Rubin Verebes is the managing editor of Foodie and is very opinionated. Transforming his hobby of eating and drinking into a career, he shares his account of Hong Kong’s F&B scene and the worldwide state of dining in Rubin’s Take, a monthly opinion column.
In January 2008, TIME Magazine coined the phrase Nylonkong in a think piece profiling a new era of global connectivity. The phrase mash-up refers to the mega financial pull of the world’s three powerhouses: New York, London, and Hong Kong.
The ostensible regional capitals of the Americas, Europe, and Asia have weathered protests, financial crises, broad political changes, and a pandemic yet still remain on top today, even if other players have entered the global discussion.
When it comes to eating, the prodigious range of options in cuisine, price, and access has rendered all three cities fine destinations for dining, enough to place in any global ranking of top foodie locales.
New York’s 24,000 restaurants prove the Big Apple’s global strength in food; the city numbers dozens of ethnic enclaves supplying authentic cuisines, including Little India, Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Manila, and Little Odessa.
In London, you can dine at restaurants from every country in the world within the capital’s 15,000 restaurants.
Of Hong Kong’s current count of just over 13,000 restaurants, any guidebook, listicle, TV show, or food-obsessed individual, local or international, would laud the city’s access to both affordable and lavish Asian and Western dining.
At lunchtime, you can fill your stomach with greasy, heartwarming noodles dunked in salty broth for only HKD30. Around the corner there’s access to HKD3,000 tasting menus at fine-dining French, Japanese, and Cantonese restaurants.
Meals can be had on the street, housed in a street-level hole-in-the-wall, in the basement of a 70-year-old industrial block, inside a billion-dollar mall, or topping a 100-storey building.
Yet lack of access to a broad range of cuisines in Hong Kong limits a direct comparison to its worldly cousins. Think of Western food and only Italian, French, and Spanish cuisines reign the most popular in the city. Cantonese, Japanese, Thai, and Korean restaurants number the highest within Asian cuisine.
When a friend said recently that “Hong Kong is international, but international in its own way,” I could see how evident this fact is when compared against the city’s restaurant scene.
For one, I love the diversity of food found here, but we lack the boisterous flavours of the Americas found in New York; sadly, there’s no Dominican, Puerto Rican, or Jamaican food or a larger scene of Brazilian, Argentinian, Chilean, and Peruvian cuisines taking root here.
The rare Polish, Hungarian, Scandinavian, and Dutch restaurants have come and gone, with the domination of Mediterranean cuisine more familiar in Hong Kong. London beats us on the prominence of stocking nearly 50 of its neighbouring nations and their food in the city.
Given Hong Kong’s proximity to Mainland China and its existence as a portal for travel and business through and into Asia, it is understandable that the restaurant scene here reflects a makeup dominated by local, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Indian, and Taiwanese food and chefs.
If Poles, Hungarians, Jamaicans, Brazilians, Argentinians, and Peruvians were to emigrate en masse to the city, we would no doubt have a more colourful international cuisine outlook.
What Hong Kong has that London and New York do not is the extremes. Possibly this is where the meaning of diversity comes into play, even when the international factor of our cuisine range is limited.
Wok-hei-torched meals versus delicately handcrafted food sculptures. Gritty neighborhood dive bars versus the world’s second-best bar and highest bar. Gigantic trolley-led dim sum halls versus Michelin-starred yum cha restaurants. Century-old neighbourhood institutions versus grandiose food palaces. Hong Kong has the full range.
This debate always turns to comparisons with our Asian brothers and sisters. Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City’s hospitality spaces are developing fast and gaining international recognition. Singapore is a close competitor. Tokyo produces some of the best food and chefs in the world, growing its measure on the global stage.
For now, if Hong Kong’s diversity factor of the extremes stays strong, which I am assured it will, this city can stand up to the world’s best, even if our internationality does not reach the same heights of other comparable food-loving cities.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author’s and do not represent or reflect the views of Foodie.
