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.

More

Morning Coffee #12: Bo(ok)hemian

Sometimes good things do come from the pages of Lonely Planet. Normally (in Southeast Asia, at least), visiting one of the bars or restaurants recommended in its pages will lead you to a place filled Lonely Planet readers of the most insufferable sort. Bo(ok)hemian is not one of those places. Despite its goofy name, it’s a nicely ramshackle hangout in the oldest part of Phuket, stocked with used Thai books and local art. The coffee is great, too, and cheap.

It was a quiet evening when I visited late last month. Most of the nearby shops had already closed for the day. Two Thai twentysomethings sat at a table on the sidewalk, eyes fixed on a white Macbook, while a Chinese couple looked through the books. Gig posters and indie CDs were on display near the cafe’s entrance. I couldn’t help but think that Bo(ok)hemian represented another face of globalization, the kind described in Andrew Potter’s book The Rebel Sell: a localized version of the same indie culture that can be found in Mile End, the Lower East Side and Kensington Market.

More

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.

Hot Coffee on a Chilly Afternoon

Inside the Social Club café, St. Viateur Street, on a cold November afternoon in 2006

Chess, Mahjong and Pi

My friends always swore by Café Pi. I never really shared their opinion (its food isn’t great and neither is its coffee) but I could at least appreciate it, since Pi’s customers are an odd mix of students and chess players, all of whom pack into the café’s jarring red-and-black confines until they are kicked out at midnight — closing time. The chess players, nearly all men, are impossible to categorize by appearance or origin, but they all share the same seriousness and the same intensity. This becomes obvious a couple of times a year, during the St. Laurent street fair, when Pi spills out into the street.

Morning Coffee #10: Coffee on Cuba

Midnight Espresso Cafe on Cuba Street in Wellington, New Zealand

Wellington has more cafes per capita than Manhattan. At least that is what I was told numerous times by New Zealanders when I mentioned my impending trip to their nation’s capital. Upon arriving in late April, I discovered that the coffee houses of Wellington are indeed plentiful and quite cool, offering a great assortment of coffee and some absolutely delicious cafe fare. Some of Wellington’s best cafes are located along the city’s peculiarly named Cuba Street in the Cuba Quarter.

Cuba Street, and Cuba Mall in particular, is the hangout for many of Wellington’s university and college aged residents. The Cuba Mall refers to two pedestrianized blocks of Cuba Street, between Manners Mall and Ghuznee Street. In addition to numerous cafes, Cuba Street is also home to trendy clothing stores, record shops, small art galleries, ethnic restaurants, and a gay bar, each catering predominantly to an eclectic mix of students from the nearby Te Aro campus of Victoria University, and of course tourists.

Cuba street gets its name from a ship which arrived from Britain in 1840 carrying with it some of New Zealand’s early settlers. Despite it’s British roots, many Cuban flags are visible along the street and there is even a cafe called ‘Fidel’s Cafe’ who’s decor pays homage to the Cuban dictator. The oddity of this Cuban connection in New Zealand’s capital city gives the neighbourhood an intriguing, almost altruistic feel. The area is clearly the epicentre of Wellington’s counter-culture, where, local establishments, the cafes in particular, have cultivated a vibrancy not usually found in a city of its size.

More

Blood, Sweat and Tea

After Hong Kong, mainland China came as a major shock. Hong Kong is user-friendly with a Westernized veneer whereas Guangzhou (also known as Canton) was the real China: a difficult crowded place with no English signs and clouds of brown smog.

Ninety-nine percent of the storefronts in Hong Kong are spotless and air-conditioned, most of the filth relegated to back rooms. In Guangzhou, things come raw, in-your-face, and it’s all quite strange: sun-dried snakes; stretched-out sea horses; sliced up deer antlers; giant plastic bowls full of live scorpions; cat, dog, and owl butchers; barrels of chicken feet; steaming turtle shells. Somehow the Cantonese manage to find a culinary use for all this. Semiconductor shops sit next to dried seafood stalls. Two-storey ten-lane highways zoom next to quiet flagstone alleyways shaded by clotheslines where old people play mahjong. Life happens on the street, things flow organically, and interiors are indistinguishable from exteriors.

As I made my way out of the crowded alleyways of Qingping market, I came across a group of cops kicking a handcuffed old man in rags, scowls of anger on their faces as the victim yelled out obscenities in Cantonese. A circle of bystanders stood by, watching. The man was writhing in pain, yet the cops kept kicking him in the crotch. It was barbaric and unprofessional. I was horrified. God knows what he had done. He probably hadn’t paid his weekly bribe to stand on the corner selling pickled eel heads.

