restaurants

Here and then gone

Nothing is perfect and everything changes.

On my first father’s day, we walk through Tai Hang to a sushi spot we use for celebrations. There’s a specific kind of place we frequent for our own occasions, those moments we want to mark together as a couple. Most people have one, I think. For moments like promotions, birthdays, anniversaries, and just good days of freedom that require something more than the usual, yet still familiar. For these moments our tastes range to the esoteric, to the nice but not fancy. Since our move to Tai Hang in 2018, No. 13 Sushi Bar has hosted quite a few of these moments. With some quiet back alley seats, welcoming staff, and incredible tuna rolls we’ve spent enough evenings there to know exactly what we want before we sit down, and to have the staff remember our faces. Or we had. No. 13 is gone now. A sign on the door offers only a “lease expired, thanks for the good years” note that’s both cute and unsatisfying. I give a silent thank you to the staff as we turn away.

Wandering elsewhere for food we talk about change. Life, in so many ways, is change1. This first father’s day exemplifies that. Clara’s expressions just shy of a year are so much more than six months prior. People, like the places they construct, change over time, and the new can not come without loss. Fineprint, the coffee shop we used to live upstairs from, replaced something I can’t recall our first few months in the neighborhood, and now feels like a fixture.

Of course some of this change, like the loss of 2nd Draft, I’d undo if I could. We all have points of personal concern, and without everyone’s sacrifice nothing would change. And yet it would, because people age. The families that run the car shops will eventually turn over, sad as it is to consider. The dai pai dong’s too, as they have many times before. Neighborhoods will gentrify and fall into disrepute. Will they become inhospitable, or will they simply become home to a different clientele? In Hong Kong the answer is the latter, new housing displacing old walk ups, new restaurants with marble’d bars displacing old worn wood ones. Many of the new ones will fail, too ambitious, too fancy, too niche. And too few of them will be like No. 13, just expensive enough to have great fish, yet playing Eminem a bit too loudly to attract a truly posh set of patrons. Instead it was us and some other folk who liked loud dinners, a few families celebrating graduations, and the occasional casual business dinners over sake and cigarettes in the alley. I wonder where all those moments will happen now, and how long it will take all those other former customers to known of the closing.

To the staff, then, who took care of us for years as just part of the job, thank you. We’ll miss you.

Despite the inevitability, some changes we do morn.

  1. “All that you touch
    You Change.
    All that you Change
    Changes you.
    The only lasting truth
    is Change.
    Olivia Butler, The Parable of the Sower↩︎

The restaurant downstairs

We live above the type of restaurant I used to dream of running. My inspiration came from Stella’s, a coffee shop in Cornell’s college town. To my younger self, Stella’s was the perfect place, big enough that there was always space, light enough to read and study but dark enough to feel alone. There’s a fine balance in lighting that serves both mood and need. Stella’s had a couple of tables right at the front, before the counter. These were perfect for newcomers, for those on a date and uncertain of whom they were meeting, and for the quick chat type of business meeting or project discussion. They were visible from the street, rarely occupied for long, and didn’t require engaging with any of the other clientele.

Further back there were small tables and booths. The booths, with leather benches, were coveted by those planning to remain until their paper on Cicero was complete, sometime in the spring. Those were staked, like claims, with piles of books and papers, and the occupant would be alternately deep in thought, asleep, or completely gone, having left sufficient weight, sufficient evidence of intent behind to hold their space. Other booths would be filled with noisy groups of friends, playing cards or arguing about physics. As a teenager I would hole up in one, if lucky, with a book and a journal, alternately deeply self-absorbed and totally engaged in watching the behavior of those older than myself.

Downstairs, in Hong Kong, the coffee shop is smaller, of course. There are not enough tables to occupy with books, but the three counters, one for each wall and one for the serving space, provide plenty of seating for those trying to craft startup ideas or simply surf the net from a place not their apartment. The front steps are a frequent stopping point for dog walkers, who build knowledge of one anther through their pets behavior. The staff is friendly, the coffee good, and, like Stella’s, in the evening there are cocktails and a smattering of food. In many ways it is perfect.

