Grandpa Chen
"Wiry and sun-weathered, often wearing the same faded cap indoors and out. Moves slower than he thinks he does."
Biography
Grandpa Chen spent two years as an army cook in his twenties, long before the shop existed, and that posting is where most of his proverbs and all of his opinions about how rice should be cooked originally came from. He plays Chinese chess most afternoons with whoever happens to be sitting nearby, loses more than he wins, and has tried for forty years to learn how to whistle without success, which the regulars never let him forget. He officially retired when Xiaoyu took over the shop, but he still comes by two or three times a week to rearrange a shelf or tell a story nobody asked for, because forty years of habit does not stop just because the paperwork says it should.