More

Arriverderci Tivoli

Almost every city has a collection of neighbourhood institutions, businesses known and used by such a wide variety of people that they become convenient meeting places as well as local reference points, secure admist the great of spasms of change in the city beyond. Some of these places seem to be fuelled on nostalgia alone, their outmoded menu and decor sought by people eager to recall earlier days. The best of them, however, have lasted so long because they have never failed to provide the great food and memorable ambiance that made them popular in the first place.

The New Tivoli Restaurant seemed to fall into the latter category. For three decades, the Gardanis family supplied the corner of St. Clair and Dufferin in Toronto with coffee and comfort food; in return, they were rewarded with a loyal and diverse clientele from the surrounding neighbourhood. “It ruled the eastern boundary of Corso Italia, whatever the mood, fashion or World Cup Champion. It was like the old sweater that you couldn’t part with—a bit frayed and rough-around-the-edges, but a constant source of comfort and security,” writes the designer and photographer Mondo Lulu, who lived above the restaurant.

Thanks to his uniquely intimate relationship to the restaurant—he calls its staff and owners his “second family”—Lulu was able to create a particularly engaging collection of photos that document life at the Tivoli. Last fall, when rising rents forced the restaurant to close, Lulu’s photos became a record of its existence as a focus of life on St. Clair. Many of Lulu’s photos can be seen on Flickr. Those of you in Toronto, however, might want to check out his photos in person, at the “Arrivederci Tivoli: Photos from the Centre of the Universe” exhibit. It opened this weekend and runs until June 7 at the Side Space Gallery, 1080 St. Clair West.

“After the SOS/ROW row, it looks like the hood is in healing mode,” Lulu told me last month. “I’m hoping that my show will be key in that, since the Tiv was the place where all factions laid down their arms in the name of bacon.”

More

Morning Coffee #9: Grounded

Manhattan, April 21, 2007: “My nose is going haywire this morning. Perhaps this is because when I travel I have to put off my morning brew until I can get from my hotel to a decent coffeehouse. Am I ever glad, then, that I discovered Grounded.”

I am a coffee fiend. Each day I venture out from work for an extended lunch break at my local coffeehouse, where I ruminate over a Fair Trade, organically-grown dark roast blend, a newspaper, and a notebook. Naturally, when I travel, I do not like to give up this daily routine. However, since finding a good independent coffeehouse is often left to word-of-mouth recommendation, I am sometimes forced to suffice with below-grade medium roast coffee or to chance it on espressos made by inexperienced baristas.

While my previous coffeehouse experiences in New York have been hit-and-miss, I seem to have stumbled over a great, unpretentious spot to enjoy a brew and gather my thoughts between bouts of aggressive phototouring. Lodged into a fifteen foot-wide crack between Victorian buildings on Jane Street in the West Village, Grounded is difficult to find amidst the brownstone rowhouses that fold over one another in this maze of a neighbourhood. To this travelling Canadian, though, it appeared as an oasis — an independent coffeehouse in the Village that serves fair trade coffee, isn’t overpriced, and hasn’t been overrun by scenesters or stroller moms.

More

Morning Coffee #8: The Boss

Milk tea at a cha chaan teng in Hong Kong. Photo by Lisi Tang

It was the Saturday before the Lunar New Year and The Boss was crazy. People crammed inside the small bakery that fronts this old Chinatown restaurant, buying cakes, buns and cookies. Others stood around, waiting for their names to be called so they could finally be seated. Hungry, we pushed through the crowd and gave our name to the host. Then we waited. My girlfriend’s sister decided to buy a box of cocktail and curry buns. As she walked towards the counter, I stared at a large painting of a rosy-cheeked, contented old man that loomed over the bakery, flanked on both sides by festive red New Year banners with gold script. His long white beard flowed towards large pots of gold coins that rested at his feet.

“Who’s that?” I whispered to my girlfriend, Laine.

“Choi Sun wah,” she whispered back. “The, uh, god of wealth.”

