The Chopsticks and the Fork: A Hongkonger Walks You through the Culinary Day
Photo by Rajat Sarki
10am – Breakfast: The Theories of the Bun
It’s morning on the last day of the Chinese New Year holiday in February, the peak season for travelling which has been turned stagnant by the Coronavirus pandemic. I decide to amuse myself with the idea of exploring Hong Kong, where I was born and raised, as a food tourist. The year I spent in London was enough to shake up my understanding of the food of this postcolonial city.
The teahouse called House of Orient is located in Central, a district that has been the business centre of Hong Kong since its Victoria City days during the British colonial era (1841-1997). The name of this restaurant, which opened in 2021, evokes colonialism. Its menu, which is printed in China blue with two ladies enjoying dim sum at a table, reflects the city’s East-meets-West character: one wears a qipao-styled top; the other a western hat.
Around my parents and me, other local Chinese families toast for a good new year, and expats and tourists sip their tea in cheery moods. On their tables, dainty dishes are presented on blue-and-white porcelain tableware handcrafted by Yuet Tung China Works, a local century-old porcelain company. We take a look at the menu. The list of dim sum seems to cater for the wealthier and international palate: its exquisite presentation and fusion recipes might be more appealing to the expats and office workers in the area looking for a business lunch spot. Apart from traditional Chinese dishes such as Osmanthus puddings and chicken feet, I can also find western-influenced dishes like soft-shell crab toasts and chicken pies on the menu. Priding itself as “inspired by the great British tradition,” this teahouse also offers an afternoon tea set, where British treats are replaced by Chinese pastries such as Huangqiao sesame cakes and lotus paste pastries.
My mother is still recovering from the waiter’s detailed introduction of the premium Lapsang Souchong tea’s properties and tasting notes. She doesn’t seem impressed. “Order for me, will you? I don’t remember a single thing he said,” she says. “And just avoid the tea set. Good dim sum is good dim sum. You don’t need all this fluff of fanciful cutlery or tiers of pretty plates.”
My father, before he retired, used to work in Central’s post office but rarely visited teahouses in the district. “They’re all so expensive. I’d rather save up so we all could have dim sum together at a cheaper teahouse,” he says. “I suppose you pay for what you get.” But his daughter is treating today, so he is particularly excited to order his favourite radish puff, a complex dish that tests the pastry chef’s skills: each thin golden layer of the cocoon-shaped puff must be light and crisp, and not soaked by the juices of the shredded radish filling. A good radish puff is difficult to find in Aberdeen, our old neighborhood. Its cheaper teahouses are visited mostly by local Chinese elderlies and the working class.
I order buns, puffs, and dumplings. When the food arrives in bamboo baskets, my father places the radish puffs eagerly onto each of our plates. Chin-chin. “Let’s try it together,” he says after a sip of hot tea to clear his palate. It may not have occurred to him how wondrous it is to have one radish puff—but not the whole bamboo basket of it—on my plate, or his, for that matter.
Four years ago, I was in London and missing home food. In London’s Chinatown, dim sum could be a luxury. A casual meal of four dim sum dishes could cost you £15; for the same price you could get six dishes in Hong Kong. So when an American friend who’s half-white, half-Chinese agreed to come along and chip in for a dim sum lunch after measuring some human skulls (she studied anthropology at SOAS), I was overjoyed.
We sat down, like the ladies in the illustration of the House of Orient menu. We each selected two dim sum dishes so we could share: creamy custard buns and char siu buns (her favourites), and char siu puff pastries and shrimp dumplings (my favourites).
But when the steaming bamboo baskets arrived, she placed her orders on her side of the table. She waxed on about her anthropology career while devouring the creamy custard buns one by one. I was confused: maybe she hadn’t had dim sum before? Maybe she saw the buns as an American burger set for herself? Right before the last one was gone, I offered some of my pastries to her. But then she said, “Don’t worry, I had dim sum all the time at home in the US. I know my favourite picks. I love buns and that’s why I always order at least two baskets for myself.” I looked at her munching away the last precious fluffy bun. By the third char siu puff, my throat was already dried up by the pastry flakes. The point of dim sum, I believed, was sharing.
I began to wonder if dim sum is consumed individually in the US. In fact, London sometimes treats dim sum as separate dishes for individual enjoyment too. Following my dim sum trauma, I passed by a quaint restaurant called Bun House in Lisle Street in SoHo. A quick search on Google said that it was founded by architect and restaurateur Z He, who grew up in southern China, and her husband Alex Peffly as “a new bar and restaurant concept inspired by 1960s Hong Kong.” On its menu was chicken, beef, lamb, fish, mushroom and creamy custard buns. In Hong Kong, it’s rare to order one single bun or any dim sum from a teahouse. But there I was, savouring a single creamy custard bun that came in a neat paper wrap and thinking how well-spent that £2.5 on sating my craving was.
