Hong Kong Stories

Taiwanese author Jewel Tsai moved to Hong Kong after marriage. In the past 15 years, she fell in love with southern Lingnan cuisine, especially with Hong Kong ingredients that she had never encountered before. Jewel Tsai’s kitchen is a world of the senses: She decorates it with colourful flowers -beauty for the eyes; the scent of fruit of different ripeness gives off different shades of smells –fragrance for the nose; She plays Miles Davis when she cooks French dishes, Leslie Cheung when she makes Thai food and operas when she makes Zhongzi- music for the ears. To Jewel Tsai , only fulfilling the palate is a waste. Appreciating food is about opening up all five senses. To her, food can also be a source of sorrow. Her uncompromising attitude towards food derived from an unhappy childhood memory. This winter, Jewel Tsai will be hosting a dinner party at home. To her, the kitchen can also be a battlefield and preparing for a dinner party is just like going to war.

Hot oil, sharp blades and burning flames- a kitchen might seem like a dangerous place for people who are visually impaired. However, does being blind exclude you from cooking? With their hearing, sense of smell, sense of taste and their hands, visually impaired people can also cook delicious meals. Kwong-po who lost his vision later in life was at first afraid to enter the kitchen. Now, he is a host for a web channel’s cooking programme, sharing his cooking experience with viewers. The kitchen became a place where he learned how to be independent and where he regained his confidence. Susan, also visually impaired, has cooked for her family ever since she was little. She used to take care of her siblings’ meals, and after she got married, she was in charge of cooking for her family of four. With over 40 years of cooking experience, Susan is a perfectionist who is meticulous about flavour and sense, as well as colour.

When we think of hospital meals, bland and unappetising food comes to mind. Little known to the public though, is that hospitals have been making big improvements in recent years, hoping to provide meals that are not only healthy, but meals that also tastes and looks good. Kowloon Hospital has followed a 20-year tradition of providing food made on premise- meals are prepared and immediately served within the hospital. Attention is also given to patients with special dietary needs. But the Hospital Authority is pushing forward the central kitchen system, where food can be prepared in larger quantity and where sanitary conditions can be better controlled. 6 years ago, Queen Elizabeth Hospital started receiving meals from the central kitchen. The meals are reheated on premise and then brought to patients. In order to improve patient’s appetite, the hospital also requests for more varieties from the central kitchen, hoping that they can provide healthy meals that also look and taste like food from proper restaurants. Centralised or not, everyone who works in these kitchens have the same hope, to provide heart-warming meals to patients in need.

Every day at 8:30am, in a kitchen inside a Siu Sai Wan factory building, a chef, Brother Yung, and his 4 to 5 helpers will be busy preparing 600 free lunchboxes that will be given to the needy through recipient social service organizations. This kitchen they work in is operated by a non-profit organization. Its freezers are filled with all kinds of cooking ingredients that were not bought, but given to them by donors. Working with leftovers can be quite challenging as the quantity of food and types of food donated cannot be anticipated. Only after Brother Yung and his team see what has been donated in morning, can they begin to design the menu and think of ways to creatively breathe new life into these unwanted leftovers. Their efforts are rewarded when they see how much recipients enjoy their food and how thankful they are for it.

Grace’s kitchen is like no other- it is available for rent! The kitchen is equipped with modern amenities, such as a coffee machine, a steamer, an oven, as well as all kinds of sauces and condiments. Renters can invite all their friends over for a cooking party, and for some, the best part is they don’t have to do their own dishes. Grace is a bit of a scatterbrain. She is forgetful and has not done particularly well in the corporate world. However, she completely transforms whenever she steps into the kitchen. Having seen that, her husband Ken remodeled two adjoining apartments into kitchens so Grace could start her own private kitchen business. Since then, Grace’s life has taken a one-eighty. Her confidence has grown and she has met many like-minded people in her private kitchen. With the lack of space in Hong Kong, many can only wish for a large unrestrictive kitchen where they can show-off their cooking skills. Grace’s kitchen provided just what people needed- a cozy environment for dinner parties, couples’ anniversaries as well as an alternative pastime for young lovers.

Each plate of food is weighed to guarantee equal distribution; you never see the face of the person who distributes the food; 4 different menus subtly cater to inmates of different nationalities and religions- this is the little known world of cooking in a correctional institution. Chan Sau-mei is a catering instructor at the Lo Wu Correctional Institution. Her job is to instruct prisoners to prepare meals, which according to her are simple and healthy. Ah Fan was put to jail for 12 months faking marriage. She is young, despises labour work and worries that she will not make it in jail. Ah Heung was an owner of a Chinese restaurant, she was sentenced to 3 months for breaking the employment law. She lost her freedom but got a go at being a chef. This is no kitchen of a celebrity chef and does not boast exquisite culinary creations- but these characters will take us on a tour of this little known world.

Traditionally, Chinese chefs always start out as apprentices, helping with cleaning and other chores. Whether or not he or she can pick up the spatula, learn to cook well and even be promoted to head chef is determined by natural talents, and more importantly, by how much you can secretly learn from observing your master. The lucky ones might even get a few tips from experienced chefs. Ever since the establishment of a Chinese cooking school though, many executive chefs at the new generation of Chinese restaurants actually received their trainings from the school. Students at the institute are no longer kids who failed school, but are a group of passionate young people dreaming of becoming excellent chefs. Even young people who already have experience working in kitchens are choosing to take courses at the school to learn more systematically. How is the new generation of Chinese chefs trained? How do students apply kitchen ethics in real life situations? What kind of philosophies and principles have they learned from the kitchens? Three generations of Chinese chefs will share their kitchen stories.

This kitchen never gets too hot as raw is the preferred way of eating. This is the Ocean Park kitchen, which serves guests from all over the world - the guests being thousands of animals. The trainers are mainly in charge of food. Even though there’s no cooking involved, everyday is extremely busy, as they need to wash the food, and cut it into the right shapes and sizes for different animals, even removing skin and intestines. They also have to closely monitor the animals eating to learn more about their health and habits. For example, garlic juice is often added to fish bait, which is not only a disinfectant, but also tastes good to the fish. And the pandas get a treat during special festivals - what are they going to get for Chinese New Year? After all that preparation, finally comes the trainers’ favourite moment, when they get to feed the animals. It’s a great way for trainers and animals to nurture relationships. This kitchen isn’t too hot, but it’s certainly a warm one.

During any major festival, the kitchen in this centuries-old clan hall, blackened from years of wood-burning, is filled with the smell of fermented beancurd. Here in Yuen Long’s Tong Fong Village, in this decrepit-looking kitchen of no more than four hundred square feet, indigenous villager Tang Luen-hing is cooking up a storm with his big wok. He diligently tends to the fire, as his ancestors for three generations before him have done, in order to make a traditional poon choi. Tang Luen-hing started following his father in the kitchen as a teenager, officially taking over as the poon choi master when his father grew old. He still sticks to the traditional way of making it, only using the freshest ingredients, and continues to use old methods to cook the pork, eel and fishballs. How to arrange and present the poon choi is an art in itself too. Tang Luen-hing and his wife are physically sore from cooking poon choi day in day out, year after year. Luckily, their son Jeff, who returned home after studying overseas, has started to learn the art of making poon choi from his father on weekends, ready to continue the tradition of the Tang family.