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Mouthing Off | Hong Kong’s Sammy’s Kitchen is closing – again. Should it actually do it this time?
Perhaps now the restaurant, like its famous neon sign has already done, should retire to a better place in our collective cultural memory
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Sammy’s Kitchen is closing. Again.
The Sai Ying Pun eatery, known for serving up Hong Kong-style Western cuisine – or “soy sauce dining” as it is colloquially known – has been in business for over 50 years. But come the end of January, the owner says it will bid its final farewell.
We have heard this tune once before. In 2017, it made a similar announcement. But a wave of public nostalgia brought some old customers back for a meal or two, and attracted a few new ones, and the restaurant decided to trudge on.
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This time around, though, it seems sentimentalism is not enough to save the struggling business.
To be honest, I don’t know anyone who eats there. That is the problem really – folks want to save these historic relics, but they don’t want to be customers.
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The appeal of these Hong Kong eateries, however, is never really about food. To many, they represent a collective memory – like the old General Post Office in Central, which might be ugly and impractical, but people still want it around.
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