Diner’s Diary | Hong Kong’s oldest tea house closing: what I will and won’t miss about Lin Heung Tea House

Lin Heung Tea House, the famed dim sum spot on Wellington Street in Central that has been a draw for visitors and locals alike for decades, will close its doors at the end of February, ending its 101-year presence in Hong Kong.

One of the last traditional tea houses left in Hong Kong, it’s known for its chaotic atmosphere, as lunchtime diners flock like magpies to trolleys coming out of the kitchen for freshly steamed dim sum in bamboo steamers. The staff are less than hospitable, and customers have to clean their own tableware with hot tea.

The tea here is not served in pots – diners are given gai wan teacups, lidded bowls without handles, which waiters top up with boiling water. It takes some expertise to drink from these. Lin Heung is also known for serving dim sum items that are not available in most restaurants any more, such as quail eggs or pork liver siu mai, and steamed Chinese sausage rolls.

By dinner time, the mayhem has dissipated and the menu has switched from dim sum to family-style and banquet-style dishes. They can range from deep-fried sliced chicken in lemon sauce and steamed salted fish and minced pork to the labour intensive eight treasure duck, stuffed with ingredients such as mushrooms, lotus seeds, dried shrimp and glutinous rice, and pork lung soup with almond.

The shuttering of Lin Heung is the final chapter in the history of a restaurant whose roots in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, bordering Hong Kong, go back to 1889. Its owners opened three branches in Hong Kong in 1918, of which the one on Wellington Street is the sole survivor, having moved there from Queen’s Road Central.

The tea house’s fate was sealed in 2015, when CSI Properties, an ambitious property developer whose chairman is Mico Chung Cho-yee, bought the ground floor and first floor of the Tsang Chiu Ho Building where Lin Heung is located.