These experiences challenged everything I thought I knew about dim sum after a lifetime of sharing in Hong Kong. Dim sum quite literally means “dainty hearts,” which came from how peasants in the Eastern Jin dynasty (AD 317-420) made bitesize pastries for frontline soldiers as a token of gratitude for protecting their homeland. Today, dim sum, served during breakfast, lunch, or afternoon hours. In Hong Kong, it’s an occasion for sharing food and spending time with people: a weekend family activity, friends looking to fill their bellies after a morning hike, or businesspeople at a lunch meeting.
That is not to say dim sum hasn’t evolved over time under different regional influences. Back at House of Orient, the colonial history of Hong Kong and cultural exchange since then have injected a unique blend of “East meets West,” and sometimes Anglophile, character into the local cuisine. According to the teahouse’s Facebook page, its head chef Wong Chi-sang worked at historic Cantonese restaurant Fook Lam Moon for more than 40 years. Fook Lam Moon’s founder Chui Fook Chuen used to be the house chef for Hong Kong’s prominent comprador family, the Hotungs, who had employed another chef in charge of western cuisines. Inspired by his colleague’s skills, Chui combined the western recipe of baked stuffed crabs with Chinese culinary skills to create his signature fried flat dumplings with crab meat and garlic chives.
Years later, Chui set up his own restaurant, where Wong learnt the recipe and has brought it to House of Orient today. The multicultural customers here may also explain why, even if most of House of Orient’s chefs and staff are local Chinese, this modern teahouse serves both Chinese and fusion dim sum, and Chinese pastries on British afternoon tea stands. Around us, Chinese and non-Chinese diners order similar items: fusion crab dumplings, Chinese sausages with soy sauce rice and sesame paste buns. Cultural exchange, after all, goes both ways.
After a satisfying meal (my father says the radish puffs are “delicious”), I take them for a walk through the nearby Tai Kwun, an arts and heritage complex that opened in 2018.
Tai Kwun arts and heritage complex in Central Hong Kong. Photo by Francisco Anzola
This former colonial-style police station has undergone a fashionable makeover. We start from the third floor, where we find an elaborately decorated Cantonese restaurant. A taxidermied peacock perches on the edge of a pink couch on the balcony. This restaurant, called Madame Fù, makes dim sum with western ingredients, such as mozzarella, black truffles, Angus beef, Spanish Iberico pork and meat alternatives from the “Impossible” brand. It also categorises its dishes into vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free for the modern palate. This is rare in traditional Chinese teahouses, where most dishes contain meat and lard.
When we head to the ground floor of the opposite block, we find another Chinese restaurant called LockCha. It offers cocktail pairings with dim sum, and works with local craft beer brewery Heroes Beer to create tea-infused beers for tourists and white-collar workers in Central.
We stop for a cuppa at the alfresco area of LockCha. As my parents sip tea, enjoying the morning sunshine and watching the world go by, I sip my “Since 1586” cocktail, which is gin mixed with tieguanyin tea melting from a rose bud-shaped ice cube, served in a porcelain tea cup. “Gin in a teacup? How strange but creative,” my father says.
Modern dim sum’s fusion ingredients, the new ways of serving and cocktail pairing mirror the 21st-century lifestyle of Hong Kong, where cultural exchange has brought exciting possibilities to the city’s food and identity. But there is one thing that I wouldn’t want for Hong Kong’s dim sum culture to change: I would still prefer to have just one radish puff, because dim sum isn’t just about the food but the people who share it together.
Noon: Where Have All the Lampshades Gone?
We stroll along Queen’s Road Central and arrive at a cream white Bauhaus-styled building. When it last closed in 2003, I was a primary school student. My school is on Caine Road, a main road in the Mid-Levels of Central; once a week after the school dance team practice, my mother and I would walk to Central to take a bus home. I had no clue what the mysterious, obsolete building yellowed by years of subtropical rain was.
Then last August, after the Urban Renewal Authority took 11 years and HK$500 million to renovate, this Central Market reopened. For several months, it was swarmed by Hongkongers trying to get a glimpse of the brunch cafe, the luxury cake boutique, the flower shop, the Taiwanese eatery, the ice-cream parlour, the sushi bar, and the lifestyle grocery claiming to sell all things sustainable.
