Cantonese recipes lost in time: book revives lavish dishes that disappeared from Hong Kong restaurants

Agnes Chee discovers traditional Hong Kong dishes that fell out of fashion because of price and labour over the last 50 years

Dishes include US$900 wok-fried giant sea conch and double-boiled pig’s stomach stuffed with chicken and bird’s nest

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Wok-seared crab cake with bird’s nest and egg white. Photo: Agnes Chee

Published: 2:00pm, 3 Aug 2019Updated: 4:00pm, 5 Aug 2019

In 2015, freelance writer Agnes Chee interviewed a well-known Hong Kong chef and restaurateur for her column in the Hong Kong Economic Journal, when she discovered there were many Cantonese dishes she had never heard of.

Speaking to Chui Wai-kwan, also known as “Brother Seven”, turned out to be such an education for the Malaysian-Chinese writer that she recently turned these columns into a book. The collection of three years worth of articles is called Vanishing Flavours of Cantonese Cuisine, which was published just in time for July’s Hong Kong Book Fair.

Chui had worked at his family’s highly revered Cantonese restaurant Fook Lam Moon until 2013, when he split from the business after a family dispute and opened his own restaurant called Seventh Son.

When Chee began interviewing chef Chui, she was overwhelmed by his knowledge of these forgotten dishes she had never heard of before.

“Afterwards I tried to look them up online and either there was no information, or a famous writer like Chua Lam had mentioned them in passing but said nothing about how these dishes were made or their ingredients. That’s when I realised there was no written record of these dishes,” she says.