Eating in Hong Kong
Living in Hong Kong, I have accepted a fact about myself: I plan meetings around meals now. This city’s real infrastructure is not the MTR or the airport express. It is the dai pai dong, the cha chaan teng, and the noodle shop with six tables and a line out the door.
The canon, as I have assembled it so far: wonton noodles where the broth is clear and the wontons are all shrimp and snap. Roast goose with skin like glass. Dim sum on Sunday morning, ordered by pointing and courage. Milk tea strong enough to stand a spoon in, and an egg tart from the bakery near the office that has ended more than one bad afternoon. Typhoon shelter crab when visitors come and I want to look like a man who knows things.
What I admire — as a person who runs operations for a living — is the discipline. These are tiny kitchens doing enormous volume with no wasted motion, mise en place as a philosophy. A good noodle shop is a better-run operation than most of the data centers I consult for, and its feedback loop is one mouthful long.
People ask what I will miss when this posting ends. The skyline, sure. The harbor. But mostly I will miss eating in a city where lunch is a serious discipline and dinner is a second one — where the best seat in town is a plastic stool and costs twelve dollars.