Hong Kong-Style Cafés Revived

Capital Café, part of a new generation of bing sutts in Hong Kong

It looks like any other Starbucks — until you gaze past the espresso machine and notice a scene straight out of a vintage Hong Kong movie. Handwritten menus are taped to the walls, birdcages hang from the ceiling and green-framed windows open onto a landscape of big-character signs.

In a nod to Hong Kong’s original cafe culture, the Duddell Street Starbucks in Central has recreated a vintage bing sutt, an informal kind of restaurant popular in the postwar years that serves eggs, sandwiches, pasta soups and iced drinks, although the Starbucks bing sutt limits itself to coffee-flavored pineapple buns, egg tarts and Swiss rolls.

“We wanted to come up with something unique that could represent Hong Kong’s past,” says Teresa Shum, Starbucks’ public relations manager. “Bing sutts in the past served the same purpose as Starbucks. It was a place for people to connect to each other, to family and friends.”

In the 1950s, 60s and 70s, bing sutts were found throughout Hong Kong, but they have since become a rarity, with no more than a few dozen left in the entire city. Now they seem poised for a comeback. Over the past year, several new bing sutts have opened on Hong Kong Island, drawing interest from a young generation smitten by the romance of nostalgia and fascinated by Hong Kong’s heritage.

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Coffee and a Letter

Woman reading a hand-written letter in the Navarino bakery-café.
Mile End, Montreal, September 25, 2004

Two Stories Over Tokyo

Tokyo defines concrete jungle: over 2,000 square kilometers of closely-packed, largely monochrome buildings set amid a tangle of clogged, winding roads, elevated highways, rail lines, and telephone wires. For many who are lost amid the ceaseless forward march of its sidewalks and churning perambulations in the corridors of its vast train stations, cafes perched several stories above the street — often, to further their escapist appeal, sporting French or Italian themes — offer rare opportunities to step back from the city’s omnipresent crowds and inexorable movement.

As much as they are respites from urban intensity, these perches also provide the best means to gain some perspective on the unwieldy metropolis. Their patrons may appear trapped in tiny windows when viewed from the street below, but they offer a scattered audience cheap, upper-balcony tickets to the spectacle of the city — itself snarled, not just in traffic, but anxiety and routine.

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Morning Coffee: Tao Dan Park

I knew I would like Ho Chi Minh City the minute I had my first cup of coffee. Any city where it’s normal to take a leisurely mid-morning coffee break is fine by me — especially when those coffee breaks take place with birdcages and newspapers in a public park.

Last year, I wrote about the coffee-on-demand service available in one Saigon park, but the city’s parks are home to more conventional cafés, too. One year ago, on a sunny morning in early February, I found myself sitting with two friends in Tao Dan Park, on the west side of the city’s colonial centre, where a concrete terrace is filled with low plastic chairs. We sat and ordered two iced milk coffees and one hot black coffee from a woman who wandered over from a small outdoor kitchen nearby. Around us, middle-aged and elderly men read newspapers or chatted as they slowly nursed their coffee. Some birdcages sat prominently in the middle of the terrace, reminding me of the old Hong Kong cafés I’d seen in films, where men bring their birds out for milk tea.

There’s something plainly civilized about park cafés — they help make public space comfortable, complete and less banal. So I was happy to hear yesterday that in Montreal, the Plateau Mont-Royal’s new Projet Montréal administration wants to introduce a café to Lafontaine Park. As long as the café is affordable and its revenues used to maintain the park around it, I can’t see many downsides to this idea. Maybe Montreal will end up with a bit of Tao Dan on the Plateau.

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Morning Coffee: Toronto’s Café Aesthetic

I Deal Coffee

The Communal Mule

I was looking forward to spending three days in Toronto last year: good food, fun times with friends I hadn’t seen in a long time, aimless autumnal wandering. Instead I was waylaid by a terrible cold I developed on the train from Montreal. I spent much of my time drowning my miseries in the city’s cafés — about five over the course of the weekend, if I recall correctly.

