HongK HongK, I'm Home
and five things I have surprisingly missed.
It is with great esteem and great nervousness too that I step into Hong Kong week, returning with an embroidered apron and an empty stomach.
In the decade I spent counting stripes of red and blue acrylics and really testing the limits of Styrofoam takeout, one-in-seven-million flew by like a quick blur. Somewhere between my affair with Australian food and exploring non-monogamous cooking, I uncovered five things I have missed most about this city.
The bone job. Never has dining etiquette been challenged so theatrically than when lazy Susan presents a three-part meal of bone-in demolition. I’m not one for performance art but if I had to curate an indisputably Cantonese act, it would be in the combination of sucking collagen off fish frames, ordering soy-braised duck tongues and the obligatory head-adorned bird as a symbol of camaraderie. As incredibly luxurious as is grotesque, my love for the bone job has become the artery to my Cantonese food fetish.
Failed food trends. Because as a city of foodies, we place the custom in customer. There’s a reason why everyone subscribes to a set-in-stone collection of customs. In a city where people are churning from shoulder-to-shoulder, having rigid food routines can only put space between person-to-person. So weekly Dim Sum must be carted by elderly women, combination dining is contingent on the need for textural variety, the last dumpling must be left untouched and the Bao Bun will cease to be voted into the congregation.
Undrinkable tap water. Because the beverage market thrives as Hong Kong’s cultural spine. Gossip is exchanged over gulps, and spilling tea on the latest of dishonourable behaviour. Uncles sling their drinks with city chic, young women purchase Vita Milk in reaction to stock volatility, and businessmen passing judgement as astringent as the medicinal soup in front of them. In a city which literally defines chitchat through characters of water, you won’t go five metres without an opportunity for rehydration.
Cakes in train stations. Tradition is the slice you never wanted but will always have. Food gift-giving is the coffee-equivalent in the church of friendship maintenance. Between everyone’s relationship to the Kjeldsens’ Butter Cookie tins, Japanese muscat grapes and Maxim’s Angel and Devil miniature cheesecakes, Hong Kong’s city planning seems to be be incentivised by the art of never-showing-up-empty-handed.
Hong Kong is a founding father of the Little Treat. Characterised by the Nintendogs movement, where piano prodigies increased alongside tobacco tax and the Ipad had yet to cure the Pox - I was an avid recipient of reward parenting. Today, my dining table is crowned with a bowl filled with individually packaged fruit-flavoured pastilles. I have had a serial dating life with pastry, having been in bed with both crueller and canelé. And a knack for efficiently choosing which Asian popsicle pairs best with the aftertaste of beef and broccoli.
Hong Kong has clearly cultivated my affinity for eating and cooking, but the time away has truly allowed me to fall deeply in love with the culinary pedestal this city beholds.
After watching afar for some time, it is absolutely mind-blowing to think little old me might help magnify the growing voice of Hong Kong’s culture and cuisine. So it is with utmost excitement and disbelief that I welcome my friends, mentors, and all of you into to my home this Sunday, Channel Ten, seven-thirty.
such good writing, love it.
the bone job is so good