When our name was called, we went to the rear of the bustling restaurant where there was a long dining hall with four rows of booths. My eyes wandered to the back of the restaurant, A strangely dour-looking jiu choi mao, or lucky cat, was perched on a ledge near the ceiling, its paw solemnly raised to beckon good fortune. As I stared at the cat, a remarkably fast-moving waitress placed four glasses of tea on the table and slapped down our menus before running off. I opened mine, stomach growling. My eyes widened as I perused the dozens of items: ox-tongue spaghetti, lovebird fried rice, baked Portuguese chicken, Hong Kong milk tea. Ah yes, this is what I had come for: cha chaan teng food.

More

Retro Malls and Department Store Kitsch

Like many teenagers in suburbia, I spent too much time in shopping malls. Unlike others, there was a purpose to my wandering. My goal was to find the quintessential department store restaurant. This dream restaurant would have a somewhat dated charm: brown and orange wallpaper, faux-traditional 1970s furnishings, waitresses with Marge Simpson hair, Jell-O cube parfaits, and pumped-out muzak with French horns galore. I scoured the Quebec City region’s K-Mart Kafeterias, Woolco Grilles, and the sketchy department stores in St. Roch.

Then, sometime in 1994, I came across the Sears Café at Place Fleur-de-Lys. It exceeded all my expectations. The walls were dark brown, the lighting was muted and I dined enveloped in the sounds of Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass. The furniture was the finest from Sears’ colonial revival series circa 1975. The menu was unreal: you could eat a “veal steakette” and top it all off with Jell-O parfaits in a variety of colours. The daily special even came with its own retractable plastic lid. My dream had come true. I had reached restaurant nirvana.

More

Quebec City Tour #4: Rue Couillard

One of my favourite streets in old Quebec is rue Couillard. It is narrow, mostly residential, and less than 0.2 km long. The street lies on a wavy tangent off the main tourist strip. There are surprises around every bend: New France cottages built in the 1600s, Victorian-era monasteries, and early 20th-century apartment buildings. Let’s go for a walk.

More

Morning Coffee #7: Cafés in Old Cairo

El Fishawy is the best known café in Cairo
and a favourite of Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz

Mention Cairo, and the first things that come to mind are the pyramids. Why do I consider this unfortunate? Because the pyramids are a remnant of a dead civilization, and Cairo today is a living city of 16 million people. Let me suggest a better symbol: the cafés of Khan-el-Khalili, a living microcosm of Egypt’s metropolis.

Cairo’s cafés are many things at once. Sometimes, they have the social buzz of a nightclub or pub. You can often count on the Egyptian smoking a shisha next to you to strike up a conversation. I even saw some French tourists at a nearby table who seemed to be flirting with two Egyptian women in conservative Muslim headgear. Somewhere beyond the shisha haze was a family in party hats celebrating their kid’s birthday surrounded by golden trays crammed with large frothy milkshakes. A café isn’t a café without, well, introspective café types: reading, quietly sipping their dark mint tea, or scribbling away.

Cafés are habitually doorless and windowless. The interiors spill out onto the streets and the suq spills into the cafés. Cairo’s most famous café, the Fishawy, is a series of mirrors and ornate doorframes crammed into a through street. The street is used by shopkeepers, trinket vendors, and pedestrians, who brush against the tables. Sometimes the people-watching seems a little too intimate but this is Cairo: dense, chaotic, and wonderful.

More

Portraits of a Neighbourhood

They stare at you—seven faces, their expressions ranging from jubilant to amused to vaguely perplexed. They are portraits of Café Olimpico’s employees, pasted above a bookstore at the corner of St. Viateur and Waverly Sts., right across the street from the well-known Mile End café (also known as Open Da Night). They first began to emerge last winter, with a portrait of the baby-faced Phil; he was soon joined by the rest of the Olimpico staff.

The man responsible for them is Francisco Garcia, an artist whose posters have, over the past year, become fixtures in Mile End and the Plateau. “I’ve always liked doing faces,” Garcia said on a chilly November evening, sitting outside on Olimpico’s terrasse. “I guess I just thought it was funny.”

He explained his process for making the portraits. First, he took a photograph of each staff member. Then he reduced the image to two tones in Photoshop, projected it onto canvas, drew an outline and filled it in with shades of grey paint. After transferring the portraits onto recycled posters, he pasted them on the empty plywood space above the bookstore L’Écume des jours, opposite Café Olimpico, over a period of seven months.

The end result is seven striking paintings that draw the eye to an otherwise unremarkable white brick building. “It’s tough, you know. I’ve got to find the right shades of grey and everything. It’s not just paint-by-numbers,” insisted Garcia, smiling self-effacingly as he fidgeted with a cigarette.

More