The sinking of Hong Kong’s Jumbo Floating Restaurant – bane or blessing?
- Kate Whitehead laments the demise of a cultural icon of Hong Kong
- Ed Peters argues the bottom of the South China Sea is the best place for the Jumbo Floating Restaurant
Let’s be frank, the food wasn’t phenomenal. You went for the spectacle – the neon lights and gold trim, the ferry ride there, photos and bragging rights. Most locals went only once, to check it out, but that didn’t mean they didn’t love it – it was part of the landscape, a cultural icon.
Pre-pandemic, a typical day out for visitors to Hong Kong might have included taking the Star Ferry across the harbour in the morning, jumping on a bus to Stanley Market for the afternoon and wrapping things up with dinner on the Jumbo. Now the Star Ferry’s days are numbered, the market is a shadow of its former self, and the Jumbo rests in a watery grave.
Tour guides will need to update their itineraries when they do get the green light to bring visitors to Hong Kong again because, post-Covid-19, it’s a vastly different city.
Kate Whitehead
Setting environmental considerations aside for a moment, the bottom of the South China Sea is far and away the best place for that gaudy monstrosity known as the Jumbo F***ing Rip-off.
I went to the Mumbo Jumbo once and loathed it. Aberdeen Harbour was as stinky as ever. The food, to be generous, was mediocre, and the prices were not what you’d call a bargain. (In fact, it’s like this with any novelty drinking/dining establishment: you pay for the mechanics in a revolving restaurant or the view in a sky bar and the soi-disant bragging rights in either.)
But what really stuck in my craw was the Bumboat’s ambience: fake, ersatz, tawdry and – beneath the thin veneer of glitz – lacklustre; even the staff (in between half-heartedly hustling for tips) seemed to act as if they were taking part in a pointless pantomime, a show that was going to run and run and run.
Ha! But it didn’t, did it? If there’s one reason to be cheerful about the novel coronavirus, it’s that it disposed of Jumbo Dumbo, the floating white elephant that no doubt earned the ultra-uxorious “Doctor” Stanley Ho Hung-sun a pretty penny or two.
Perhaps the Jumble’s inundation could mark a, um, watershed for Hong Kong’s food and beverage industry. Should Hong Kong International Airport ever return to anything like normal, it could really do with a hearty, authentic cha chaan teng to fill hungry travellers’ stomachs rather than the bland menus regurgitated by international chains.
Failing that, perhaps residents could vote for which Hong Kong non-icon should be sent to the bottom of the sea once a year.
Ed Peters