The cuisine of Hong Kong can best be described as a type of eclectic cuisine with extensive influences from Cantonese cuisine and parts of non-Cantonese-speaking China (especially Chaozhou, Dongjiang, Fujian and the Yangtze River Delta), Western world, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Due to Hong Kong's past as a British colony and long history of being an international city of commerce. From the roadside stalls to the most upscale restaurants, Hong Kong provides an unlimited variety of food in every class. Complex combinations and international gourmet expertise have given Hong Kong the reputable labels of "Gourmet Paradise" and "World's Fair of Food" .
Background
Modern Hong Kong has a predominantly service-based economy, and restaurant businesses serve as a main economic contributor. With the third-densest population per square meters in the world and serving a population of 7 million, Hong Kong is host to a restaurant industry in which competition is cutthroat. Due to its small geographical size, Hong Kong contains a high number of restaurants per unit area.
With Chinese ethnicity making up 98% of the resident population, Chinese cuisine is naturally served at home. A majority of Chinese in Hong Kong are Cantonese in addition to sizeable numbers of Hakka, Teochew and Shanghainese people, and home dishes are Cantonese with occasional mixes of the other three types of cuisines. Rice is predominantly the main staple for home meals. Home ingredients are picked up from local grocery stores and independent produce shops, although supermarkets have become progressively more popular.
Traditional Chinese preference of food freshness means grocery shopping happens much more frequently, and in small quantities, for Hong Kong's population than the Western world. Take-out and dining out is also very common, since people are often too busy to cook with an average 47-hour work week.
History
19th century: Colonial origins
The cuisine of Hong Kong traces its origins to its founding as a British colonial outpost in 1841. Soon after the colony was founded, many British and other Western merchants along with Chinese from nearby Guangzhou flocked there to conduct business. Initially, much of Hong Kong society was segregated into expatriate Westerners, a majority of working class Chinese coolies, Chinese farmers and fishermen, and Chinese merchants. The simple peasant cuisine was rudimentary compared to the cuisine of 19th century Canton (now commonly known as Guangzhou).
As the colony developed there arose a need for meals to entertain businessmen. Some Chinese restaurants were founded in the late 19th century and early 20th century as branches of renowned restaurants in Canton and offered elaborate meals consisting of traditional Chinese "eight main courses and eight entrees" (八大八小) types of banquets for 2 taels of silver, at the time equal to a clerk's monthly wage. Before 1935 when prostitution was still legal in Hong Kong, female escorts often accompanied diners to restaurant meals, especially those of a business entertainment nature. Opium was also offered which lasted until World War II. For the majority of Chinese who were not part of the merchant class, dining out in restaurants was non-existent and consisted of simple Cantonese country fares. Meat only appeared in festive occasions and celebrations such as birthdays were often done by catering services who prepared the meals at the celebrant's home. The restaurant scene for Europeans in Hong Kong was segregated from Chinese dining. Elaborate colonial dining existed at the likes of Hongkong Hotel and subsequently Gloucester Hotel.
1920s: Canton's influence
Hong Kong's dining lagged behind the then-leader of Chinese cuisine, Canton, for a long time and many Hong Kong chefs spent their formative years in Canton. Canton was renowned for its food, and there was a traditional saying of "Eat in Canton" (食在廣州). Cantonese cuisine in Canton reached its peak during the 1920s and was renowned in the care in preparation even for peasant fares such as char siu or boat congee. Dai San Yuan was renowned for its braised shark fin dish that charged 60 silver yuan, equivalent to 6 months' wage for a working class family. The Guandong cooking style eventually trickled down to the culinary scene in Hong Kong.
1949: Shanghainese and Western influences
The victory of Chinese Communists in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 created a wave of refugees into Hong Kong. A sizable number of refugees were from non-Cantonese speaking parts of China, including the Yangtze River Delta, and introduced Shanghai cuisine to Hong Kong. On the other hand, most renowned chefs of Canton, now known as Guangzhou in pinyin romanization, settled in Hong Kong to escape from Communist rule in mainland China.
