Above, the salak or snakefruit, and below two herbal drinks at new cafe 103 on Chinatown’s Soi Nana. The blue concoction is a refreshing butterfly pea juice and the brown liquid is a drink made from the mathum, or bael fruit, a sour fruit about the size of an orange which is sometimes made into candies. Two families on a single Thornburi street have produced the mathum candies for generations.
Holey is a stylish-looking artisanal bakery on Sukhumvit Soi 33. I had passed it earlier in the week, and waking up craving crusty European bread, I decided to make my way back. While googling for directions though, I turned up more than I had expected. First of all I was surprised to read that the hipster haven was an import from Bangladesh. In fact, the business is a refugee of sorts – having originally started in Dhaka it opened in Bangkok following a harrowing terrorist attack in 2016. ISIS-inspired militants had burst in, killing 20 customers (after torturing those who could not recite a passage from the Koran, including seven Japanese aid workers). I read this munching on my baguette in the cafe’s stylish and friendly Bangkok space, pondering what would have happened had I been in Dhaka that day. Why had a bread shop been a target? Was it simply a place where foreigners congregated, or was it more an scathing comment on the life of leisure enjoyed by expats in a country where few could afford 100 baht (or the equivalent) for a just-baked bread loaf? The Bangkok bakery that day was certainly full of the fair and the moneyed, Phrom Phong beautiful people, Australian and European expats. And was I then “the enemy” too? Lots to chew over as I enjoyed my bread and butter.
“Baker’s gonna bake” cafe: cute space, good coffee but disappointing bread for a self-proclaimed bakery.
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A cafe in the Sathorn backstreets housed in an eighty year-old green timber house, next to a bonsai farm.
Saphan Kwai hipster!
How Department was a surprise – a spacious, concrete-floored old factory space in Kwun Tong converted into a chic (and well-attended) cafe and clothing and homewares store. They also carry a full range of the d47 guidebooks for prefectures of Japan.
Mum’s Not Home is one of my new favorite Hong Kong hangouts. We first noticed it as a neon light shining in the window of an old Yau ma Tei tenement building, and then climbed up the chipped stairs to find a painted door.
Ringing the bell, we were ushered into a room filled with ferns, racks of colourful clothes on sale, artworks, a papier mache monkey’s head and an oversized menu of sweet drinks and cakes. Avant garde French electro was playing and a saffron-haired HK hipster was taking pictures with his boyfriend against the lush greenery, while a middle-aged woman scooped up rubber dinosaurs on sale.
I immediately fell in love.
Eating cheaply and well is one of the highlights of any Vietnam trip and we feasted on roadside noodles served with pungent vegemite-y fish paste and sweet pink onions. These were delicious, but would leave me knocked out a few hours later with a blazing MSG hangover. We also saw oysters frying on the street, frog, and ate local specialities like the cao lao noodles in Hoi An, thick and springy with crunchy pork crackling in a fragrant broth, or bamboo soup.
In Danang our biggest discovery was the “Banh xeo” street, an alleyway really, home to rowdy, napkin-strewn restaurants serving the Vietnamese crepes stuffed with beans and shrimps, accompanied by satay sticks of beef.
Afterwards we would walk up to Highlands Coffee, one of the city’s innumerable high-decibel “ca phes” serving evening crowds sugar-loaded coffee drinks and weirdly, absolutely no food.
For dessert, the place to go was AVA, a tiny patisserie in a mouldy little room that served the absolute best chocolate cakes I have ever tasted.
Camel milk latte at Jethro’s Canteen and kimchi poached eggs at Archie’s.
While back in town, I wanted to see what was new on Melbourne’s hipster strip of Fitzroy. I started with “Easey’s”, a frankly remarkable bar and burger joint housed in a series of old train carraiges, perched up four flights of grafittied stairs on an innercity sidestreet. Not only is the concept amazing, but the banging nineties hip hop, views, tasy burgers and cute straight bro waiters gave it a fun-time vibe.
Around the corner on Smith Street is “Hotel Jesus”, perhaps the kitschiest of the city’s burgeoning crop of Mexican restaurants, designed by the same team as Bali’s (even more riotous) “Motel Mexicola“.
And finally, way down the end of Johnston Street near the river, is “Admiral Cheng-Ho.” The cafe is named after the Chinese explorer ( more often known as Zheng-he) who led a fleet to Africa in the thirteenth century and could hypothetically have taken coffee back to China. Since the closure of “Lawyers, Guns and Money”, a hipster congee and tripe cafe, this is the only Chinese-themed hipster cafe in Melbourne but to be honest, other than the teas on the menu it was mostly standard (and therefore, excellent) Melbourne cafe fare.
