Beijing dessert shop redefines the meaning of fast food
A dessert shop in Beijing is literally delivering “fast” food to customers by sliding the dishes to them on a make-shift slide.
The store advertising “mung bean ice porridge”, or sweet Cantonese congee with green mung beans, uses a metal slide several metres long to send the orders down to the customers waiting at street level, according to video from online news broadcaster BJ Time.
As the kitchen is located on the first floor of a residential building, it operates out of a window with a blue-backgrounded menu displaying dishes outside and green shrubbery just below it.
In a video of the store in operation, a woman is seen placing the store’s dishes – wrapped in plastic bags – in a basket which is lowered to customers standing on the footpath.
Quickest food delivery? Food store owner delivers food to customers through make-shift slide in #Beijing pic.twitter.com/RlmJFyN3PN— People's Daily,China (@PDChina) June 7, 2017
The basket is attached to the top of the slide by a red string, guiding the dish safely to the bottom, which flattens out into a sort of landing area for customers to pick up their orders.
After the food is collected, the basket is pulled back up to the store’s window by the string.
State-run People’s Daily reposted the video on Wednesday night, captioning it in a tongue-in-cheek way as the “quickest food delivery”.
Online users reacted in amusement to the unconventional delivery method, with one calling it “amazing” and another joking that it was “fast food”.
Video of a university student at the Henan University of Technology went viral earlier this year for a similarly home-made meal delivery system, using bedsheets tied together to hoist a takeaway delivery from the ground floor to her sixth floor dorm room window.
The same thing happened previously at the Communication University of China in Nanjing, with a student using a pulley system to pick up food deliveries from the ground level, People’s Daily reported.
