A HEARTFELT NEED

Everytime I think of garlic butter baked sole (蒜茸焗龍脷飯 'suen yong guk long lei faan') a friend comes to mind. Not that he likes it -- he may, I just don't know -- but he was posted to Hong Kong for a few years and probably ate his lunch near the office in a chachanteng. It's likely one of the healthiest things on the menu there. Man does not live by baked porchop on a bed of tomato sauce spaghetti with a thick layer of gooey melted cheese on top alone.

Even though that will send you back up twenty stories of bamboo scaffolding and get you returned to your desk for another eight hours.

It's part of the Hong Kong weltanschaaung's gestalt: work hard, eat hard, loose a fortune at Happy Valley, then die three months after you've retired at age eighty.
Your viagra merchant will be heartbroken.

Mind you, I like melted cheese too, but I would prefer to combine it with bacon. On top of a hamburger patty. Perhaps on top of the baked rice with tomato sauce, with sambal on the side, and washed down with that big cup of heart-attack strength milk tea.

Which to the best of my knowledge a chachanteng doesn't do.
Even though they really should. In an ideal world.

The reason why that baked sole is healthy is because of the vegetable next to it for colour.

It's an important detail. Baked fish just looks rather bland by itself. One could achieve the same effect by spashing a chili paste garlic butter and wine reduction sauce around it -- also healthy -- but Hong People are still at the early stage of developing an affection for heat, so would shy away from something like that. Whereas some of us Dutch speakers are further progressed, final stage of chili fondness, darn well terminal.

The people at my favourite chachantengs know at this point that I will need Sriracha or that jar of sambal, and bring it without my even asking. At one place the lady is still somewhat appalled, but I think she accepts it as an eccentric Caucasian peculiarity. Smokes a pipe, speaks Cantonese, dumps hot goo on otherwise perfectly edible food.
But he doesn't talk about Jesus, so he's probably okay.
Might be insane. But so far not.



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