Cafe Match Box Review

So this is what happens when film art director Angelo Castilho dresses up a restaurant. You get the richness of a movie set and the feeling that you are having an experience, not just a meal. Every surface of Café Match Box is covered with bing sut tiles and wood panelling, and the theme of old Hong Kong means retro clocks, old movie posters and stool seating.
Like many rebirths of cha chan tengs, this one serves notable favourites such as fluffy egg sandwiches, elbow macaroni in soup with ham, and sweetened milk tea so thick you could stand a spoon in it. As we sat down at a shared table, our hip, young waiter urged us to order the set menu of buttered toast, ham omelette, fried egg sandwich, char sui (roast pork) over spaghetti ($36), and the chicken pot pie ($32)for good measure.
The char sui spaghetti was exactly that, but in a shallow bowl of chicken broth, while the pork was chewy and belted with fat. The spaghetti was nothing to note, and the soup was bland. My dining companion reminded me that this is simple food, and that the food should be light in flavour, but filling. I’m not sure I agree with this, and if this was the only dish I was going to get I wanted it to be fantastic, or at least full of flavour.
Next up was a good sized bowl of pig’s liver in ramen noodles with Demae Itcho packets of sesame oil and MSG soup powder on a separate plate. “This means we are getting a good brand of instant noodles, and not the cheap, imitation stuff,” my companion said. The ramen were telephone curls of egg noodles in a broth made from liver. The liver itself was thin-cut and steeped in the soup long enough to carry the broth’s flavour, but not long enough that it masked the livery taste. The liver was as slippery as organs tend to be, and had a really strong odour which was hard to stomach if you are not a liver fan.
Now, an item never seen before in any cha chan tengs arrived at the table: chicken pot pie and an electric green puddle of pea soup – unusual even in Western diners. We had no idea why this would even go together, but strangely it did. The pastry crust crumbled at the slightest touch to reveal chunks of chicken, ham and mushrooms. It took a spoon and fork to get the soup and pie in one go. Again, there is no reasoning behind this combination, but we went with it. The waiter said it goes well with ketchup, but we decided to go naked for this one. The ham and egg sandwich was the super fluffy kind with the super fluffy toast. The eggs were mixed with Kowloon Dairy milk and loaded with butter, as was the thick white toast. It was a simple combo.
One thing we would definitely come for are the banana hot cakes ($42). Three stacks of cream on the inside, evenly browned exterior sandwich slices with warm banana and walnuts. The caramel and cream sauce pulled this entire dish together giving the sweet tooth a reason to live. Served hot off the griddle, this is one of our favourite dishes of 2010.
I’m trying to think if there was anything left on the menu we didn’t try. Perhaps the warm egg tarts at the take out counter would’ve been a nice addition. Though with plenty of good food in our bellies, we decided enough was enough. Angie Wong
G/F, 8 Cleveland St, Causeway Bay, 2868 0363. Daily 8am-1am.
The bill
Set menu $36
banana hot cakes $42
chicken pot pie $32
10 per cent service charge
Total $121

Long Lunches

How I long for the golden days when offices would empty out at noon and employees would cement business deals over multi-hour, wine-fuelled food orgies that went on till sundown. People were so drunk they put ink to paper while taking shots of malt, and that’s how deals were done.

But the era of three-martini and three-hour lunches have long been off the menu, and traded in for express meals that get you in and out in under 30 minutes. According to a 2006 survey by Diabetes Hong Kong, 69 percent of 1,322 office workers said their lunches lasted 20 minutes or less. That’s barely enough time to chew.

It's been a while since I sat down for a proper long lunch, Christmas Day 2006 in fact. I thought I’d be a hot shot and volunteer to work on Christmas. This was also the day I toyed with the idea of antidepressants. A bunch of traders invited me to dine at the Four Seasons where we feasted from noon until 9.30pm and drank up a bill of $81,000. Luckily the boys who worked the India and Japan markets that day expensed it.

For our holiday table of 14, we had a good crowd who sustained a continuous riff of banter that made nine plus hours fly like nothing. And when we finally ran out of conversation, we happily sat in silence, enjoying each other’s company. It was that good.

Now please don’t confuse what I’m saying with the thinly-veiled Christian cult also known as the Slow Food Movement. People who lunch as a lifestyle are doing it to gain professional advantages or as a big personal fuck you to the mandatory lunch hour, not because they like to chew their food slowly.

Old timers at the FCC blame women executives for killing the long, boozy lunch. They say women in the workforce hold the good old boys accountable for long lunches that lead to bar crawls that lead to pay-by-the-hour hotels charged on entertainment expense accounts. The next assaults were emails, Bloomberg messaging, and Webex making everyone super-efficient and time-starved. Power breakfasts became the ‘it’ meal, limiting meet ups to one hour and taking the boozing aspect out of the equation. Then, as a last blow, their corporate Amexs were put on a diet as corporations trimmed their fat. Good news boys, I’m looking to bring long lunches back!