An egg waffle in Hong Kong. Photo by Jojo Yuen.
Six months after its opening, it’s no longer as crowded, but the queue at the egg waffle shop is still going strong, even though this shop’s offerings are similar to those at other egg-waffle places. Egg waffles are a childhood memory for many locals, including me. Once in a while after school, my mother would buy me an egg waffle from our neighbourhood’s now-closed smaller stalls. The only available flavour was the plain version. But at Mammy Pancake in Central Market, my mother’s eyes brighten at the medley of variations. “Let’s get chocolate. Wait, Earl Grey seems more special, but salted egg yolk looks good too. Actually, I’ll have Ferrero Rocher,” she says.
As we stroll around, sharing the Ferrero Rocher egg waffle that comes in a somewhat unnecessary waxed paper box, we’re fascinated by the vintage merchandise on sale. “Look at that thermos bottle printed with the Chinese longevity blessing,” says my mother, passing me the waffle. “You can hardly find these old-fashioned patterns anywhere these days.”
But then a conversation nearby takes me by surprise. A silver-haired woman wonders, out loud, where the pork vendor is and why no one is butchering fish in view of the customers. The middle-aged man holding her arm, who called her “ma,” responds, “That’s not how revitalisation works. We preserve something and not everything.”
This shopping complex, which smells of coffee and potpourri, is a far cry from the meat market it once was. Central Market dates back to 1842, when the British government built what was then called the Canton Bazaar between Cochrane Street and Graham Street for Chinese artisans and food traders. It relocated to Central in the 1850s, and has undergone several phases of renovation since then, including the transformation from two two-storey, brick red blocks in 1895 to a four-storey Streamline Moderne building in 1939. In 1989, it became a part of the world’s longest outdoor covered escalator system. Nineteen years later, Morgan Freeman and Christian Bale in The Dark Knight would talk about the properties of sonar in submarines, not bats, here.
This latest version has retained some old Hong Kong elements. At the two main entrances, we find 500 red plastic lampshades hanging from the ceiling. The last time I saw these red lampshades was when my mother brought me to wet markets to buy fresh fish and eggs when I was a child. “Don’t be fooled by the red colour,” she warned me back then. “It casts a warm tone onto the produce to make you believe it’s fresh.”
I haven’t visited wet markets since adolescence. The rise of supermarkets selling packaged and exported products means a decreasing need to examine products with the naked eye. But now these lampshades have a modern function, as a popular interior-design item. Two years ago, a Dutch friend who used to live in Hong Kong took me to a designer product retail store called G.O.D, which is a five-minute walk from Central Market. There, I found red lampshades for sale. Then last November when M+, the visual culture museum, opened, I found the lampshades in the reception centre, only those were grey, casting a cold, pale shade on the art museum staff. It amuses me all the time how the quotidian, humble wet-market lampshade is now sold as a trendy consumer item. I’m not too sure how it adds to the aesthetics or practicality of my flat. My father, who likes to ridicule contemporary creations that he doesn’t understand, says, “What do you really know about art?”
There are also other old Hong Kong elements in Central Market which are now symbols removed from their practical purposes. The wood-and-bronze folding shop gates, made to look like old metal shop gates, transport visitors back in time, but they aren’t necessarily effective in keeping thieves out. The eight-decade-old clock has read 2:25pm since March 2003. It doesn’t tell the time but marks the moment of the market’s last closure. The iron hooks on the first floor are no longer hung with cattle, pigs and sheep, but are now exhibits, to show visitors what life was like in the past.
I walk up the renewed terrazzo main staircase, which is made famous by Fan Ho’s photographs in the 1950s and 60s. A few local wannabe influencers in qipaos, probably rented from the nearby Sheung Wan boutiques, are busy looking for the best angle for Instagram posts. But like an Instagram filter, Central Market is somewhat too clean, too upscale, too international and too aestheticised to be reminiscent of the historic meat market.
But would I complain about enjoying an egg waffle without the smell of fish and blood?
3pm – Afternoon Tea: Shrimp Paste on a Silver Plate
After picking their trophies of candied roasted nuts and a few bottles of milk tea from a lifestyle product shop like children on a school trip, my parents, tired but satisfied by the exploration, take a bus home—the same one my mother and I took together all those years ago.
I meet up with my boyfriend for a little excursion to a faraway village called Tai O. Hong Kong Tourism Board’s website calls Tai O the “Venice of the East” where “time will appear to stand still.” These days, when weekend getaways to tropical paradises in Thailand or the Philippines are impossible, the closest one can go for scenic views and a relaxing afternoon would be old villages and islands away from the city centre.
