Expat News
Hong Kong isn't a city for nostalgia.
By
Sep 17, 2007, 09:45

Expat Village is edited and published by Iain Williams in Caracas, Venezuela.


A Bloomberg article by food critic Richard Vinest at www.bloomberg.com

Travel back after a few years away and you may as well have stayed at home. The office where you worked, the bar where you went for a first date, the nightclub where you danced and the apartment block where you once lived all may have been demolished.

It's 24 years ago today that I arrived in Hong Kong to work for what turned out to be 12 years. Kai Tak airport, where I touched down, has gone. Lee Gardens Hotel, where I stayed, has been replaced by an office block. I couldn't even find any trace of Fifth Avenue, the dodgy disco where I spent many a night.

So I felt a bittersweet pleasure when I spotted Red Pepper, the Sichuan restaurant in Causeway Bay where the Lee Gardens concierge in the early 1980s sent many a visitor intimidated by the heat and dust, the crowds and noise of Hong Kong island.

Step inside the door of this eatery on Lan Fong Road and time stands still. Red Pepper has occupied this spot since 1975 and the decor is exactly as I remember it: the lanterns with red tassels, the cream walls, the orange tablecloths and the patterned carpet. It's how Chinese restaurants once looked in London.

The place was almost empty one lunchtime earlier this month. A Japanese couple showed up with shopping bags, and two mainland Chinese enjoyed a meal while the waiter immediately brought hot jasmine tea and a cold towel to my table as I tried to cool down.

I'd spent the morning checking out the two apartment blocks where I once lived. Both were still there, though there was so much development around one in North Point, it took a while to spot it. The building where I first worked was demolished in 1995. The street where it stood, once very much down at heel, is now lined with restaurants, coffee shops and smart new offices.

Cooking Creds

I never found another old favorite restaurant, Pine and Bamboo, or the place where I took two courses in Chinese cooking and earned a long-lost certificate, of which I was very proud.

Even the harbor isn't what it was. I stayed at the Four Seasons, built on reclaimed land that would have been part way to Kowloon in my day. There are now three cross-harbor tunnels, whereas I reached Hong Kong island by the only one in 1983.

The menu at Red Pepper appeared unchanged. There's chop suey for the uninitiated and a dessert of toffee bananas. The waiters always used to recommend sizzling prawns in a chili sauce and I heard the sound of the dish long before it was served to the Japanese diners. They dutifully held their napkins in front of them to avoid the spitting sauce, just as we all did in 1983.

Even in those days, there were people who didn't have a lot of respect for Red Pepper, preferring other Sichuan restaurants in Causeway Bay, Happy Valley and Wanchai. But I've spent more than two decades remembering Red Pepper's dishes, rushing to try them when Bar Shu, a Sichuan eatery, opened in London last year.

Fried Garoupa

This time around at Red Pepper, I ordered shredded chicken with hot garlic sauce, double-cooked pork and dry-fried shredded beans. You can choose medium or large dishes, though three was my limit, even for the smaller ones. If I go back, I'd also like to try the sizzling prawns and a dish of fried garoupa with spring onions. I'm not tempted by deep-fried, crispy rice with sea slugs.

The food was unchanged by time or memory. The pork -- boiled belly, stir fried with chili-bean paste -- was as tasty as ever: The sliced meat was served without needing a sauce, the spicy chicken given depth and sourness by the addition of vinegar.

This was the first place I tried the smoky dry-fried string beans. It was only last year, when I interviewed the cookery writer Fuchsia Dunlop, that I learned the unusual taste came from a mixture of minced pork and ya cai, an intense preserved mustard green from the city of Yibin, in China's Sichuan province.

Hong Kong dining has come a long way in the past quarter century. I enjoyed several exemplary meals over the course of a few days, including world-class dim sum at Lung King Heen, where a dish of wok-fried Wagyu beef cubes with Japanese green pepper was so good, I may find myself heading back hoping to find it in 2028.

Red Pepper Restaurant, G/F, 7 Lan Fong Road, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong. Tel. +852-2577-3811