This week in PostMag: festive food styling and Cantopop Christmas ballads
As the holidays arrive, we reflect on food, memory, music – and the Hong Kong rituals that still anchor the season
In her Tai Tong studio, food stylist Gloria Chung Wing-han hosts a beautifully unassuming holiday meal. Associate editor Gavin Yeung finds her arranging persimmons and lardo on silver platters, building a towering centrepiece from onions, radicchio and grapes, and serving a deceptively tart trifle in a glass dish that could double as a plant pot. It’s minimal, a little funky and entirely her own. “Don’t try to make 20 things in three hours,” she cautions. It’s advice I’ve often failed to heed myself but a good reminder for this year.
Chef Cary Docherty of Lobster Bar and Grill tells us how he celebrates the holidays at home, which, reassuringly, involves prawn cocktail and his mum’s butter tarts. Proof that even professionals keep it simple and classic never goes out of style.
Of course, nothing about the holidays is ever as effortless as it looks. Andrea Lo unpacks the peculiar social rituals of being a holiday guest in Hong Kong, from the delicate gift politics to the ever-contentious shoe debate. Her sharp, funny take makes one thing clear: everyone’s winging it and everyone’s being judged.
Holiday drinks, at least, can be adjusted to taste. Three bartenders offer up festive pours including a tart, fizzy watermelon-rum number involving tartaric acid and a soda charger, if you’re feeling ambitious, and a delicious-looking mulled wine if you’re a low-effort queen like myself. Approach accordingly.