How Hong Kong’s cooked-food centres are the heart of the city’s culinary scene – but we must keep loving them, or risk losing them
- Home to Michelin-star restaurants and Asia’s best bar, Hong Kong also has a wealth of cooked-food centres selling high-quality, low-priced food to the masses
- Some, however, have fallen foul of the machine of local bureaucracy, threatening jobs, livelihoods – and a unique part of Hong Kong
Hong Kong is home to one of the most dynamic food and beverage scenes in Asia, with 77 Michelin-star restaurants, the continent’s best bar and enough suave establishments serving picture-perfect dishes to keep one’s social media followers scrolling for a lifetime.
Looking at the city through this lens – Instagram filter on, of course – it’s plain to see why at the other end of the dining spectrum, Hong Kong’s cooked-food centres, with their often mundane decor, dull-tiled floors and uniform tables and chairs, don’t tend to get the same kind of attention, especially among non-locals.
The solution came in the form of huge municipal buildings, constructed to house cooked-food centres with cavernous communal dining areas bordered by hole-in-the-wall spaces for vendors to operate out of, along with wet markets and other community-focused amenities.
These complexes continued to pop up throughout the remainder of the 20th century and beyond – more than 50 were built in the 1980s and ’90s alone – until almost every neighbourhood had one of its own.
The idea behind cooked-food centres was, and still is, to facilitate the sale of high-quality, low-priced food to the masses by offering vendors low rental rates the likes of which are hard to come by elsewhere.