The Mouth Never Stops Eating

When I still lived in Hong Kong, I always looked forward to every minute of the day because food awaited and crossed every path I took. I remembered that before school every morning, our family would take a one hour walk in the mountains before we headed off to breakfast. Sometimes we would eat in the Cantonese fast food chain restaurant called Café de Coral, or go have congee and fried bread sticks called youtiao from the street market or grab some sticky rice and soymilk from street vendors, or order dim sum from a restaurant nearby.

After school, I was usually confronted with more food-related decisions that I needed to make. In Hong Kong, school ends earlier. We usually got off of school by lunchtime. I could still recall smelling the roasted duck and barbeque pork on my way back from school. Sometimes I would grab a lunchbox from these street vendors. The lunchbox included a choice of the roasted goods, rice, and a drink, usually soda or milk tea. This famous lunchbox is packaged in the classic white Styrofoam box and the yellow and orange floral paper cup.  

In a few hours, around 3 in the afternoon or so, it is the time for high tea, a tradition Cantonese people inherited from the English when Hong Kong was still under British rule. High tea is the meal between lunch and dinner time where people could obtain appetizer-sized lunch food items and various other snack munchies. Prices are usually lower and more specials occur during high tea so sometimes people will wait till this time to get lunch in order to save some money. Almost every restaurant has high tea. Typical high tea foods include fried chicken wings, French toast, Pineapple bun with butter sandwiched between (called this not because it is pineapple-flavored, but because the bun looks like a pineapple), Ramen with different toppings, different flavors of shaved ice, and many more. But the distinction of high tea foods is less apparent. In the past, there were only a few high tea foods, but now, with more cultural influences, everything is becoming less traditional and more foods are eaten during this time.

For dinner, my mom usually went down to the street markets and shopped for ingredients for that night’s dinner. Shopping for food in Hong Kong is very different from shopping for food in America. In America, our family always had to buy in bulk since it is not as convenient to drive to the supermarket each time we needed something. In Hong Kong, on the other hand, supermarkets and markets are usually right below the apartments or down the street, making shopping much more convenient. Ingredients sold are also fresh and not frozen.

In addition to eating at home, we sometimes would walk to restaurants nearby, which catered from Chinese foods to a wide variety of foods from a wide variety of cultures. Some are very traditional while many are more fusion cuisines. Then after dinner, sometimes people go out to places especially for desserts. In Hong Kong, there are places to eat desserts called sweet soup.

If you think that’s all the meals eaten on a typical day, then think again! The last meal of the day… or the early meal in the morning is the midnight snack meal, which can basically be everything--only that it is eaten at midnight or later!

As you can see, a typical day in Hong Kong consists of non-stop eating!