Prostitution and opium had by then long faded from the restaurant scene, and in order to survive, many restaurants started to tap into winning businesses from families by offering yum cha and wedding banquets, while on the other hand, the end of strict colonial segregation by the British colonial government and expatriate Westerners after the Second World War opened up Western fare to the Chinese.
Egg tarts and Hong Kong-style milk tea soon became part of Hong Kong's food culture. It could be argued that the seeds of Hong Kong society as understood today were not sown until 1949, and the cuisine of Hong Kong has its direct roots in this period.
1960s-80s: prosperity
By the 1960s Hong Kong was past the worst of the economic depression, and there was a long and continuous period of relative calm and openness compared to the Communist misrule in Mao Zedong-era China and martial law isolation in Taiwan. The Cantonese cuisine in Hong Kong had by then surpassed that of Guangzhou, which had witnessed a long period of decline after the Communists came to power. The rising prosperity from the mid 1960s had given birth to increasing demand for quality dining. Many of the chefs, who spent their formative years in pre-Communist Guangzhou and Shanghai, started to bring out the best of fine dining specialties from pre-1949 Guangzhou and Shanghai. Families had largely abandoned catering services and resorted to restaurants for celebratory meals. Seafood started to become specialised delicacies in the 1960s, followed by games in the 1970s.
This wave of prosperity also propelled Hong Kong Chinese's awareness of foreign food trends, and many are willing to try foreign ingredients such as asparagus and crayfish from Australia. Foreign food styles such as Japanese and Southeast Asian cuisine started to influence local food, and the pace of change accelerated during the late 1970s and early 1980s. This gave birth to nouvelle Cantonese cuisine (Chinese: 新派粵菜 ) that incorporated foreign dishes such as sashimi into Cantonese banquets. For the first time, many Hong Kong Chinese started to have the economic means to visit many Western restaurants of the domain of mainly wealthy expatriate Westerners such as Gaddi's of the Peninsula Hotel. During these years, there was great wealth growth from stock market investments, and one visible manifestation of the resultant nouveau riche mentality in 1970s Hong Kong were sayings such as "mixing shark's fin soup with rice" (Chinese:魚翅撈飯).
1980-90s: links with mainland China and Taiwan
China initiated economic reforms when Deng Xiaoping came to power after Mao Zedong died. The opening up of the country gave chefs from Hong Kong chances to reestablish links with chefs from mainland China severed in 1949 and opportunities to gain awareness of various regional Chinese cuisines. Many of these cuisines also contributed to nouvelle Cantonese cuisines in Hong Kong. The lift of martial law in Taiwan in 1987 jump-started Taiwanese links with mainland China and has caused a proliferation of eateries specializing in Taiwanese cuisine in Hong Kong as Taiwanese tourists and businessmen used Hong Kong as a mid-point for visits to mainland China. From 1978 until 1997 there was no dispute Hong Kong was the epicenter of Chinese, not merely Cantonese, cuisine worldwide, with Chinese restaurants in mainland China and Taiwan, and among overseas Chinese communities, racing to employ chefs trained or worked in Hong Kong and emulating dishes improvised or invented in Hong Kong. Hong Kong-style Cantonese cuisine (Chinese: 港式粵菜 ) became a coinword for innovative Chinese cuisine during this period. It was even unofficially rumored the Chinese government had secretly consulted the head chef for the Peking Garden Restaurant of Hong Kong, part of the Maxim's restaurant and catering conglomerate, to teach chefs back at the renowned Quanjude restaurant in Beijing how to make good Peking Duck, Quanjude's signature dish, in the early 1980s as the skills to produce the dish were largely lost during the Cultural Revolution.
Post-1997: decline
After Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, the Asian financial crisis and SARS epidemic led to a decade-long depression. The boom in Hong Kong culinary scene came to a halt and many restaurants, including a number of renowned eateries like Sun Tung Lok, closed down. It is argued that the catch up in prosperity among populations from coastal regions of China, particularly the nouveau riche (derogatory Chinese:
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