Indo-Chinese cuisine in Hong Kong: a delicious dialogue of cultures and flavours
At a moment when diplomats are talking about rebuilding trust between India and China, two chefs in Hong Kong are already finding common ground in spice, smoke and fire
On September 12 and 13, world leaders and ambassadors are due to gather in New Delhi for the 18th Brics Summit, with President Xi Jinping expected to be among them – his first visit to India since 2019. It is a moment of cautious optimism in a relationship that has see-sawed between tension and thaw for the better part of a decade, marked by such events as the 2017 Doklam (Donglang) stand-off and the 2020 clashes in the Galwan valley.
But as politicians cook up deals and diplomacy, two chefs in Hong Kong would rather let the food do the talking. In July, chef Palash Mitra of Prince and the Peacock and chef Theign Phan of Grand Majestic Sichuan fired up their tandoors and woks, trading notes on the almost 2,000-year-old conversation their cuisines have been engaged in, long before anyone put it on an agenda.
Growing up in Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal state in eastern India, Mitra never thought of Chinese food as a separate cuisine. It was simply stitched into the city’s culinary fabric.
He remembers the Chinese food carts his family would visit on special occasions, and “Shubhon”, the man behind the wok, whose real name was Chen Shiobin. By day, Shubhon worked at a rifle factory; by night, he sold street bites, peddling in fluent Bengali, bargaining at the market in Bengali, laughing in Bengali.
“He was as much a part of Kolkata as the tram lines and the Durga Puja pandals. He was simply one of us,” says Mitra.