With a friend in town from Guangzhou, I spent a sunny Sunday morning trawling through the galleries, cafes and rooftop gardens tucked away in the old industrial buildings of my own neighbourhood, Wong Chuk Hang.
First we had pumpkin salad and pancakes at Three Thirds, the cozy cafe hidden in the Yally Industrial Building, before taking in some surprise Lee Ufan artworks and a beautiful hillside view at Bridgestone Gallery, Slovenian photographer Matjaž Tančič hosting the opening of his exhibition of 3-D pictures of North Korea at Pekin Gallery and an avant-garde performance at Spring Workshop. I really should do this more often.
The cafe murals and illustrations of Melbourne’s Robert Bowers.
So what did get up to this week? Dinner at the new vegetarian hangout Ovo Cafe in Central, tucked away in a mini-mall with an organic food supermarket and the new incarnation of Maya, another highly-regarded Hong Kong vegetarian eatery.
Saturday brunch: scrambled tofu in caramel with pine nuts, and an overpriced but delicious baguette at Le Pain Quotidien.
At home, reading about philosophy, the Shanghai White Terror and Karl Ove Knausgaarden’s “My Struggle” (not yet finished, and lots to process before I write more on that.)
Dinner with a new Brazilian friend and a good Shatin buddy – steamed fish in blackbean sauce and monkeyhead mushrooms – and then fun, fanciful drinks at Quinary: frothy earl grey martinis and yuan yeung with whiskey-flavoured condensed milk.
A Sunday swim in a murky pool on a warm, late Summer day: the sky cloudy and grey, with a warm breeze blowing. More reading.
Then on Sunday, as we drove in to Yau Ma Tei to see a movie, news of a fire at the city’s fruit market, just a block away from our destination. I had been at the market just the week before: shopping for dragon fruits and longan amid the dangling, flashing lights and the sooty old buildings, dating back to 1913, one with a tree sprouting maturely out of its roof gables.
Although the dust has yet to settle, I’ll be sad if this unique old part of Hong Kong is lost.
Trapped in a traffic diversion, we arrived at the cinema late and did a disorienting dash down the street of fortunes tellers, to the flashing strobe lights and drunken warblings of the pavement karaoke bars.
The movie itself was disappointing: “If Cats disappeared from the world.” The premise was great – a man dying of a brain tumour is approached by the devil who offers to extend his life, on the condition that for every day gained, something precious will disappear from the world…
Sadly though, it was really poorly executed: full of cheesy piano music and clumsy allusions to much better films, like an unnecessary trip to Argentina halfway through, quoting liberally from “Happy Together.”
Disappointed, we went to Temple Street to eat a late supper of Malay Cake and shrimp dumplings at Kung Fu Dim Sum, before back to bed for Monday morning.
It has been a while since I was in my favourite city and the list of new and interesting places I want to check out is growing ever longer, especially since I discovered the Thai magazine “aday”, which has lots of great tips like this cafe near the Hua Mak airport express stop in Ramkhamhaeng called Sunday.
Or this pretty jogging track around the Ram Inthra stadium:
Restaurant Harmonique with its courtyard under a banyan tree.
Plus a secret drinking den in the city’s US military headquarters
The dining table inside a swimming pool at 3nvy.
The city’s riverside Protestant cemetery.
And the cluster of art workshops and galleries amid old European buildings on the Charoen Krung Soi 30, also known after an obscure historical figure as Soi Captain Bush.
Then there is the chic speakeasy cocktail bar J Boroski, hidden on a Thonglor sidestreet, with a plush interior featuring a wall of mounted beetles.
Plus there is the new incarnation of the Thailand Design and Creativity Centre nearby in the vast old nineteen thirties main post office building, and the glittering ICON mall across the river promising a new art museum and Takashimaya department store, coming next year.
Some discoveries back on Hong Kong island. For example, who knew that every morning around 7am a makeshift market happens on the Aberdeen waterfront? The Tanka “Boat people” come in to buy vegetables and sell fish. I was surprised to find such an “Asian” scene – old women squatting over fish or leafy greens, spread out on the ground among milling crowds of (also mostly elderly) shoppers – in my own backyard. Also, a new cafe in Shek Tong Tsui, Artisan Garden above, and below sea-grapes from the tasty “Orchid Veggie” vegetarian fusion restaurant in Kennedy Town.