These types of shops are not rare now, no longer solely the providence of college towns. There are coffee shop slash bars in almost every city and town, and I’m sure I’d find a favorite in many. Even here, the cafe downstairs is a second branch, the first having opened in Central some five years back. What makes the spot special, in the end, is the title. The restaurant downstairs is the simplest of descriptions, and the most powerful. It is a statement of density, of multi-use buildings, and of accessibility. Of course the staff knows me. Of course we are regulars. We live up stairs.

This is the second time in my life I have ever lived above a restaurant. In Shanghai, Tokyo, Houston, Boston, and San Francisco, I did not. Only once, for brief summer months where I lived on a sofa in New York, has the phrase ever been true before. As with my joy at finally living downtown by the train in an American city, I am thrilled with the current situation. Walking downstairs for coffee or bread is a great reminder of exactly what Hong Kong’s density has given us, so many parts of my perfect city made real.

I’m sure eventually we won’t live above a restaurant, it’s a rarer scenario than it should be. Until then though I’ll probably keep wandering downstairs in my flip-flops looking for fresh beans, comfortable with the hours and staff, and slowly meeting the neighbors. I wish more people, and especially more Americans, could enjoy the same.

The weather of things

In the steaming fog of the dumpling shop the rain outside doesn’t seem so out of place. On Irving this afternoon the sun was hidden by clouds long before it set, late now the day after the equinox. The streets have been filled with shoppers, students, families these past few days, since the sun no longer sets at five. Daylight Saving Time may be an oddity, a trick we play on ourselves with math and clocks, but it works. We are a happier people when we see the sun.

Tonight the wind came in early, fog and rain along side. No one complains, knowing deep down winter is over. Even in California the spring brings relief, and it’s tempestuous showers cause no ill will.

“This is dumpling weather,” she says. I concur. This is weather for fogged-up windows and large numbers crammed in small rooms. We take novels and drink tea, ordering in fragmented Mandarin and cherishing the hot sauce. On the way home we watch the rain, lighter now, patter on the pavement, reflecting the headlights of 19th Ave.

“This weather’s good for the Little Shamrock too,” I say, continuing our conversation about things just perfect for this weather. The self-proclaimed oldest bar in town, the Shamrock is a cozy kind of place with a fire and padded chairs, built for rainy Sundays.

“They wouldn’t do well in a sunnier neighborhood,” she says. “Too dingy.”

We cross, watching the fog sneak across the street on Irving, now fully at ground level. It is our second year here, in this weather of swirling shapes and constant drizzle that we so enjoy in part because we know where to go when the world becomes a place of damp and chill. Having learned the neighborhood grown out of the fog, we are no longer put down by it’s weight.

In Houston there were no dumpling houses like the King of Noodle, no bars like the Little Shamrock. Instead Poison Girl featured bike racks outside and a garden that was heavenly in February, perfect in November. Filled with plants and vines that snaked up and over the walls into neighboring yards, this space felt felt utterly unlike the dive bar it belonged to, and yet perfectly attached. Like the Shamrock, Poison Girl was built of it’s neighborhood, of it’s weather.

Weather is the strongest of forces, a statement that needs no proof save the news, and it shapes the places of people far more than we pretend. At Beach Bum on Boracay the drinks are built for long afternoons spent barefoot on the sand, and when storms blow they build walls of sand against the rising tide. It is an establishment made possible by the location, and then refined by weather.

To know a city, a town, a beach, then, we must embrace the weather there, be it by hiding near the fire or lolling barefoot. In San Francisco that idea has taken us most of two years to learn, here where the ocean joins the air and rolls over the land, where the fog is a member of the neighborhood, and where the best bars are cozy, the best restaurants steamy.