Hungry people came for flavors of home, like fried spicy beef and steamed fish heads, served by waiters speaking Mandarin and garnished with green and red chilies.
Amid intensifying competition in Hong Kong's food and beverage industry, it was the opening night of Return Home Funan, a famous mainland Chinese chain restaurant. The restaurant's founder, Huang Hai-yin, greeted customers in a bright red suit, while waiters handed out red envelopes stuffed with coupons.
Hong Kong is a tough place to open a restaurant these days — with fewer people dining out, more restaurants have closed than opened this year — but mainland Chinese restaurateurs facing unique challenges at home are seeing opportunity.
“Everyone has their own way of surviving, but right now it's about surviving on the edge,” Huang said. “We'll see who is more persistent and successful.”
Return Home Funan is one of more than a dozen popular Chinese restaurants that have opened in Hong Kong in recent months, with owners encouraged by a steady influx of new customers travelling from Hong Kong to neighboring mainland China city Shenzhen for more options.
But the restaurants' expansion into Hong Kong has met with some resistance: a Chinese territory that has long operated with a high degree of autonomy but is increasingly coming under Beijing's control. For some in Hong Kong, the relocation of these restaurants is a sign of a gradual mainland Chinese takeover of the city's culture.
Not far from “Return Home Hunan” are new restaurants serving cuisine from three southern Chinese provinces: a Guizhou rice noodle shop, a Guangxi snail noodle shop and a Hunan stinky tofu shop.
These shops cater to locals and the growing number of mainland Chinese who have settled in the city over the past decade.
“When I first came to Hong Kong, it was hard to find restaurants that served authentic mainland Chinese food,” said Karen Lin, a banker studying business administration part-time at the University of Hong Kong, as she ate spicy fried beef at Return Home Funan on a recent evening.
“All the Chinese restaurants here are based on Hong Kong's 'local flavours',” said Lin, who has lived in Hong Kong for six years.
Complaints among mainland Chinese migrants that Hong Kong's food is bland have recently become even more poignant for locals grappling with the city's changing identity.
Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law on Hong Kong after pro-democracy protests erupted across the city in 2019. Many foreigners and Hong Kong residents left the city, an exodus exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and Hong Kong's public health measures, some of the strictest in the world.
Now, as Hong Kong is drawn further into China's sphere of influence, mainland China's economic slowdown and real estate crisis are weighing on Hong Kong's long-awaited recovery.
The fastest growing group of migrants to Hong Kong are mainlanders who have secured special visas that the government has begun issuing for better jobs and feel more welcome in the city than they were before the pandemic, when mainlanders often faced hostility from Hong Kong residents.
“Hong Kong has become much more tolerant of mainland Chinese people,” said Cheng Hui Man, manager of the Hong Kong branch of Tai Er Pickled Fish, a mainland-based Sichuan restaurant where waiters announce the arrival of dishes in the cadence of traditional Peking opera, declaring, “The delicious fish is coming!”
Cheng, who moved to Hong Kong from neighboring Guangdong province as a teenager and worked as a waiter in the summers, recalled that Hong Kong customers became more rude when they heard he spoke with a mainland Chinese accent.
The atmosphere is changing as Hong Kong residents spend more time dining and shopping across the border.
Tai Er Pickled Fish has become so popular among Hong Kong tourists in Shenzhen that it opened four stores in Hong Kong in December.
More than half of the newly built apartments next to the shopping mall where Cheng works as a manager, which once housed Kai Tak airport, that went on sale in March were snapped up by buyers from mainland China, local media reported.
Cambridge Chan, franchise owner of a new restaurant from China, Xita Grandma BBQ, complained that mainland Chinese customers were mainly interested in trendy restaurants. Chan hoped to find a different customer in new markets.
He soon discovered that many others had the same idea.
“When I came here, I realised, 'Oh, there are mainland Chinese restaurants here and there,'” Zhang said happily.
For local restaurants that are barely hanging on, the rush to open is puzzling: Nearly twice as many restaurants closed in April as opened, according to OpenRice, an online restaurant and market analytics platform.
In Shek Tong Tsui, where Return Home Funan opened in May, many of the colorful restaurants that were once staples of the neighborhood have recently closed, including the cheap noodle and milk tea joints and the cafes where retirees used to gather for dim sum and catch up on the day's news.
“The restaurant business is hard work,” said Roy Tse, a local restaurateur who used to sell rice dishes that were popular lunchtime staples for office workers in Hong Kong's Tai Koo Shing business district. These days, he sees fewer customers at lunchtime, but those who do still order the basic menu.
At Foo Jing Aromatic Noodles, a long-established Hong Kong restaurant where manager Ien Hei can watch chefs braise beef brisket in his window, he says customers used to come in almost every day.
“Then one day they just disappeared and never came back,” he said.
Restaurants serving cheaper food have been thriving in recent times, with many new entrants from mainland China luring customers with steep discounts, coupons and fan club perks.
On a recent Thursday afternoon, Chester Kwong and Sonia Chen were hunched over large bowls of noodles at Meat Noodles, a fast-food chain known for its hot and sour noodles made with potato flour from the southern Chinese city of Chongqing.
“This is super cheap,” Kwong said, referring to the hot and sour noodle set that Cheng ordered for HK$36 (US$4.61), which came with hot and sour noodles and fried chicken.
Both Chen and Kwong, recent university graduates, expressed concern that Chinese restaurants would replace their local favourites. “It's good to have Chinese restaurants and options, but it's a bit scary to think that one day they might overtake what we had in Hong Kong,” Kwong said.
Some people feel the same way and choose not to patronize mainland restaurants.
“I take every opportunity to support local restaurants,” said Audrey Chan, who grew up in mainland China, moved to Hong Kong as a student six years ago and identifies as a Hong Konger.
Fu Kam Noodles once relied mainly on its neighbors in Chai Wan's middle-class neighborhood, but with many of them moving away, many of them from Hong Kong, the restaurant has had to find new customers.
Huang, a member of the Hunan Provincial Returnees Group, said he knew it would be difficult.
But, she added, “No matter how bad the economy is, people have to eat.”
