East Meets West in Hong Kong
(中西合璧的香港美食)
5 min read
Hong Kong—a British colony between 1842 and 1997—has retained its international image since it was handed back to China. Given the city’s multicultural influence, it is no surprise that some of its foods, even dishes that seem indigenous, are actually a fusion between east and west. At the center of this “east-meets-west” culture are the iconic Hong Kong-style cafés (茶餐厅). If you ask an overseas Hong Konger what she is most nostalgic for from her hometown, her likely answer would be the HK-style cafés, which offer timeless fusion foods like egg tarts (蛋挞), pineapple buns (菠萝包), HK-style French toasts (西多) and much more. Instead of blindly copying Western recipes introduced by the British, these cafés show a flair for adapting them to suit local tastes.
You can find this type of eatery in almost every neighborhood, and their unpretentious settings make them an easy choice for a quick bite. Their affordability, eclectic menu, and a sense of community and nostalgia for simpler times make up for their no-frill service, cramped space, and bare-bone décor.
Egg tarts, the most iconic of all Hong Kong fusion foods, are believed to be an adaptation of the Portuguese pastel de nata (葡挞) that was first introduced to Hong Kong’s neighboring city of Macau—a Portuguese colony between 1557 and 1999. Egg tarts and pastel de nata are usually offered side-by-side in eateries and bakeries in Hong Kong. For HK style egg-tarts, people often have a penchant with either a puff-pastry shell or a short-bread shell (locally called cookie shell). My preference is the short-bread type.
Other baked goods offered by HK-style cafés include pineapple buns and cocktail buns (鸡尾包). But the baked BBQ-pork buns (焗叉烧包) reign supreme. The traditional steamed BBQ-pork buns are filled with savory BBQ-pork filling dressed in Chinese flavors. But they are only served in dim-sum restaurants, while HK-style cafés serve the baked type. They usually have the same fillings and savory flavors as the steamed ones, but baked with a Western style bread—a perfect example of east-meets-west.
Despite its name, the pineapple bun (first photo below) contains no pineapple. The bun is topped with a craquelin topping made with equal parts of sugar, butter (or shortening), and flour. Upon baking, this topping cracks up to resemble the look of a pineapple, while adding sweetness and a crackle texture that is a contrast against the bun’s softness. A “pineapple bun with butter” (菠萝油, second photo)—a warm bun with a thick slice of cold butter in the center—is something to die for. The cocktail bun (top photo) is a local invention based on Western bread-making. Cocktail (鸡尾) is a Cantonese slang for a hodgepodge mixture. The most believable story about this bun is that bakeries use the leftover sweet-fillings—whether they are adzuki-bean paste, shredded coconut, or crushed peanut—for the next day’s buns. Egg tarts, baked BBQ-pork buns, pineapple buns, and cocktail buns are not only served in HK-style cafés, but also in almost all Hong Kong bakeries.
HK-style cafés also offer made-to-order foods. The most popular made-to-order item is probably milk tea, which is known for its smooth and robust flavor. An adaptation of the typical British tea, the Hong Kong version adds the filtering process and replaces the regular milk with evaporated milk for extra milky taste and silkiness. The filtering gives this tea a quirky name, the “silk-stocking milk tea”. The tea, from boiling tea leaves in water, is poured through a long filter bag for several times. The cloth filter bag is pulled up and down to speed up the filtration of the tea. The filter bag acquires the tea’s color, which resembles that of nylon stockings. It is believed that the filtering process makes the tea thicker and smoother.
Another popular HK-style cafe offering is yuanyang milk tea (鸳鸯奶茶)—essentially a mix of seven parts milk tea and three parts coffee. This quirky name refers to a species of mandarin ducks (鸳鸯), with the male and female looking differently from each other, signifying harmony in Chinese culture. HK-style milk tea and yuanyang milk tea—products of east meets west—are officially listed by the Hong Kong government as an intangible cultural heritage.
A HK-style French toast takes the classic breakfast dish and puts it on steroids. Think of creating a decadent breakfast by sticking two slices of bread together with creamy peanut butter in between, deep-frying them in an egg batter, and finally topping it with a drizzle of condensed milk.
A HK-style café offers much more than the above in its eclectic menu. Some offer Swiss chicken wing, which has a sweet soy-sauce taste. Despite its name, this dish is unrelated to Switzerland. An urban legend goes that a Westerner came across this dish in Hong Kong. The waiter, with an accent, introduced the dish as “sweet chicken wings” and the customer misheard it as “Swiss chicken wings” and this name—a mistaken identity—has stuck ever since.
An enduring classic in HK-style café is the set-meals (常餐) consisting of a drink (a milk tea, coffee, or lemon tea, for example), a sandwich such as egg sandwich (蛋治), and a main dish such as macaroni with ham in chicken broth (火腿通粉). Other timeless classics are rice dishes such as rice with minced beef (免治牛饭) and silky-egg and beef (滑蛋牛肉饭). These set-meals kept me going all afternoons when I grew up in Hong Kong.
A local invention that is sold only by street vendors is the egg puff (鸡蛋仔), which is among the most popular Hong Kong street snacks. Like making waffles using a waffle iron, an eggy leavened batter is heated between two plates that have pingpong ball-shaped indentations. The result is an addictive golden-yellow egg puffs that are crispy on the outside and soft in the inside.
HK-style cafés and their fusion foods are an integral part of Hong Kong’s cultural identity and have become the city’s calling card with international allure. Due to waves of emigration from Hong Kong through the last several decades, these cafes and their fusion foods have spread to Taiwan, Southeast Asia, many cities in Mainland China, and overseas Chinese communities in North American, Europe, and Australia, providing a sense of home for the Hong Kong diaspora.
Photo credit: Wikipedia.com; std.stheadline.com; SCMP.com; Baidu.com; Bilibili.com