Cheung Fun Fix

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Night on Cheung Chau

We didn’t know what to expect. Faced with the novelty of an open Saturday night, my girlfriend Laine and I decided to go somewhere random. Why not Cheung Chau? We’d always enjoyed visiting the island during the day, when its bicycles, beaches and palates of drying fish are a rebuke to the city’s uptight rush. It might be just as fun at night, we reasoned.

So we headed to the Central Ferry Piers where we stocked up on good beer — a Paulaner Dunkelweizen, a Brooklyn Lager and a Yebisu, for the record — and caught the 9:30pm “Ordinary Ferry” at Pier 5. In this case, “ordinary” means you’ll get exactly what you’d expect from a ferry: a real boat that sloshes back and forth in the water, with a spot at the rear where you can sit outdoors and feel the wind in your hair. It takes 15 minutes longer than the hermetically-sealed icebox “Fast Ferry,” but it also costs half as much and is twice as much fun.

We arrived at the island a bit after 10pm. The lights on the harbourfront promenade twinkled like somebody’s forgotten Christmas decorations. As we disembarked the ferry and left the pier, I noticed that most of seafood restaurants along the Praya were already winding down for the night, but Laine pointed out something far more exciting: street food.

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Neighbourhood Dim Sum

The small, delicate dishes of dim sum have spread around the world, following Cantonese people wherever they went, but one of the best places to get them is still Hong Kong. There are plenty of places here to go for yum cha (literally “drink tea,” used to describe the experience of eating dim sum in a restaurant) and just as many where you can buy dim sum piecemeal on the street.

While Sunday mornings usually involve a trip to some giant restaurant with hundreds of seats and harried waiters, my favourite dim sum experiences have been had in small, neighbourhood restaurants, where people wander in with a couple of friends for a laid-back dim sum lunch or dinner. These are, along with cha chaan teng, Hong Kong’s traditional neighbourhood cafés.

I recently visited three hole-in-the-wall places around the city. Here’s what I found.

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Barbecued Euphoria in Shenzhen

Mark Ndesandjo, Barack Obama’s half-brother, is a talented guy. After graduating from Stanford and Brown, he moved to Shenzhen, where he gives piano lessons to orphans. Just the other day, he released his first novel — inspired partly by his troubled relationship with his father — and he’s now working on an autobiography.

But out of all of his achievements, the one that pleases me most is the success of Cabin BBQ, the chain of laid-back outdoor barbecue restaurants Ndesandjo started with Chinese partners in 2003. The original Cabin BBQ sits in a restaurant hub not far from Xiangmihu metro station in Shenzhen, four stops away from the Lok Ma Chau border crossing with Hong Kong. There are now ten branches across China, the farthest of which is in Yinchuan, Ningxia.

For anyone used to dining in Hong Kong, where the air conditioning is always on full blast and the lack of space forces elbows onto your dinner plate, Cabin BBQ is a relief. Somehow, despite being just 35 kilometres from the skyscrapers of Central, Shenzhen, with its mild air and abundance of palm trees, always feels more tropical. This is a smoky, outdoor dining paradise where street vendors sell coconuts next to the parking lot and people wander in to eat lots of meat and drink copious amounts of beer until the darkest hours of the night.

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The Great Outdoor Kitchen

When you combine Hong Kong’s notorious lack of space with the natural tendency of people in warm climes to prepare food outdoors, you get scenes like those above. In all but the poshest and most sanitized neighbourhoods, kitchen workers crouch over brightly-coloured plastic buckets, washing innards and greens. It might not be hygenic, but it gives Hong Kongers a more honest relationship with the food they’re eating; its ingredients and preparation become part of the public spectacle.

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Late Lunch

2:30pm in a restaurant on the outskirts of Saigon’s District 1

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Free the Street Vendors

Hot dog vendor at Spadina and Queen. Photo by Kevin Steele

Toronto is finally getting the street food it deserves. After suffering under years of legislation that prohibited nearly everything but precooked sausages from being sold on the streets, vendors will now be able to serve food from hundreds of culinary traditions.