From Central, we take the mass transit railway to Tung Chung, and hop on to a bus that takes us on a 45-minute ride up a narrow, winding road along the mountainside. As our bus speeds past the shopping mall, cable cars and village houses, and begins to climb uphill, occasionally dodging the trucks that come downhill on the single-lane road, we leave behind the city and enter what looks like an ink landscape painting. Thick clouds run like a stream amongst the layers of dark green mountain valleys. Raindrops on the window blur the contours of the wild buffaloes on the side of the road.
In this fishing village, secluded by the Lantau Island mountain range, the fisherfolk sell their catch on speedboats below the main bridge, while restaurant owners make their choices and haggle for better prices above; hawkers hang their squid, which is bigger than my face at the shopfront with pride; boat operators shout “25 per ride” to tourists desperate to get a glimpse of the last few Chinese white dolphins that populate the Tai O waters.
Tai O fishing village on Lantau Island. Photo by Joshua J. Cotten.
We snack our way through the maze-like village. There is something nostalgic and heart-warming about struggling to hold a steaming Hakka teacake on a cold winter day; tooth-picking squid pieces from a polystyrene cup together; and the shop lady asking if we’d like more shrimp paste. Simple homemade snacks and the hospitality of the people here remind me of my marine science internship days. Ten years ago, when I was at World Wide Fund for Nature, I used to hike up to Fu Shan hill to survey the Chinese white dolphins in the Tai O waters two to three times every week.
Time hasn’t stood still in this historic village and the nearby waters. So much has changed since I was last here. Unlike sinking Venice, the area has grown in land mass thanks to land reclamation projects, including a newly created island that will soon host the airport’s third runway. And anchored above the Tai O waters are massive concrete columns that make up the 55-kilometer bridge-and-tunnel that links Hong Kong to Macau and the mainland. One thing that has shrunk is the endangered Chinese white dolphin population, which is half what it was a decade ago. Their passageway has been blocked, their breeding grounds reduced, and their hunting impeded by underwater noise. This has reduced their population by more than half. What remains the same is the herbal tea shop lady’s begonia tea recipe, which once saved me from heatstroke.
“I think I see something,” my boyfriend squeals, squinting at the brisk movement on the water surface. “Oh never mind; it’s just waves.” As we stand on the top of Fu Shan, the bridge, which wasn’t there ten years ago, and the soon-to-be-complete airport runway mark the city’s rapid development. This secluded village, too, is gradually morphing into a more modern, internationalised “Venice.”
At the very end of the road, past the houses built on tall wooden stilts above water, is the Tai O Heritage Hotel, a white, two-storey colonial building converted from a police station that was built in 1902 to combat pirates. When the nine-room boutique hotel opened in 2018, Hong Kong’s then-Chief Executive, Donald Tsang, said, “The revitalisation of Old Tai O Police Station contributes to the heritage conservation, community development and tourism of Tai O. It helps promote Tai O as an exclusive cultural destination for both local and overseas visitors.
The glass elevator on the slope takes us up from the village road to an elevated platform where the hotel sits. Up here, a glass-roofed restaurant called The Lookout is lushly decorated with ceiling fans. A polished wooden bar booth, taken from the now-defunct private China Tee Club, sits at the end of the dining hall. During weekends, the restaurant serves afternoon tea with a local twist—crispy chicken wings with shrimp paste, deep fried shrimp toasts with salty egg yolk paste, pork patty with salty fish burger, churros with mountain begonia sauce.
We order shrimp paste fried rice and fish and chips, which comes with a shrimp paste tartar dip. The shrimp paste’s savoury, sharp taste blends well the rice and the creamy dip, and brings out the freshness of the seafood ingredients. Swirling my red, sour “mangrove” special drink, I give out a satisfied sigh, while trying to get my head around the idea that I’m paying double for cha chaan teng or home food, which is now served on pretty plates and afternoon-tea stands.
“What do you think I’m drinking?” my boyfriend asks, holding his short-stemmed wine glass. While I’m not sure if this upscale setup can give first-time Tai O visitors an accurate idea of the villagers’ simple food culture, I have no doubt that they would enjoy the hearty, innovative meal with a sea view. We do too, but I just happen to prefer the HK$18 begonia herbal tea to the “mangrove” special drink in our glasses.
9pm – Siu Yea on Hong Kong’s Sunset Boulevard
The train pierces through the evening darkness as it speeds back to the city centre. It’s 8.30pm, but the SoHo area in Central, which is usually loud with music and bright with shop sign lights, is dead quiet under the tightened social distancing restrictions. Sights of young people dancing, shisha smoking and colleagues grabbing a drink are now replaced by lifeless closed gates of clubs and bars.
