Lunching with a vegan does rather limit your choice of restaurants. Although many places offer a fair choice of dishes to suit vegetarians, few cater to the vastly stricter vegan regimen that abjures all animal products, including eggs, cheese, milk, butter, and even honey.
When ringing up to invite conductor Georg Tintner to lunch, I mentioned this problem to his wife, Tanya, a practically minded lady who organises much of her husband's business, and who characteristically had a ready solution to the problem.
She suggested Kung Tak Lam, a Shanghainese vegetarian restaurant in Causeway Bay to which the Tintners had been introduced by Klaus Heymann, boss of the Hong Kong-based Naxos classical label, for which Mr Tintner records. It had clearly struck a chord.
We arrived at noon, and eventually settled on six dishes accompanied by tea.
Tanya, though not a vegan, is also a vegetarian, and I asked how they get round the problems this poses when eating out. She replied that they get round it by eating in. Trips to restaurants are a rare treat, although more common in Hong Kong than some of their other regular ports of call.
'One of the nice things here is that we can eat out. Because Chinese cooking hardly uses dairy products, most Chinese vegetarian food is vegan,' she pointed out.
