© 2016 AFP/ RICHARD A. BROOKS
Brilio.net/en - In the past year, Hong Kong's street food has stood out in the culinary world, especially thanks to the raise from the Michelin Guide, but also by a very efficient world of mouth culture. Street food is a big part of the Hong Kong way of life, and even though all locals will agree to say that things aren't what they used to be, it remains very popular.
The real golden age of the Hong Kong's street dining culture was between the seventies and the eighties, when the government was giving official license for people to literally cook in the streets and when people were hungry for cheap-and-easy ways to eat. Food back then was peddled on the streets by vendors with pushcarts. Nowadays, it would be nearly impossible to happen upon an old lady selling homemade pastries next to a zebra crossing. The government simply wouldn't stand for it and is actually close to totally forbidding it, at least during some special occasion, like the events of the last Chinese New year have shown.
For decades indeed, the peddler stalls (the small food shops on the street??) where the only places to find food during the Chinese New Year holidays (three days in total), a tradition that could disappear under the governments pressure to close those stalls.
Last February 2016, during the celebration, an intervention led by the local police against the peddler sellers provoked a riot in the street of the Mong Kok districts, along with some incidents in the neighbourhood of Tuen Mun. To eat in the street during the year change is the typical tradition in Hong Kong and the population doesnt agree with the Government reasons (mainly economic and political) to shut down and bury such an emblematic aspect of the Hong Kongs culture. Even if it is still possible and very popular to find food in the street of the megalopolis, it might be the end of it and the beginning of a new era where fast-food and other global firms will take control over the food industry in any part of the world.
(brl/red)