There’s just one problem: rather than embracing liberalized street food and all of its potential, City Hall is taking an overly bureaucratic approach. Just eight street vendors, out of a total of 19 that applied, will participate in a pilot project that will see Afghan chapli kebabs in Nathan Phillips Square, Ethiopian injera at Roundhouse Park and jerk chicken at Yonge and St. Clair, to name a few delicacies that have been specially chosen for their “nutritional value” and representation of Toronto’s ethnic makeup. Every aspect of the vendors’ operations will be tightly controlled: each one must use a custom-designed food cart (which range in price from $21,000 to $28,000) and they can’t deviate from their designated location.

City officials are concerned about food safety, naturally enough, but they’re also fussy about the nutritional value of what street vendors dish up, having gone so far as to pass a bylaw last December to ensure that street food is not only more “culturally diverse,” but “wholesome and nutritious.” It seems they want to discourage competition among vendors, too, since they’ve gone to great lengths to designate a handful of disparate locations at which street food can be sold under the new program.

It’s a remarkably heavy-handed approach, one at odds with the world’s great street food traditions, which are grounded in the ability to adapt quickly and flexibly to customer demand. Think of something like the now-famous Kogi taco truck in Los Angeles, which serves up Korean-inspired tacos from a roving truck whose location is announced only by Twitter and word-of-mouth. It’s innovative, delicious and exactly what people want — but it would be impossible in Toronto, where food vendors aren’t allowed to move around.

People less cynical than me can consider Toronto’s new approach a step towards street food freedom. But it’s an awfully small step. Even if this pilot project works out, what will dissuade city officials from micromanaging every future street food venture?

Popularity: 7% [?]

Morning Coffee #11: Coffee on Demand

Coffee is a big part of the social life of Saigon, a city that somehow manages to be both languid and relentlessly energetic in nearly equal measure. Hundreds of cafés and coffee stands dot the city: relaxed neighbourhood hangouts with a few plastic seats out front to watch the city go by; leafy park cafés where middle-aged women chat and men bring birdcages; multistoried cafés with elaborate fountains and gardens, oases hidden in unremarkable lanes. But even when there isn’t a café, it’s still easy to get coffee.

On a warm afternoon earlier this week, a few friends and I found ourselves in a small park in District 1, just around the corner from the Notre-Dame Basilica and Saigon’s tourist hub. Not long after we sat down, a woman came up to us and asked us if we wanted any coffee. We ordered three cà phê sữa đá (iced coffee with condensed milk) and one black iced coffee. About five minutes later, a man on a motorbike arrived with the coffees in a wire tray and the woman brought them to us. We paid 26,000 dong (about $1.80) for the four drinks.

Somehow, the fact that the coffee woman was wearing a Parasuco t-shirt emblazoned with the words “Montréal, Québec, Canada” made the candy-sweet coffee even more delicious.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Taipei Street Food

Lime juice on sale in Shida

Deep-fried chicken in Ximending

Brochettes, squid and other treats in Shilin

Popularity: unranked [?]

Buying Seafood in Sai Kung

In most of Hong Kong, buying fish for dinner involves a trip to the neighbourhood wet market, or maybe to the seafood aisle in a slightly more sanitary supermarket. But in Sai Kung, an old fishing port in the midst of one of Hong Kong’s more verdant corners, many head straight for the source: the sea. Every evening, next to the minibus terminus and a few metres down from the strip of waterfront restaurants, dozens of people flock to a public pier where they look down at a handful of seafood vendors selling fish from their boats, tied to the wooden pillars of the pier, where the water swells with every passing boat. Questions are asked, prices are quoted and the vendors pass up buckets of fish to customers with the help of a long metal rod.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Earth to Mouth

For all the times I went to buy groceries at Montreal’s Chinese supermarkets, it never once occurred to me that much of the food I was buying was in fact locally-produced. Then I saw Yung Chang’s short documentary, Earth to Mouth, which my friend Cedric screened last year in a fifth-floor room in Chinatown. In his disarmingly quiet way, Chang introduces us to Wing Fong Farm, just outside Toronto, which grows the produce sold and consumed in the city’s big Chinese malls and supermarkets. In a particularly inspired scene near the beginning of the film, the farm’s 73-year-old matriarch, Lau King Fai, introduces us to some of the produce she grows, like gai lan (best prepared with smashed ginger and stir-fried with wine and salt) and go lai choi (stir-fry with vinegar and serve with oyster sauce).