One of my favourite pasttimes in Saigon was wondering through the cavernous old French colonial apartment buildings in District One which have been converted into collections of hipster coffee shops or clothing boutiques, or alternatively left to rot, or sometimes an appealing combination of the two.
The buildings are full of atmosphere, and surprises: feral tribes of cats playing on the balconies, surprisingly chic little clothing stores tucked into dingy passageways, an open door into somebody’s cramped apartment, a sudden vista across the neighbouring rooftops. You walk up and down great curving stairways of chipped stone, often dim with little natural lighting, and along corridors of exposed wiring and rising damp.
And sometimes, you will stumble into one of the city’s superlative new generation of cafes. Here, digital nomads tap away on gleaming Macbooks and sip on coffee in first-rate establishments better than their equivalents in Hong Kong or Bangkok.
My favourite of these was L’Ursine, which I first found up a back staircase down an arcade, or alternatively when it was raining I could access it by going through an alleyway, a gallery and the kitchen of a restaurant. Inside there is an immaculately beautiful space, with retro French posters on the walls, gleaming white tiles, soaring ceilings and little green succulent plants on wooden tables. I would go every day for breakfast (or I’ll be honest, sometimes more than once per day) and read magazines and sit on the balcony to watch rain falling over the Opera House. I later found that there was another version on the nearby street of Le Loi, which is above a Monocle-esque homewares and clothing store.
I can also recommend Workshop for its coffee and grilled vegetable salad. Its found up above a motorcycle parking bay.
As my long Summer break ambles on, I’ve been enjoying balmy evenings and blazing days around town, sampling some of the city’s new hot spots. It’s a hard life. 😉
Omotesando Koffee, the first outpost of the super-hip (and now defunct in Harajuku) Tokyo brand was disappointing . Despite massive queues at its sleek Wanchi store when it first opened, the coffee I had there was just OK for the hefty 50 HKD ( $8.60 AUD) pricetag. I’d say: give it a miss.
I also went for a late afternoon dip at Deep Water Bay and returned to one of my favourite hangouts of last summer, the Thai restaurant atop the changing rooms next to the beach. It seems to have changed management and gone a little bit “fancier” but you can still order a coconut and a som tam and sit outside watching the sun on the water and feeling the salt breeze.
By far my best new discovery though was the recently opened Potato Head, a branch of the famous Bali bar and restaurant, now set up in Sai Ying Pun. Whereas HK’s other Balinese import Mamasan was disappointing in its local incarnation, Potato Head seemed to get everything right. I ate at the restaurant there called Kaum (there is also a small homewares/fashion store, bar and events space) and loved it: funky and forward-looking tropical design, friendly service, great music and delicious nasi goreng made a place I’m looking forward to getting back to.
Perfect for Summer.
Recently I made a couple of interesting discoveries on the upper floors of obscure buildings in Mongkok. The teeming district is famous for its bird, flower and goldfish markets, but who knew there was also an indie record store and a Thai amulet mall? Eager to continue exploring this week, I headed back to find more “Mongkok hidden treasures”.
Lo Yi Faateng, meaning “little sibling dancefloor,” is a new cafe accessed via a hard-to-open door and a dingy staircase, in an old building opposite the McPherson sportsground on Shantung Street. The former apartment has been converted into a wackily-decorated cafe with a bizarre “dictator” theme, a fridge full of books and stacks of my favourite Chinese magazine, Outlook. It would probably be my new favourite place if the food wasn’t (to be frank) so resolutely disappointing. Go for the refreshing longan and lemongrass tea though.
Just around the corner is Knockbox, a cafe more serious about its food offerings and especially its coffees, with single origin and siphon brews.
Jouer is a pint-sized bakery/cafe housed in an extravagantly decorated room in a tucked-away little curve of St Francis Street, near Star Street in Wanchai. This corner of the city must be one of its most charming – a dozing, car-free few blocks accessed up a staircase and lined with trees and potplants, ageing (if highly desirable) apartments, low-key boutiques and artist spaces.
Watching the rain pelt down during a sudden morning peak hour storm at Rocket on Sathorn Soi 12, a street where I was once almost terrifyingly savaged by a pack of street dogs who emerged at night from the Chinese cemetery, but is now home to slick blond-wood Nordic-inspired cafes serving flatwhites and coconut and pomegranate granola.
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