The cravings came to enjoy a taste of home in a dish of spicy fried beef or steamed fish head. Waiters speaking in Mandarin brought plates heated with green and red chili peppers.
It was the opening night in Hong Kong for Return Home Hunan, a well-known mainland Chinese chain trying to establish itself in the city’s competitive food scene. Huang Haiying, the restaurant’s founder, greeted customers in a bright red suit as waiters handed out red envelopes full of vouchers.
Hong Kong is a difficult place to open a restaurant these days. Fewer people are eating out and more restaurants have closed than opened this year. But mainland Chinese restaurant owners, facing their own challenges at home, see an opportunity.
“Everyone has their own way of surviving, and now it’s about surviving on the edge,” Ms. Huang said. “We’ll see who has more courage and succeeds.”
Return Home Hunan is one of more than a dozen iconic Chinese restaurants that have opened in Hong Kong in recent months. The owners were encouraged by the steady flow of new customers from Hong Kong traveling to Shenzhen, the mainland city next door, in search of more choice.
But the introduction of these restaurants in Hong Kong has been met with some hesitation. Hong Kong, a Chinese territory that has long enjoyed a high degree of autonomy, is increasingly coming into Beijing’s tightening grip. For some people in the city, the exodus of these restaurants is an example of how Hong Kong culture is slowly being absorbed by the rest of China.
Not far from Return Home Hunan, new restaurants offer food from three southern Chinese provinces: there’s the Guizhou rice noodle shop, the Guangxi river snail noodle shop and smelly tofu from Hunan province.
These establishments cater to locals and a growing community of mainland Chinese, some of whom have made the city their home over the past decade.
“When I first came to Hong Kong, it was difficult to find authentic mainland cuisine restaurants,” said Karen Lin, a banker and part-time business school student at the University of Hong Kong, who served spicy fried beef at Return Home Hunan on July 17 ate a new evening.
“The Chinese restaurants here are all based on the ‘local taste’ of Hong Kong,” said Ms Lin, who has lived in the city for six years.
Mainland transplants complaining that Hong Kong food is boring hurts locals more these days as they grapple with the city’s changing identity.
In 2019, Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law in Hong Kong following anti-democracy protests across the city. Many expatriates and local Hong Kongers left the city. The exodus has been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the city’s public health measures – among the strictest in the world.
Now, as Hong Kong moves ever closer into China’s sphere of influence, an economic slowdown and a real estate crisis on the mainland are slowing the country’s long-awaited recovery.
The fastest-growing group of migrants to Hong Kong are people from mainland China looking for better jobs and special visas the government is now offering. They have found a city more welcoming than before the pandemic, when mainlanders were often greeted with hostility by Hong Kong residents.
“Hong Kong has become much more inclusive for mainlanders,” said Zheng Huiwen, the manager of one of the Hong Kong branches of Tai Er Pickled Fish, a Sichuan seafood restaurant from mainland China. In the restaurant, the waiters announce the arrival of a dish in the style of traditional Peking Opera and announce: “Delicious fish is coming!”
Mr. Zheng, who moved to Hong Kong as a teenager from neighboring Guangdong province and spent his summers waiting tables, recalled how Hong Kong diners treated him more rudely whenever they heard his mainland accent.
The tone is changing as Hong Kong residents spend more time across the border eating and shopping.
Tai Er Pickled Fish became so popular with Hong Kong tourists in Shenzhen that the company opened four branches in Hong Kong in December.
Among newly built apartments next to the site where Mr. Zheng is manager, in a shopping center that once housed the city’s old Kai Tak Airport, more than half of the apartments listed for sale in March were sold by buyers Mainland China purchased, local news media reported.
At Xita Grandma BBQ, a new restaurant from China, Cambridge Zhang, the franchise owner, complained that mainland diners were mostly interested in trendy restaurants. Mr. Zhang wanted to find other customers in a new market.
He soon discovered that many others had the same idea.
“I came here and realized, ‘Hey, here’s this restaurant on the mainland, and there’s another restaurant on the mainland,'” Mr. Zhang said animatedly.
For some local restaurants that are barely hanging on, the flood of openings is confusing. According to OpenRice, an online restaurant and market insights platform, nearly twice as many restaurants closed in April as opened.
In the Shek Tong Tsui area where Return Home Hunan opened in May, many of the colorful restaurants – once important neighborhood eateries – had recently closed. A restaurant that served cheap noodles and milk tea was no longer there, nor was a restaurant where retirees gathered to eat dim sum and catch up on the day’s news.
“The restaurant business is hard work,” said Roy Tse, a local restaurant owner who sold rice lunch dishes once popular with office workers in Hong Kong’s Taikoo Shing business district. There are fewer lunchtime visitors these days. Anyone else who comes orders the bare essentials.
Yeung Hei, the manager of Fu Ging Aromatic Noodles, a longtime local restaurant in Hong Kong where a chef braises beef brisket in the front window, said he used to have customers every day.
“But then one day they just disappeared and never came back,” he said.
These days, restaurants that offer reasonably priced meals tend to do better. Many of the newcomers to the mainland are luring guests with deep discounts, vouchers and fan club specials.
On a recent Thursday afternoon, Chester Kwong and Sonja Cheng sat in front of large bowls at Meet Noodles, a fast-food chain known for its spicy-sour noodles made from potato flour from the southern Chinese city of Chongqing.
“It’s dirt cheap,” Mr. Kwong said. He was referring to a hot and sour noodle set that Ms. Cheng ordered for 36 Hong Kong dollars, or $4.61. This included a bowl of hot and sour noodle soup and a side of fried chicken.
Both Ms. Cheng and Mr. Kwong, recent college graduates, expressed concern that the Chinese restaurants would replace their local favorites. “It’s good to have these places and options for Chinese food, but it’s a little scary to think that one day they could surpass what we had in Hong Kong,” Mr Kwong said.
There are others who feel the same way and prefer not to visit restaurants on the mainland.
“I take every opportunity to help local restaurants,” said Audrey Chan, who grew up in mainland China but moved to Hong Kong six years ago as a student and identifies as a Hong Konger.
Fu Ging Aromatic Noodles once counted the surrounding residents of the middle-class Chai Wan neighborhood as its main source of income. But so many people have moved away – many from Hong Kong – that the company remains looking for new customers.
Ms. Huang from Return Home Hunan said she knew it would be tough.
But she added: “No matter how bad the economy is, people always need to eat.”
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2024-06-20 04:01:20
www.nytimes.com
