rising up

After years of pandemic-induced closure, Hong Kong is writing its next chapter. Francis Lam meets the artists and chefs (and one artist-chef) driving their dynamic city's latest round of reinvention

i can't say that I expected one of the most thought-provoking meals I'd ever had in Hong Kong-really, in my life-to take place in a bordello-red underground pleasure palace with mirrored ceilings with a vulgar double entendre of a name. The story on Ho Lee Fook is that it's a restaurant for people who wake up to party. It is famous for cheeky, fusion-y flavor bombs like prawn toast dressed up with Japanese mayo and feathers of bonito waving in the air like they just don't care, but what most stunned me was a deeply uncool dish of chicken in a clear soup, infused with a bitterroot called dong quai: a showcase of deeply Cantonese flavors usually relegated to medicinal teas and almost exclusively enjoyed by people of an older generation.

The chef, ArChan Chan, returned to her native Hong Kong in 2021 to take over this kitchen after years of cooking abroad in Australia and Singapore. She forged her vision during her time away while watching from afar as political unrest, suppression, and then COVID pummeled her hometown. Eventually, she decided to abandon her varied culinary path and return home to focus on finding the soul in traditional dishes that her guests' parents and grandparents would recognize.

The meal was toe-curlingly delicious, but it also raised questions for me. Chan has devoted herself to preserving Hong Kong Cantonese cuisine, but what does preservation even mean in a city like Hong Kong, born of English colonialism on Chinese soil, a capital of capitalism, a place where the old is always being dismantled to make way for the new? On one trip decades ago, my parents and I tried to find the buildings they grew up in. There was no trace of them. What chance did they have? Even Bruce Lee's house eventually became a by-the-hour love hotel.