The Little Chef and the Pretty Shopkeeper Team Up to Open the Best Tavern

One is a kitchen maid blacklisted by her peers; the other is a female shopkeeper who could be forced out by her clan relatives at any moment.

They only wanted to keep one dilapidated restaurant afloat, but thanks to Shen Zhiwei's extraordinarily sensitive palate, they somehow ended up on an irreversible path to transforming the food supply across the land.

When the restaurant ran out of grain, Shen Zhiwei made cakes from bean pulp. The customers went wild for them, and the Zhou family grain shop rushed to lower its prices and beg for a partnership.

When a barren village ran short of water, she tasted the water from an old well and noticed something odd in its flow. They dug up a spring, and the whole village started worshipping her as the River God.

When grain merchants blocked the roads, Gu Mingtang mortgaged the restaurant to build her own caravan. They ended up buying the wharf, and their rivals had to pay them tolls instead.

They could have earned a hundred thousand taels by hoarding grain during a year of famine, but instead they opened their granaries at low prices. They lost money, yet the people of ten counties brought them grain and orders in return.

Gu Mingtang rubbed her forehead. "Didn't we agree to rent just thirty mu of land?"

Shen Zhiwei gazed at the miles of wheat fields. "The land grew on its own. What does that have to do with me?" (Not even a ghost would believe that.)

All the grain merchants: "Wait, they run a restaurant. How come they stole our livelihood?!"