Inside The Hello Kitty Dim Sum Restaurant
Editor's note: Lucky Peach was a magical food magazine that existed from 2011 to 2017. It was beloved by readers, regarded as a destination publication for writers, and won a slew of James Beard Awards. After its untimely demise, the website—and all the stories it ever published—disappeared into the digital ether. In the spirit of resurrecting the dead (and because the copyright reverts to the author), The Takeout will be republishing several stories from Lucky Peach's archives—for posterity. I wrote story for luckypeach.com in October 2015.
We Chinese have kicked ass
and taken names in so many areas we've lost count—engineering, concert
pianists, opening ceremonies, Internet censorship—but there's one thing we'll
admit to falling behind Westerners and never to catch up: owning a sense of
irony.
Really, we don't even have
a word for "ironic." The Chinese character is deeply rooted in earnestness, so having to
explain "I actually mean the opposite of what I say for humorous effect" is a
confusing concept. Just ask my parents when I was 16.
I bring this up because a
Hello Kitty-themed dim sum restaurant opened in Hong Kong in 2015. Hello Kitty
Chinese Cuisine is the restaurant's English name, and it's located off the
tourist drag in the dense working-class neighborhood of Jordan. Not
surprisingly, its novelty drew robust interest from the Western press—Buzzfeed, The Daily Mail, Eater, Time, and others.
Inside, there's a
red-and-gold Ming dynastical feel to the proceedings, what you'd imagine if a
Western interior designer was told to replicate a Chinese teahouse—except, and this is the key difference, Hello Kitty's unmistakable
hair-bowed visage is on the surface of every available square foot of real
estate. Everything. Everything.
I walked by a phalanx of
Hello Kitty plush dolls on sale, next to a four-foot-tall Hello Kitty statue,
in order to get to my table (emblazoned with Hello Kitty's face), where I was
served Iron Buddha tea from a Hello Kitty teapot with a Hello Kitty saucer,
provided with a Hello Kitty wet nap, and, handed a menu where each dish featured
her likeness in some form. Conveniently, her head is shaped like a dumpling.
For more shapeless dishes, there were allusions to her feline majesty: beef
noodles were topped with a hair-bow of shredded eggs, or garnishes of hearts, or
more overtly, the company logo pressed on with food-grade dye.
Before I even tasted a
bite, what struck me about the restaurant was the clientele. Young parents
towing kids were a given—it was the adults who were there for a casual lunch,
who weren't. They weren't hovering above the table with a camera and conjuring
some snarky tweet in their head. They came in—and this was a remarkable
concept to me, a jaded American food writer—to eat. To those customers, and
to the wait staff, the fact that Hello Kitty's face was on goddamn everything
seemed incidental. There was no verbal acknowledgment of the cartoon from
servers, no scripted lines, no song nor dance, no
whatever-the-equivalent-is-to-"Let It Go" on a loop, no evidence any staffers
exhibited unbridled love for the namesake character. It operated, efficiently
and unironically, as a restaurant. You could bring people here blindfolded and
they'd never know it was some gaudily themed restaurant.
When the food arrived the har gow were facsimiles of Hello Kitty's
head. Her iconic hair-bow was made from tapioca flour wrappers dyed
yellow-and-red, her eyes and nose appearing to be sesame seeds, and the three
whiskers on each cheek drawn on. Ma lai
go, the steamed sponge cake, received the same make-up. None of these
visual add-ons changed the flavor of the dim sum one iota — it's like icing on
cake (except that frosting is delicious), only there was some deviant pleasure
in chomping half of Hello's head off to reveal her prawn brains.
Even in the glutinous rice,
where the components were deconstructed to form its Hello Kittiness (red pepper
bow, black bean eyes, corn kernel nose), it tasted like... glutinous rice
everywhere else. These were all middle-of-the-road dim sum, nothing to garner
Michelin stars. It was just a dim sum restaurant off the tourist drag in the
working-class neighborhood.
Before I arrived, the potential
for ironic commentary had me salivating. By the time I left it had dried to a
crust of realization that this, in fact, was a rather savvy business idea.
Hundreds of dim sum restaurant operate in Hong Kong in obscurity. For a
licensing fee to the Sanrio corporation, this restaurant slapped a mouthless
Japanese cat on its logo and stood out from the pack. And for what? Charging 50
percent more than comparable dim sum parlors for food of middling quality, and then get enough write-ups in the
media to a make a publicist's toes curl? Wow, that goes well beyond irony—it
enters the realm of satire.
Note: Hello Kitty Chinese Cuisine has since closed.