Remember when walking around Hong Kong was a year-round assault on the senses, with an overpowering whiff for every season? In summer it was rancid drains. Waiting outside in the summer heat of a UA Queensway cinema queue for tickets was memorable for the rising wafts of noxious drain smells. Not any more, it’s all indoors now. Then about this time of year, you knew winter had officially started because out came the street hawkers selling stinky tofu. And boy did it stink – more so than now, or is that just my memory? I recall rounding the corner to the old Blake’s Pier from Central Post Office and being hit in the nostrils by a ghastly blast. All tidied away now by the environmental hygiene killjoys, of course. Along with that too sweet sickly pong of instant shopping mall waffles were nice smells, like roasting chestnuts and sweet potatoes.
But now there’s nothing natural about the nasal assaults. Apart from the boiled–over cooked milk smell from Starbucks, or “Charbucks” as the kids call it, and the stale-deep fat-frying oil smell from many MacDonald’s, which never seem to go away, most smells now seem artificial in origin.
All-pervading smell of Subway
Trudging up from the Star Ferry walkway to Central you are hit by the sickly Subway stench. It’s smelled like no known bread you’ve ever tasted, yet bread smell it is, apparently, billowing from the vents in saccharine gusts. It smells like it comes in a bottle and gets added to the air conditioning, but no, we are told. It’s not just me – whole internet sites are devoted to this topic. Food Republic describes the Subway stench as a “sweet-sour odor that doesn’t smell like any other bread ever baked in an oven, but it's undeniably bread-like.” Children live it, adults describe it as putrid and plastic, the writer adds. Polly Gillespie, a New Zealand radio personality, mused that it smells like “little elves baking perfect treats.” Oh please.
Just admit it – it smells chemical and vile. Food Republic called up Subway headquarters in Milford, Connecticut and spoke to Mark Christiano, Subway's "Global Baking Technologist," the man who’s responsible for churning out two billion loaves of bread each year. According to Christiano, the smell is not intentionally pumped outside to entice, although he says: “We are proud of the smell. Any baked product smells good. And we want you to catch that bread aroma.” You can’t miss it, it’s like a blanket. He claimed there was no deliberate plan to make it smell as it does, and that it’s just the result of “a combination of the baking process and the percentage of different ingredients.”
Christiano did hint that perhaps the caramelization smell of the sugar might be a factor in the bread smell. “There’s nothing artificial in there,” he insisted. I must be in the minority. As food Republic concludes: How could two billion loaves of bread be wrong?