Latest news with #LukYuTeaHouse
South China Morning Post
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
How Hong Kong culinary icon Chua Lam inspired a generation to explore the world through food
With Chua Lam's death on June 25 , Hong Kong has lost not just a culinary icon but a storyteller who inspired a generation of Hongkongers to explore the world through food. Advertisement As a child of the Asia-Australia diaspora, my first experience of Chua Lam was via television. My mother had rented one of his series on VHS tapes, and I remember sitting down to an episode of him visiting a vineyard in Australia. While tasting the wine, the vineyard's owner said: 'This is a rare vintage, so we should drink it instead of spitting it into the spittoon.' Chua, however, looked straight at the camera and said to the audience, in Cantonese: 'This wine isn't that great, but we can drink it anyway.' I was instantly captivated – not only because of Chua's candour, but also because he said it with confidence. Through that confidence, you felt wisdom in his words. Chua at Luk Yu Tea House in Central, Hong Kong, in 2008. Photo: David Wong Born in Singapore in 1941 to a poet father – who later worked at Hong Kong film studio Shaw Brothers – and a school principal mother, Chua was the third of four children. As a child, he lived above a movie theatre, which helped fuel an obsession with cinema.
South China Morning Post
27-03-2025
- South China Morning Post
Hong Kong restaurants, put more pictures on menus to win back customers and tourists
There is a lot of anxious hand-wringing these days about how to entice diners back to restaurants in Hong Kong and how to encourage mainland Chinese tourists to explore the cosmopolitan range of eateries in our city. Advertisement Well, one simple idea is just to put more pictures on menus. I know for many chefs and restaurateurs, adding images of dishes to menus is not considered very posh. In fact, some find it cheap and tacky, devaluing the brand and assuming clients are illiterate louts . Fast food customers need visual boards to order, not fine dining's cultured clientele. But in multilingual Hong Kong, maybe that assumption is false. Having been educated overseas, my level of Chinese reading is far from mother-tongue fluency. In a cha chaan teng or local diner , sometimes I have trouble deciphering all the different dishes. Many of the Chinese characters might as well be Greek to me – which I wouldn't mind because I like Greek food. The nostalgia-inducing menu at Luk Yu Tea House – all in Chinese and lacking pictures. Photo: Charmaine Mok In more refined Chinese banquet palaces, the dish names are even more elaborate, sometimes poetic and vague. In such venues, being able to point to a picture and order is a great relief when I am unsure of what a specific dish consists of. And if the image looks good, I am more likely to try it than if I have no idea what is in it. Advertisement
