Outside the Lin Heung teahouse, a woman is laying out the day’s newspapers on a stand; inside, at just after 6am, it is already busy and the air hums with Cantonese chatter. Most of the customers are elderly or middle-aged working men. Some sit alone, engrossed in the papers as they slurp tea and eat their breakfast; others gossip with their friends.
Bleary-eyed after my early rising, I find a perch at one end of a glass-topped table and a waiter swiftly brings me my bowl, teacup and spoon, and a pot of musty pu’erh tea. Soon waitresses are passing by with their trolleys, calling out the names of dumplings and other titbits. One lifts the lids of towers of small bamboo steamers to offer me fluffy buns stuffed with chicken and small dishes containing folds of tripe. Another has sticky rice and chicken wrapped in fragrant lotus leaves.
The tea-waiters rush around with their kettles, replenishing teapots and bowls. Every few minutes more customers arrive and the clamour of conversation grows louder, mixing with the clatter of teacups and bowls.
Lin Heung is a rough-and-ready sort of place, with a worn tiled floor, metal spittoons and ceiling fans whirring away. The walls are a clutter of framed calligraphies and red plastic boards listing some of the dishes and dumplings on offer.
One of my neighbours at the table, Mr Wong, 50, has been coming here almost daily for four years, to wake himself up before he clocks on for his job as an office cleaner. “The tea is good, the water is good and the boss is a smart man. He doesn’t cheat us. He knows how to keep everyone happy,” he says as he prods the Dragon Well tea leaves in his cup.
His friend Mr Lau, 83, says he’s been a regular for 50 years. “I come every day,” he says. “And many of the staff have been here for years, too. Nothing changes, including the quality of the food. That’s why I keep coming.”
Lin Heung, or “Lotus Fragrance”, was founded in the 1920s and is one of the few old-fashioned teahouses that remain in Hong Kong, although it has moved several times from its original location. The first teahouses opened in the territory in the 1840s but they began to flourish only after 1897, when the British authorities abolished their night-time curfew for Chinese people. From the 1920s until the 1940s, they sprang up all over the territory and acquired a vital social function in the postwar economic boom.
Cheng Po Hung, in his Early Hong Kong Eateries (published by the University of Hong Kong), describes how whole families lived in cramped accommodation, sharing apartments with limited cooking facilities or even no kitchen at all. Teahouses were cheap and convenient, as much for family meals as entertaining guests or discussing business.
Some became known for particular trades, such as the Kam Kong restaurant, frequented by dealers of watches and gemstones, others for their board games or musical entertainments. Visiting a teahouse became so central to Hong Kong life that people began to greet one another by asking “Have you had tea yet?” instead of the more traditional “Have you eaten?”
While the teahouse ritual is known as yum cha (drink tea), the dumplings and other small eats that are traditionally served are known collectively as dim sum, the Cantonese dialect form of the Mandarin dian xin. Dim sum is a curious term that defies direct translation into English but means something like “touch the heart”. It dates back to at least the Song Dynasty (AD960-1279), when historical sources mention it as a name for the snacks customarily served for breakfast. Though dian xin are eaten all over China, it is in Hong Kong and the Cantonese south that they are most dazzling and abundant.
The har gau, or fresh prawn dumpling, is the best-known of the delicate steamed dumplings and one of the most perfect when properly made. A dim sum cook will tease the white wheatstarch dough into a perfect circle with the flat of a cleaver blade and then wrap it around whole prawns, lightly seasoned and mixed with a scattering of crunchy bamboo.
After a swift steaming, the faint pink of the prawns glows through the pearly translucence of the wrapper, with its neatly pinched edge. The prawns are simultaneously crisp and tender, the wrapper soft and glutinous in the mouth.
Cheung fun, sheets of slithery rice pasta wrapped, perhaps, around deep-fried doughsticks, barbecued pork or fresh prawn and served with a drizzling of sweetened soy sauce, are made by pouring a thin riceflour batter on to a sheet of muslin and steaming it, before wrapping it around the chosen stuffing with a few flips of a spatula blade.
Steamed char siu buns are soft and fluffy, their white dough breaking open into a smile of barbecued pork in a savoury-sweet sauce.
There are also fried snacks, such as pan-fried slabs of Asian radish in rice paste, studded with morsels of bacon and dried shrimp, and deep-fried yam cakes with frizzy shells encasing a soft, comforting paste and a meaty stuffng.
The Cantonese dim sum tradition draws its inspiration from all over China, as well as further afield, so you will often find the famous Shanghainese “soup” dumplings, which burst when you bite them in a flush of savoury stock, as well as boiled pork dumplings served with soy sauce and chilli oil in a nod to the Sichuanese tradition.
There are also Vietnamese spring rolls and western-style cakes. Beancurd-skin rolls are served with English Worcestershire sauce, deep-fried lobster dumplings with salad cream mixed with tinned fruit: this is not, as many believe, a bastardisation of Chinese food for western tastes but just evidence of the eclecticism and inventiveness of Hong Kong chefs.
A dim sum breakfast or lunch is a casual and often chaotic affair but it still has a few of its own particular rituals. You may thank your host for pouring tea into your cup by tapping your index and middle fingers lightly on the table. This practice is said to date back to the late 18th century, when Emperor Qianlong went on a fact-finding mission to the south of China.
Travelling incognito, as emperors sometimes did in those days, in an attempt to understand what was really going on in China, he dropped in on a teahouse with his small retinue. When the emperor poured them some tea, his footmen were flustered because palace etiquette dictated that they should respond by falling to their knees and yet they knew they should not give away his disguise. So they tapped their two fingers on the table as a miniature form of prostration, laying the foundations of a habit still common in Cantonese communities all over the world.
Booming property prices and competition from restaurants spelt the end of the heyday of the Hong Kong teahouses. Their vast, sprawling premises were knocked down and replaced by skyscrapers; some teahouses moved to new locations, most of them closed down for good. These days people flock to Lin Heung for a glimpse of the past, or the smarter Luk Yu teahouse nearby in Central. Luk Yu, named after the Tang Dynasty scholar who wrote a treatise on tea in the 8th century, was founded in 1933 and retains its old wooden panelling and atmosphere of edgy glamour. Here, in the mornings, you can still find waiters carrying snacks on trays slung around their necks, a style of service that predates the trolley.
But if the old-fashioned Hong Kong teahouse is on the wane, the dim sum tradition itself is flourishing. Popular establishments such as Maxim’s in City Hall, near the harbour, are crowded and clamorous at lunchtime on Sundays; while more upmarket restaurants such as the Victoria City in Wanchai offer fine dim sum in a calmer atmosphere.
The Crystal Jade chain has made waves across Asia with its chic decor and fabulous dumplings. And even in the west, where the yum cha ritual was once the preserve of Chinese communities and a few China aficionados, dim sum have leapt out of the ghetto. Alan Yau’s restaurants, Hakkasan and Yauatcha, convinced Londoners that the Chinese tea lunch could be the height of glamour. In his wake, many other non-Chinatown bars and restaurants in the British capital have begun to offer dim sum.
The international rise of dim sum is part of the broader trend for grazing on small portions of delicious food. Spanish tapas and Japanese sushi offer similar pleasures: variety, delicacy, a constant titillation of the tastebuds and the palate. Top European chefs are increasingly drawn to the idea of “little eats”, inviting their customers to assemble their own meals from long menus of stimulating titbits. Cantonese dim sum, with its thrilling diversity of tastes, colours and textures, seems finally to have found its place in the world.
Fuchsia Dunlop is the author, most recently, of ‘Revolutionary Chinese Cooking’ (Ebury Press)
