Milk Cafe

Perhaps one of the “biggest news” ahead of Lunar New Year for the neighbourhood of Happy Valley is a new cha chaan teng (茶餐廳) has opened for business after several months of preparations.

That’s the “Milk Cafe” (牛奶冰室), which already has a branch in the nearby Causeway Bay. Its Happy Valley branch is the latest addition to the chain restaurant, owned by Taste of Asia, a local fast food group that also operates other businesses like Korean BBQ and hot pot restaurants all over Hong Kong.

To impress the (demanding?) neighbourhood of Happy Valley is definitely not an easy mission. We have too many foodies here, not to mention Happy Valley is the home for the most historic Cheung Hing Coffee Shop (祥興咖啡室), a favourite among many celebrities and tycoons in Hong Kong. So what’s special about the new Milk Cafe?

I have been there for three times so far, once for breakfast and twice for some takeaways. First, you need to know Milk Cafe is actually a combination of bakery and dine-in (well, currently you cannot do dinner dine-in due to existing Covid rules) restaurant. It has an open shelf where you can grab all kinds of breads and cakes and the most famous one here is the Pineapple Bun (菠蘿包). I actually quite like its Swiss Roll (瑞士卷). Don’t go there too late. Many breads and cakes are often sold out before dinner time.

Breakfast wise, it’s pretty standard. Milk Cafe has a breakfast menu that’s available before 11:30am everyday and it has everything that you can probably find in any other local restaurants. Noodle lovers will be happy to find many choices of noodles (instant noodles, rice noodles, etc) to go with assorted vegetables, satay beef, and spicy pork cubes. They all come with a butter toast and fried egg. This feels so Hong Kong — like ”One country, two systems”, and our local noodle breakfast has been always “One breakfast, two styles” — in both Chinese (noodle) and Western (toast) styles.

The restaurant also has a rich menu of dinner food, well, fast food in Chinese style. My favourite so far is its set dinner Satay Beef with Vermicelli Noodles in a pot (沙爹粉絲肥牛煲), coming with rice and a drink free of choice (and charge). It has other family-style pots for set dinner, like tofu, fish, and lamb. This is not your Michelin-star restaurant but it is not too bad for some local comfort food especially when you are in a hurry to grab something.

Restaurant staff are pretty nice here. Don’t know if this is related to a previous incident in its Causeway Bay branch where some of its staff got complaints from local diners. Perhaps the restaurant learned the lesson. Or perhaps we have a more demanding reputation for Happy Valley. Anyway, for me it’s nice to have another cha chaan teng just around the corner.

The restaurant remains open during Lunar New Year holiday but it will charge an additional 10% service fee per table/meal. Fair enough.

Life is more than a smoke

Title: 往事並不如煙 (Life is more than a smoke)
Camera: Nikon FM2/T
Lens: Nippon Kogaku Japan Nikon 50mm f/1.4 non-AI manual focus
Film: FujiFilm Superia X-TRA 400
Venue: Tai Kwun, Central

I remember this photograph was a quick one. From the moment when I saw the subject to when I pressed the shutter, it perhaps only cost me less than 15 seconds.

I like the composition of the photograph, and the three main colours in background, red wall, black door, and white stone. The woman was most likely on a short smoke break and she was all in white, which matched the overall colours of the photograph very well.

I was lucky to catch this moment. It just felt like “wow, I need to shoot this.” And I did.

Tai Kwun (大館) used to be the Central Police Station, including a detention centre mostly for refugees and dissidents. That was during the time when Hong Kong was under British rule. Nowadays Tai Kwun is a popular cultural and art spot.

People come and go. Buildings witness all the changes of their owners. Is this all about fate? Is life more than a smoke?

Life Beyond One Frame

Camera: Nikon FM2/T
Lens: Nippon Kogaku Japan Nikon 50mm f/1.4 non-AI manual focus
Film: FujiFilm Superia X-TRA 400
Venue: Causeway Bay, Hong Kong

A “frame burn” happens when the starting part of the film is exposed to light, i.e. that happens when you load a new roll of film into a camera, light will expose the first few inches. It actually creates an interesting opportunity to see your first frame of film becomes usually about half image and half (or sometimes 1/4) film artifact.

For every roll of film you load, you have an opportunity to pull off a really cool result for the first frame, and that is also known as the “frame burn” or “burning-first frame” in the industry.

I got this unique frame (yes, the very first frame of my new FujiFilm roll), which shows a 1/4 “frame burn” and the rest of some old local buildings in Causeway Bay, one of the world’s busiest shopping areas where Hong Kong’s SOGO Department Store and Times Square are located.

But there are still many local residents living here, right behind those fancy malls, and their lives are often neglected in the society.

I guess it’s just like the “frame burn”. Things happen always for a reason. You choose to forget to forget, or you just decide to forget it someday.

A Lucky Cat (FujiFilm 400 Review)

Title: Lucky Cat
Camera: Nikon FM2/T
Lens: Nippon Kogaku Japan Nikon 50mm f/1.4 non-AI manual focus
Film: FujiFilm Superia X-TRA 400
Venue: Soho, Hong Kong

This is my first time to try a FujiFilm film. Superia X-TRA 400 is known as an affordable film and ISO 400 also makes it an almost “all weather” film that preforms well in daylight and lowlight.

All film photographers will agree that it’s like 10x more challenging to shoot film at night due to lack of natural light, so a high ISO film will be quite desirable for night photography.

In comparison (this may be my very personal or “biased” view) I feel this FujiFilm film produces a warmer sense than some Kodak films, but there are also a lot of variables so my assessment is not scientific at all.

Perhaps 100 photographers will have 101 views about film.

What makes good XO sauce

XO sauce is a flavor-bomb condiment rich with dried seafood and cured ham. You can spoon it over any number of dishes, but it's also a fantastic ingredient to cook with.

XO sauce is quite popular in southern China, probably originated in Guangdong province, and it has growingly gained more fame after celebrity chefs at hotels like The Peninsula (半島酒店) and Mandarin Oriental (文華東方) in Hong Kong put it on the world stage and branded it as a “secret sauce” for Chinese cuisine. I remember my friends in the US or Singapore sometimes like to ask me to buy them a bottle of XO sauce from MO’s gift shop before I board my flight.

It has turned out that our Meta (Facebook) in-house chef Yew Eng Tong is also a master of XO sauce. I got a small bottle from him ahead of the new year holiday and then I just can’t stop having it for almost everything I cook and eat, noodles, wonton, or my favorite Shanghai rice cake in soup (上海湯年糕).

In Hong Kong, I'm sure everyone has his/her favorite XO sauce and my flavor prefers relatively light and wet sauce and it must taste fresh. The key to success for XO sauce is all about the ingredients such as dried scallop, chilli peppers, Chinese Jinhua ham, dried shrimp, garlic, canola oil and so on. Now you can tell it’s definitely not cheap to make some good XO sauce.

The name XO sauce comes from fine XO (extra-old) cognac, which is a popular Western liquor in Hong Kong, and considered by many to be a chic product in the old and good times. In fact, the name “XO sauce” is a misnomer since the condiment contains no cognac, and it is not really a sauce in the traditional, smooth sense, but more chunky, like a relish.

Btw, “Upstairs Canteen” is the name of cafeteria for Meta employees in the Hong Kong office, aka our very own food paradise.