The Gurkha soldiers who stayed on in Hong Kong, and one place they settled: Yau Ma Tei, where flavours of Nepal abound
A restaurant on Temple Street is your best introduction to the thriving Nepalese community in Yau Ma Tei, where Gurkhas once stationed at British barracks nearby settled with their families after 1997, and drew more incomers
It is a Friday night at Manakamana, a Nepalese restaurant on Temple Street, Yau Ma Tei, and the classics are rolling out from the kitchen. There are juicy chicken momos, a steaming dish of aloo chat, Nepalese-style chow mein laced with coriander, red onions and tomatoes.
Manakamana is a stalwart in the neighbourhood on the Kowloon peninsula, an easy entry point for outsiders to experience its thriving Nepalese community.
There are an estimated 40,000 people of Nepalese origin in Hong Kong, about a third of whom live in Yau Ma Tei and next-door Jordan. You notice it as soon as you enter the neighbourhood: women dressed in colourful saris with abundant jewellery; grocery stores with signs in Devanagari script; and children in the local playgrounds bantering in a mix of English and Nepali.
There is just as much that you do not see.
Thousands of young Nepalese work in the restaurant and bar industry, and when they return home to Yau Ma Tei after a long night of work, they feast at one of 30 unlicensed restaurants hidden inside the neighbourhood’s tenement blocks.
