Hong Kong’s traditional street food stalls – popular with residents and tourists, less so with officials
Hong Kong Free Press
Let us now praise New People’s Party legislator Judy Chan for what appears to be an effort to make sense of the government’s policy on food served in the street or, as the official phraseology has it, “fixed-pitch and itinerant hawker stalls selling food with local characteristics.”
In this laudable pursuit, Chan put down a written question to the administration. Indeed, she did not just put down a question, she composed a mega-question. Short story writers have managed with fewer words.
After a little warm-up paragraph the question consists of 10 sub-questions, some of them with multiple prongs and alternatives: is the government doing X and if so how many times in the last three years, and if not, why not?
This literary brick dropped into the lap of the Secretary for Environment and Ecology Tse Chin-wan, a recycled environmental civil servant. Tse’s equally lengthy reply exemplifies the rule in these matters: the longer the question the less you learn from the reply.
The problem here is that one of Hong Kong’s traditional attractions is the street restaurant, or dai pai dong, which offers tourists the alluring prospect of a local meal in the open air. Years ago, you found them all over the place; Luard Road, for example. A much wider road than traffic required, the Wan Chai thoroughfare was regularly reduced to two lanes by a row of street food stalls on each side.
Over the years they have gradually disappeared. This does not appear to be the result of a lack of custom. Most observers diagnose a classic case of official hostility.
The official line, as articulated by Tse, is that if there are any “suitable proposals which are supported by the relevant District Councils, the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (FEHD) will give consideration with an open mind.” He did warn that it is “very challenging to identify suitable sites.”
Many people who used to sell food in the street have been relocated to “cooked food centres” in municipal buildings. They are usually upstairs from a wet market – diners with delicate stomachs should avoid walking past the butchery horror show – and feature wet tiled floors, bare concrete walls and a lot of fans because there is no air conditioning.
In my experience, the food in these places is OK but the ambience is not. The toilets often leave a lot to be desired too, though I must add in fairness that the facility in the Kennedy Town market is fragrant, floral and wins prizes.
A long time ago I joined a small group who met regularly on Friday nights at a place in Fo Tan which is probably not, in official terminology, a dai pai dong because it has a real kitchen with mains water and electricity. It gave you the flavour of the experience, though, because the tables extended gradually through the evening onto the territory of the adjacent bus station, so you would eat, weather permitting, in an unused minibus stop.
This was a pleasant arrangement and gradually caught on with our friends, so that on some Fridays the group required two 16-people tables, to the great delight of the lady in charge of promoting the sale of Yan Jing beer. This is the state beer of China, though, in the opinion of many experts, not as good as Tsing Tao.
There was, though, constant trouble with the FEHD. A uniformed squad would arrive and terrify the operator of the establishment with threats of huge fines if a table wandered outside the area officially designated for dining. Their van would sit nearby, occupied by a driver who was sometimes spotted doing unmentionable things with his nose.
At knocking-off itme, which I think was 8 pm, the uniforms would get in the van and go home. People who arrived earlier would often stand around waiting for the hour of liberation and amusing themselves by developing new insults for the FEHD, or Food Gestapo as we called them.
This was apparently standard procedure in many parts of Hong Kong. Many government departments have little foibles which do not really make sense. The Transport Department will not entertain speed bumps. The police, though they have long abandoned the system under which retiring sergeants were expected to own large parts of Toronto, still has a thing about the ICAC, and so it goes.
The FEHD is, for some reason, peculiarly hostile to dining in the open air. There are, of course, some potential problems with street food hawkers, involving things like noise, hygiene and rubbish, but this does not explain the department’s visceral hostility to people eating al fresco, even if the food is coming from a perfectly respectable restaurant and the space is not being used for anything else.
As a result Hong Kong has always been a problem area for open air dining, unless you get away to somewhere rural or an outlying island. And dai pai dong are an endangered species: there are only 17 left.
As tends to happen with endangered species they are now being eagerly touted to foreigners as an attraction. “Eating at a dai pai dong is a must-try Hong Kong experience and you can’t call yourself a real foodie if you haven’t dined at one,” chirps the Tourism Board on its social media.
Two of the Cooked Food Hawker Bazaars where the board suggests you can enjoy this experience are officially described as “temporary”. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
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