My boyfriend suggests that we go for a snack in his neighbourhood in Sai Wan Ho, an old residential district in eastern Hong Kong that saw its heyday in the 1960s. Today, much of Sai Wan Ho’s inland area still retains its down-to-earth character. Fruit stalls and cha chaan tengs visited by elderlies and local Chinese and street food vendors popular among students fill the streets. Buildings which are several decades old still stand along the main Shau Kei Wan Road, where the tram runs.
Sai Wan Ho in Eastern Hong Kong. Photo by Johnlsl.
One of these buildings is Tai On Building, built 54 years ago as a densely populated residential and commercial property. This is the perfect place for this time of evening because its ground floor food market is known for its siu yea scene. Siu yea is a late night meal that usually consists of affordable small bites, popular among people who get off work late or want a cheaper meal than dinner. Apart from Sai Wan Ho, siu yea is also widely available in downmarket areas like Temple Street or old districts like Tsuen Wan and Mong Kok.
Among them, Tai On Building is one of the widely reported siu yea places. A number of the shops have made it to the news. CNN, Time Out, and Apple Daily listed Hung Kee, the egg waffle stall, as one of the best in town. But this food market is equally notorious for its hygiene problem: until recently, many of the stalls did not have a license issued by the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department.
Today, while the situation has improved, I’m still wary as we pass through the rusty iron bars that guard the entrance and venture into this ghetto-like food maze lit by pale blue fluorescent lights. Fans clogged with dust swivel on the dark ceiling.
The owner of the steamy cart noodle shop is busy putting beef offal, fish balls and pig blood curd into a bowl of noodles with one hand while blanching vegetables for her next customer with another. My boyfriend tells me, “When my mom was pregnant with me, she worked late into the night. Cart noodles, which used to be sold in a mobile cart, was something my mom could always depend on. She once said to me, ‘You were eating cart noodles before you were born. It’s only natural that you like siu yea.’”
We arrive at the famous egg waffle shop, where the shopkeeper fans the fresh egg waffles straight out of the hot pans while sweating in the tiny compartment surrounded by barrels of thick batter. We order a plain egg waffle. Plucking out the bubbles one by one brings me back to the time when I would share an egg waffle with my mother after school. We would take turns, and she would always save the last bubble for me. It didn’t taste fancy. It was just a chewy, eggy centre with a crispy crust. Still, no luxurious toppings could give me the same comfort during my days in London, where egg waffles were often soaked by ice-cream into a sad, wet glob.
On a quieter lane, there’s an old lady who has been running her dessert shop for four decades. This is one of the last remaining places in Hong Kong where you can still add quail eggs (HK$2 for two) and eggs (HK$4 each) to your sweet soups. Eggs were once considered a luxury protein option by my parents when they were small and when meat was unaffordable. Now these old-fashioned ingredients are outcompeted by Taiwanese glutinous taro balls.
I wonder how long the sweet soup lady would still set up her few foldable tables for her customers, some of whom she has known since they were school kids. But she doesn’t seem to be bothered, as she ladles out her signature ginger-and-sweet potato soup from the giant red plastic bucket for a young man. As she laughs with him about his unappeasable client, she is apparently unaffected by how she, too, is hustling.
We complete our food hunt with a bubble tea and head out of this steamy underground hive towards the waterfront area for a stroll. Albeit only a five-minute walk away, Sai Wan Ho’s seaside area is a completely different sight. There are new western bars and Spanish and Italian alfresco restaurants, which in recent years have given this gentrified corner the nickname “SoHo East.” Hanging out here can be as expensive as the Central district—think around HK$100 for a glass of Aperol Spritz, about $13 USD. With the Urban Renewal Authority’s announcement last October about renewing Sai Wan Ho’s old buildings, it’s only a matter of time before the sunset businesses in Sai Wan Ho undergo the same westernization or gentrification that dim sum, lampshades, and shrimp paste have gone through.
We sit on the edge of the harbor and look out to the dark wide sea, thinking how the tide of modernization is eroding away the local food cultures. But perhaps there is something about the grit and life of these sunset businesses and old Hong Kong sights which the blinding lights in SoHo cannot outshine.
Zabrina Lo is a features editor for Tatler Asia and an arts and culture journalist in Hong Kong. She studied creative writing and film at Oxford University and English at University College London. Since returning to Hong Kong in 2018, she has been writing about the Asian arts scene, including five cover stories for Tatler Asia.