As you would expect from someone who made Up the Yangtze, which put a defiantly human face on a massive technological achievement, Yung Chang has made a film that is more about the people who run Wing Fong Farm than it is about the food they produce. We learn about Lau’s path from Changsha to Guangzhou, and then, late in life, to rural Ontario, where she slipped quietly into the role of a farmer after a lifetime spent in cities. She rises at dawn each day, putting in long hours overseeing the farm’s operations, but it is the six Mexican workers she and her son employ who do the real grunt work. Watching the interaction between the farm’s Chinese owners and their Mexican employees is one of the things that makes Earth to Mouth so fascinating: this is the ordinary, everyday face of globalization.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Le spécialiste du melon d’eau

Watermelon stand at the Jean Talon Market

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3am at the Casse-Croûte

It’s a bit past 3am and I’m sitting with a few friends in the Nouveau Palais, a 24-hour diner just around the corner from my apartment. It’s a classic Quebec casse-croûte with plastic booths and wood-panelled walls, a décor so timeless that, when the restaurant was damaged by fire a few years ago, its interior was painfully reconstructed to look just as it did before.

As we sit down, the waitress, a squat woman with a broad chest, narrow waist and constant frown, hands us our menus. Her skin is always tanned a deep orangey brown, even in the depths of winter, and her mood tends to swing from guardedly friendly to frighteningly surly with only the slightest provocation.

“I hate her so much,” mutters one of my friends, who grew up a few blocks away from the restaurant. She likes to annoy the waitress with snide remarks and passive-aggressive questions.

“Once I asked her how often she went to the tanning salon and she freaked out. She was like, ‘Tu penses-tu que j’ai le temps pour ça?’ But it’s so obvious!”

I open up the menu, a small book of photocopied paper, and try to decide what to get. My choices include all of the casse-croûte standards: hamburgers, poutine, souvlaki, fried rice, pizza, spaghetti and, of course, pizza-ghetti, that unbeatable combo of soggy pizza and overcooked pasta served side-by-side.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

Street Food Freedom!

While Montreal obstinately refuses to allow any sort of food vending on its streets — ostensibly for health and cleanliness reasons — Toronto has convinced the Ontario government to liberalize its street food rules so that vendors may sell more than just hot dogs. Soon, in addition to the several hundred sausage stands and chip trucks that dot the city’s landscape, Torontonians will be able to buy samosas, brochettes, crêpes, Taiwanese fish balls — and pretty much anything else you can imagine — on the street.

Considering the extent of Toronto’s cultural diversity — half of its population is foreign-born — you can pretty much bet that this move will introduce the city to a vast array of street vending traditions from around the world. Immigrant entrepreneurs will finally have a way to build a low-overhead business selling the food they know best; Toronto’s pedestrians, meanwhile, will have access to an international food fair on every block.

In fact, last Friday, a street food festival was held in front of Toronto’s City Hall to celebrate the new rules. According to the Toronto Star, one of the highlights was murtabak, an Indian Muslim wrap that is a popular street snack in Singapore and Malaysia.

Down the 401 in Montreal, however, in a city supposedly known for its laissez-faire attitude, cosmopolitanism and joie de vivre, politicians and bureaucrats claim that allowing street vendors to sell food would put the city’s hundreds of cheap restaurants out of business. Yet Toronto has no shortage of hole-in-the-wall falafel joints, take-out jerk chicken restaurants and inexpensive Korean cafés. Montreal certainly wasn’t hard-pressed for cheap eats back when street food was allowed in the 1950s and 60s.

Like most Montrealers, I’m a fan of the occasional shish taouk from Basha or soggy steamé from La Belle Province. But wouldn’t it taste so much better if you could buy it on the street?

Popularity: 11% [?]