Dim sum in Bangkok's Chinatown beats 'boring' Buddha statue
Cecilie Gamst Berg
Lantau Island has the most famous thing in Hong Kong apart from Louis Vuitton: Southeast Asia's Biggest Outdoor Sitting Bronze Buddha. Wow! That rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? We in Hong Kong are proud of this record, but if you re-examine that title it seems more like an exercise in listing adjectives than any real achievement.
Bangkok's Golden Buddha, on the other hand, is just the World's Biggest Gold Statue, full stop. Boring! So, naturally, I couldn't be bothered with that when I was in Thailand recently, and went to the capital's Chinatown instead.
After three days of Thai food I was gagging to eat with chopsticks and in need of proper chilli sauce. Personally, I think Thai food was made to be eaten with chopsticks, but no, fork and spoon is what you get. Weird!
Anyway, Chinatown in Bangkok looked disappointingly similar to the other places I had been to in the city; there were just more Chinese characters on show. Furthermore, it was not at all apparent who was Chinese. After much trying and failing, I found a teashop with three card-playing old geezers who were actually Chinese, albeit of the Mandarin persuasion. And although they didn't understand "yum cha" they did understand "dim sum".
They directed me to the elegant-looking Shanghai Mansion, which, outrageously, didn't open for another hour, at 11.30am! Didn't they know I had to navigate Bangkok traffic afterwards to get back to the hotel where my friend R was waiting, unable to go anywhere crowded because her arm was broken in three places?
Shanghai Mansion offers "all you can eat for 599 baht [HK$140]", so is probably a really upmarket venue, but what was I supposed to do for a whole hour? Go and look at some gold statue or something?
Fortunately, The Canton House just across the road had the sense to be open and, as the place was guarded by a guy in shorts sitting on a stool and wearing a motorcycle helmet, I thought it would be safe to go in. The cavernous hall was reassuringly packed with people eating with chopsticks. The staff, who didn't speak Chinese, tried the spoon-and-fork trick on me and couldn't provide bowls (a sad phenomenon in Chinese restaurants around the world). But the dim sum, served individually in the baskets instead of in threes or fours, was as good as any I have enjoyed for only HK$23.
And it saved me from having to stand and gawk at gold.
