Flying Sand | Food truck scheme hard to stomach after glory days of Hong Kong’s street hawkers
Niall Fraser pines for the era of ubiquitous fishball stalls, though he might give the stinky tofu a pass
When I arrived in Hong Kong just shy of quarter of a century ago, the city literally reeked of street food.
From the now strictly controlled stinky tofu – the powerful stench of which I swear, if condensed and bottled, could be sold as a chemical weapon – to more fishball stalls than you could shake a spiky stick at, the Fragrant Harbour was, from a culinary point of view, just that.
A walk down pretty much any street in those days was nothing short of a full-frontal attack on my underdeveloped and uncultured notion of what constituted food. Back then, my idea of exotic started at vegetables not cooked to within an inch of their life and finished at a clove of garlic.
The sheer variety and availability of rough and ready street food was surpassed only by the ravenous rate at with which everyone – from the bare-chested, triad-tattooed delivery man to the upwardly-mobile, pencil-skirted woman about town – scoffed the stuff down their gullets.
Then, the inevitable creeping corporatisation of what we eat and where we eat it began to consume the gas-fired mobile wok operators and table and chair strewn dai pai dong spectacles that made up Hong Kong’s haphazard but happy dining landscape.
