The rural farmers supplying Hong Kong ‘Demon Chef’ Alvin Leung’s farm-to-table restaurant Cafe Bau
- Yi O farm, on Lantau Island, is a major supplier of rice and other produce to Alvin Leung’s Wan Chai restaurant Cafe Bau, which opened last year
- For Leung, the venture is about reducing his carbon footprint, and a reminder of a time when Hong Kong was more of an agrarian society
Imagine a world where inanimate things can talk: the locally grown produce used in Cafe Bau, a restaurant in Hong Kong’s Wan Chai district, might express mounting confusion as it moves closer to its final destination.
The bags of rice and fresh lemongrass harvested from southwest Lantau Island would find it hard to believe that Johnston Road, where trams ding, cars honk and people clamour, is still Hong Kong.
After all, this produce is from Yi O farm, a picturesque 100,000 sq ft (0.9 hectare) plot of farmland surrounded by mountains – an area that could not be any more different to the jam-packed streets of Wan Chai, a district where 180,000 people live and to which 600,000 people travel every day, according to the Hong Kong government’s Home Affairs Department.
“I wanted to tell people that there were more parts like this in Hong Kong probably 50 years ago. I would say up to the 1970s, there was still a lot of farmland. At its peak, this place used to have around 1,000 residents who farmed,” says Cafe Bau’s executive chef, Alvin Leung, gesturing into the distance. Yi O farm currently employs five people.
Yi O is a village with a history that goes back two centuries. As Hong Kong transformed, people moved away, and by 2012 it was deserted. That was the year the newly founded Yi O Agricultural Cooperation – a cooperative created by former residents and their supporters – began restoring the village.