It turns out that drinking lots of milky, caffeinated beverages is the last thing you want to do when you have a horrible respiratory infection. (Also a no-no: hanging out in public places and spreading your germs.) Even if it didn’t make me feel better, though, I appreciated Toronto’s café aesthetic, which seems to lead towards messy spaces with rickety furniture, limited signage and casual, almost indifferent service.

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This Café is Seething! Guy-Concordia Station

DCorbeil | Passage, Montréal 2010

Guy-Concordia Station : 18h37. Il y à cette foule touffue, opaque, qui me traverse sans même me voir. Je suis là, pourtant, à multiplier les clichés de cette cohue fébrile et qui s’agglutine, comme le mercure qui se déverse sur le sol. Une tâche métallique, au reflet d’un soleil au bord du crépuscule.

Concordia University, un nom qui résonne et qui rebondit, de sa longueur et de son élan, le long des parois académiques de ces pavillons de verre éclaté. Mille milliers de ces étudiants qui piétinent et qui vocifèrent dans tous les sens. Étourdissement, asphyxie. Un tourbillon humanoïde.

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Morning Coffee: Café Olimpico

DCORBEIL | Un caffè et un rêve, 2009

« En chemin, la pluie reprend vigueur et me rattrape rue Saint-Viateur. Je plonge, tête première, au Olimpico. La terrasse, partiellement à l’abri de notre climat capricieux, est déjà bondée par une foule bigarrée de fumeurs, accrocs du caffè, de Bobos, de m’as-tu-vus et autres lesbiennes dépravées. Aussi quelques habitués : le fou du village, le boulanger du coin. Une petite fille seule, l’air débile. Et moi, un peu à l’écart, un peu inclus dans le groupe.

Caffè macchiato, que je commande dans un italien trop confiant. On me sert, et je demande un verre d’eau, pour authentifier mon origine catanaise. Je donne un pourboire généreux, nonchalamment, tout en jetant un regard rassuré sur la mine heureuse du barrista. Les affaires sont les affaires, et je ne suis pas un cheap. De toute façon, je calcule qu’on me sert ici un café parmi les meilleurs en ville, pour un prix dérisoire. J’investis donc dans le service, même si ce dernier est toujours un peu laborieux. Et pas très volontaire.

M’installant sur une des tables qui longent la large fenestration, je constate que je suis bien seul ici. Même le fou du village se retrouve au centre d’une petite bande d’hurluberlus. Il reçoit un appel, ça semble important. Peut-être brasse-t-il des affaires. Des trucs louches. La drogue ? je m’interroge. Je penche davantage pour la porno, avec son air de pervers, ses culottes noires et délavées. Son veston vieillot, trop petit pour son ventre protubérant. Sa tête échevelée. Son regard perdu. Il est grotesque et se couvre de ridicule. Malgré tout, le barrista l’interpelle comme on le ferait un ami. Malgré sa mine bête, il fait partie de la place.

Alors que moi je suis seul. Un imposteur, une imposture. Un voyeur même. Un autre type de perversion.

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Coffee and a Newspaper

Café Myriade, Mackay Street, Montreal

Morning Coffee: 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.

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Morning Coffee: 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: 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.

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Morning Coffee: Bombay’s Zoroastrian Cafes

Zoroastrian carving, Bombay. Thanks to Toreajade.

Bombay’s Zoroastrian community emigrated from Iran about 1,000 years ago and brought their religion along with them–the oldest living monotheistic faith. They are also known as Parsis, because of their Persian origin. Since they cannot marry outside the community, they have retained a distinct identity and appearance. They worship in Bombay’s towers of silence. where sky burials are also performed–a practice that has come under scrutiny in recent years because of the declining vulture population.

Though Zoroastrians represent a mere 0.005% of India’s population, they have had a considerable impact on the country. In the West, the best known Parsi is probably Queen singer Freddy Mercury, who grew up in Bombay. Indians are more familiar with the Tata family, who seem to own everything–you start your day with a cup of TataTea, pay your TataPower bills, drive to work in your TataCar, and make calls on the TataSky network. In recent years, the Tatas have moved outside of India, acquiring Tetley tea, Ritz Carlton Hotels, and Jaguar.

Kyani Café, Bombay

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