Well, here’s the thing. My campaign to reignite long lunches in Hong Kong lasted about a week, and it was all talk and no action. My friends decided to take it into their own hands and book me for a Friday. I was happy to be nestling inside Central’s new old boys’ club, Alfie’s by KEE, when it started pouring. The men were working down their second bottle of wine by the time our soups arrived. “We’ll finish this bottle, have a martini, some cheese, then you can go back to work,” they assured me after I tried leaving for the second time.

The longer the lunch went on, the longer I felt guilty for being away from my desk. This isn’t normal I thought. How is it they can enjoy a three-hour lunch, entirely guilt-free and I can’t? I used every excuse in the book to up and leave, but my handbag was held hostage.

“What you need to do is call your office and tell them you have a meeting this afternoon,” said J. “Then you are going to have another drink with us,” said D as he emptied out the remainder of the bottle in my glass. “At five o’clock you tell your office you’ve got to walk around the portfolio, and there is no point of you coming back as you have a client dinner at six-thirty.”

The temptation was there. My club chair already created a nook for my backside. Maybe I’ll just stay for dessert, I told myself. And as the third bottle of wine was brought out I knew I couldn’t enjoy it so there was no point. I stood up, made the announcement that I was going back to work and that I would find them at this very table when I was done. I left my bag behind as collateral.

Guilt won over decadence in this round I thought, as I hailed a taxi. Time is the ultimately luxury and I don’t own my time, not right now, not yet.

Angie Wong

Posh food is just a genre.

In a 2009 issue of Esquire magazine British columnist David Baddiel said that as kids we never voluntarily choose to eat gourmet food, but were in fact yanked kicking and screaming from restaurants if mummy tried shovelling forest fungi and goose liver down our throats. Instead, he opined, little ones gravitate towards unidentifiable nuggets or edible objects coated with sugar or salt. “As a kid, I didn’t know what a nice taste was.” Somewhere along the way, we ignored our taste buds and idolised the food darlings of the moment, not fully knowing whether we should like it or if we actually do like it.

When I first started writing about food professionally, I was eating out all the time at expensive gourmet restaurants. Nothing short of Peter Lam’s newest haunts or some celeb chef-touted mega-diner would do. I bought into the majesty of the Michelin Guide. For some time, I thought food at high calibre restaurants was actually better food. It is haute cuisine after all. It took more than a few bites for me to realise that a $20 burger was as satisfying as a $300 Kobe beef/ foie gras burger with truffle jus. But at the time I convinced myself that an expensive burger was by definition a better burger. I believed that money equals quality. If I made the same comparison with people, would you see the fault in my thinking? After more time comparing fancy restaurant to their cheap eats counterparts, I decided that this was all bullshit.

The biggest piece of evidence lies in the ingredients. I’ve met a food supplier who has a monopoly on produce in Hong Kong. He sells the same pre-washed mixed salad greens to posh restaurants around the city as he does to the fast food chains. The pedigree of the ingredients is exactly the same. Sadly, what we end up paying for is ambiance and extortionate rent.

Baddiel’s message to his readers was essentially this: expensive food is not better food, but simply another genre of food. If we classified posh food like we do Indian or Japanese or New York pizza, then we see it a whole different way. Fancy food is just that: a classification, not a level.

In Hong Kong is it not uncommon to order from the top two most expensive dishes at pricey diners. When I ask restaurateurs what that is all about, the answer I usually get is “saving face.” So what we are really talking about is who can afford what, or what your expensive choices say about you as a person. It’s not necessarily about good food at all.

This was all very annoying. Is price really the best way of judging taste? Or does status override all other elements? This made me think of all the restaurants out there pushing Wagyu beef, D'Artagnan duck breast, Hudson Valley foie gras, alba white truffles, bluefin tuna, great white’s shark’s fin, and gold-leafing to add extra zeros to the dishes.

When you look at posh food as just being a genre of food, and not better food, then we lose the class status built around it and we appreciate taste. I’ve sat at many fine diners wondering why the dim sum meal I was having would be considered better than one I could get at Maxim’s. Just because something is delivered in a dome and topped with a sprinkling of parsley, doesn’t mean the taste will be heightened one bit. This is why those who visit the supposedly top restaurants in the world are often disappointed. Can you really taste that the five-week old lamb was massaged everyday before slaughter? Or that the bean puree was made with Icelandic water, and not straight from the tap? Or that the shrimp is from the northern waters of Japan? Hand on heart, it all taste the same. These are just devices to load bland nouns (lamb, beans, shrimp) with adjectives or, worse still, with overtones of excessive refinement.

I hear chefs barking. But they would agree with me that there is no such thing as high- or low-brow food, only good or bad. Whenever I’ve dined with chefs, it is rarely in a fancy environment. We are almost always sitting on a plastic stool, sharing a wet-nap, and slurping incredible, cheap meals. They know how to eat well, and they know it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to eat there. It’s time we did the same.

Angie Wong