbearing, awful relatives and her dying little brother, she tears up the exploitative marriage contract and grips the kitchen knife in her hand. Starting with a bowl of wontons made with spiritual spring water, she sets up a food stall on a county-town street. Her cooking wins over customers’ taste buds and brings her first benefactor. A contract in which each party gets what they need brings her into an alliance with Lu Lin, a taciturn, stern retired serviceman. Her pushcart becomes a private dining restaurant. Her “Boiled Cabbage” dazzles everyone, she earns the honor of top scorer in the province, and the gates of Tsinghua University open to her. Meanwhile, Lu Lin’s family’s unjust conviction is quietly overturned in the springtime winds of a new era. Moving to the capital means a new battlefield. In a Beijing courtyard, her flagship Wan’s Kitchen becomes famous throughout the capital; in Tsinghua’s classrooms, the principles of economics illuminate her business plans. She turns culinary artistry into an academic pursuit and uses her kitchen knife to carve out an industrial empire. He sheds the scars of his past, rebuilds his military honors, and becomes her strongest support. Her younger brother Xiangyang also grows from a child in need of protection into a young man with ambitions in business. From putting food on the table with a street stall to laying the foundations of a restaurant group, from being bullied by everyone to earning the respect of people from all walks of life as a devoted couple, Su Wanwan uses delicious food and wisdom to cook up a vibrant, down-to-earth life in a changing era. When they embrace beneath the moonlight in Beijing and look back on the road they’ve traveled, all the hunger, hardship, and choices they endured become necessary steps that brought them to each other and toward a brilliant future. This is a heartfelt story about food, entrepreneurship, knowledge changing one’s destiny, and mutual redemption. See how the heroine wields a spatula and a pen in the turbulent late 1970s, cooking up every flavor of life and winning success in both her career and love.