Hong Kong's own diner — milk tea strained through cloth, macaroni soup for breakfast, and a pineapple bun with no pineapple in it.
The cha chaan teng — literally tea restaurant — is Hong Kong’s own contribution to eating out, and it exists because of the colony’s specific history.
Western food arrived with the British but was served in restaurants and clubs that Chinese residents could not afford or were not welcome in. From the 1950s, cheap local places began serving an approximation of it — adapted, hybridised and considerably better than the original in several respects.
The result is a cuisine that exists nowhere else: Hong Kong-style Western food.
Milk tea
Nai cha, and the foundation of the whole thing.
Black tea — usually a blend of Ceylon grades — brewed strong, then strained repeatedly through a cloth bag that stains the colour of rust and gives the drink its name, silk stocking tea. Evaporated milk rather than fresh, which is why it tastes the way it does.
It is strong, tannic and slightly gritty, and it is genuinely one of the world’s great tea preparations. The making of it was listed as intangible cultural heritage by the Hong Kong government in 2017.
Yuenyeung is milk tea mixed with coffee, in roughly seven parts to three, and is better than it has any right to be.
What to eat
Pineapple bun — bo lo bao — a sweet bun with a crackled sugar-crust top that looks like pineapple skin. There is no pineapple. Ordered with butter — a cold slab of it inserted into the split hot bun — it becomes bo lo yau, and that is the correct order.
Egg tart — daan tat — in either shortcrust or puff pastry, the custard baked just to setting.
Macaroni in soup with ham and a fried egg, eaten for breakfast, which is exactly as strange as it sounds and is genuinely comforting.
French toast — sai do si — two slices with peanut butter between them, deep-fried, served with butter and golden syrup. It is not a light dish.
Baked pork chop rice, satay beef noodles, club sandwiches, instant noodles with luncheon meat and egg, and Swiss chicken wings, which have nothing to do with Switzerland — the name is a corruption of “sweet”.
How they work
Fast, loud and functional. You share tables at busy times without ceremony. The set menus — breakfast set, tea set, quick lunch — are the value, and they run by time of day.
Service is brisk to the point of abrupt. It is not rudeness.
Cash or Octopus; many do not take cards.
Where
They are everywhere. Long-established names include Lan Fong Yuen in Central, which claims to have invented the cloth-strained method; Australia Dairy Company in Jordan, famous for scrambled eggs and for turning tables faster than anywhere in Hong Kong; Kam Wah Café in Mong Kok for the pineapple buns; and Capital Café in Wan Chai.
Any place with a laminated menu, tiled walls and a queue at eight in the morning will do.
Dai pai dong
The other tradition worth knowing: open-air food stalls with folding tables in the street, cooking over fierce gas burners.
Licences have not been issued since the 1970s and the number has fallen from thousands to around twenty-five. The surviving cluster on Stanley Street in Central is the easiest to find, and Sing Heung Yuen there does a tomato noodle soup that people queue for.
