Ten things Hongkongers never say about food

1. This queue is far too long. This restaurant simply isn't worth the wait.

Hongkongers will wait in a queue for any length of time, for anything.  It is not unusual to wait 45 minutes for a table for lunch at a moderately good restaurant, and a couple of hours at a really popular dim sum place.  You rarely pass a restaurant of any standard which doesn't have a queue outside at lunch.  A good trick is to go alone - single diners get in straight away to fill gaps in the seating.

2. I'm really busy today.  Let's just get a sandwich and take it back to the office.

In Hong Kong, lunch means sitting down in a proper restaurant, and never means bringing your lunch back to the office.  You could fire a cannon in our office at 1:05pm and you wouldn't hit anyone.

3. Have we ordered too much seafood?

You can never have enough seafood in Hong Kong. Shark fin soup, whole lobsters, crab claws, abalone in addition to the prawns, mussels, oysters and fish Westerners are used to.

4. Ask them if it has bones - I hate having to avoid the bones.

There is a simple rule in Hong Kong - if the dish has the word "fillet" in the name, then it has no bones.  Otherwise, expect it to be between 50 and 99 percent bones.  My personal unfavourite is sweet and sour pork ribs.  That would be batter covered pieces of either pork or bone in sauce. Do not bite down too hard until you have ascertained which.

5. Are you mad?  You can't eat that part of the chicken!

The supermarket's default setting for whole chicken involves leaving the head on, which is kind of disturbing to us sensitive Westerners who don't like to meet our dinner face to face. Chicken feet of course are legendary.  Like skydiving, I admire those who partake but feel no compulsion to ever do that to my own body.  

6.  I don't go to that place anymore, they use too much MSG.

That whole 1980s "no MSG" thing evidently only happened in the West and passed the Chinese by. The cheaper Hong Kong restaurants have no problem with MSG and use it all over the place. 

7. Could I have a small coffee please, without cream/whipped cream/sugar/hazelnut syrup?

Hong Kong coffee basically consists of Starbucks and the local rip-off, Pacific Coffee.  The coffees are enormous and full of stuff that isn't coffee. Syrup is popular enough that I have even seen it in the few Australian-style espresso bars in Hong Kong.  Why not just go and have a milkshake?

8.  Is there a 7-11 around here?

Hong Kong has the second highest density of 7-11s per square kilometre of any country in the world (Macau is first). There are often 2 or 3 7-11s within sight of each other. Hence the trick Hongkongers like to play on tourists is to tell them the place they are trying to get to is "just next to/across from the 7-11".  True but useless.

9.  You know what I hate?  Cake.

Ok, I know cake is popular everywhere but if Hong Kong had any more cake it would be constructed out of cake. I have never seen so many cake, muffin, biscuit and baked good shops as in Hong Kong, and they are generally big shops in prime real estate positions.  I have a theory that in Hong Kong you are never more than 100 metres from a swiss roll.  

10.  I'll just heat that up in the oven.

The oven is not a standard kitchen appliance in Hong Kong and the vast majority of people do not have one.    Our house has one and I am the envy of my colleagues at work when I tell them how I had a meat pie or a roast on the weekend.  I don't really know why this is: roasted meats are a big part of Asian cuisine and as I noted above, everyone is mad for cake. Still, kitchen space is at a premium in Hong Kong, and I guess the oven is the least frequently used of the major cooking appliances.  To make up for it, Hongkongers have at least one kitchen appliance that I have never seen in Australia: the steaming microwave.