Benazir Bhutto - Eat Your Heart Out

You know it's slow news season when there's a syndicated article in the Hong Kong Standard about the humble cha chaan teng. Hong Kong's version of the UK's "greasy spoon", these are the sort of places Benazir Bhutto and her scarves wouldn't have been seen dead in, filled as they are with enough health and safety infractions to keep an inspector busy till he too falls on his sunroof lever and joins the choir of early-deceased Sindhi dynastic power-mongers in the sky.

Set meals is what the cha chaan teng does best – "most" is probably a truer reflection of the actual situation. The one thing that can be said for the set lunches (20-odd Hong Kong dollars) is that they're better than the set breakfasts, which rate as some of the worst food served up on the planet. If you like you're fried eggs watery, your macaroni tasteless and your sausage straight out of a giant bag in the freezer marked "franks", then this is definitely the place to go.

The Standard article touches on one of the rules the people who work in these places need to observe – rudeness – as the author extends his spin from the F&B ("the tea is superb, smooth and fragrant") to the service ("the gruff waiters and working-class ambience carry a quintessential Hong Kong vibe that other places lack").

What he fails to comment on, however, and what shows he is no habitué of these establishments, are three of the essential elements that any self-respecting chaan teng must possess. First, it must have rectangular tables along the wall with seating on benches-with-backs for four people, and round tables in the middle with green plastic stools. Since everyone wants to sit at the oblong tables, the circular ones act as mere staging posts, at which families will perch or around which they will hover until someone shows the first signs of leaving, like finishing their food or folding up their copy of Apple Daily's Racing Guide.

At this point, the single inhabitant of the table will order another cup of the world's foulest drink, yin yeung, a combination of two drinks that are in their own right strong contenders for that title, the cha chaan teng's proprietary version of "coffee" and "tea", of which the only thing that can be said is that any resemblance to coffee and tea is entirely coincidental.

Of course, like nearly every hot drink that you order at the chaan teng, a generous portion of evaporated milk is poured into and down the sides of the cup/beaker/mug, which explains why when you do get a wall seat and try to stretch your legs you will invariably come up against boxes of the stuff stashed under the benches.

Which brings us to the second essential of these places: which is that no drink order is allowed to arrive at the table before at least some of the contents have been spilled into the saucer. (This, incidentally, explains why the more labour-intensive cup-and-saucer retains its leadership in face of fierce competition from the mug and the beaker.) For those of you who wonder why Hong Kong's newspaper stalls (maaih bou ji) give away a packet of tissues with each purchase, wonder no longer.

The third prerequisite of the cha chaan teng is that it should on no account have enough knives. Quite why this should be, I don't pretend to know. It is one of those aspects of life in Hong Kong that has no rational underpinning, like the Jockey Club closing down accounts of people who win money and drivers who automatically cross into the outside lane as they enter a tunnel, even though experience tells them that it would be quicker to stay in the inside lane.

As in all food outlets, the thing to do is order à la carte. I can personally recommend the French toast at the Sha Tin Wai greasy spoon next door to the Jockey Club betting shop. Especially on day like today, when they seem to have made a New Year's resolution not to dilute the maple syrup.