A dim sum cart auntie serves diners at Metropol, one of Hong Kong's largest dim sum restaurants. Metropol, a massive banquet hall, is closing, and fading with it is a cherished tradition of dim sum carts and the chatty women who push them. Photo / Billy H.C. Kwok, The New York Times
It was nearing peak lunch service on a recent weekday at the Metropol, one of Hong Kong’s largest dim sum restaurants, when So Yim-ha emerged from the kitchen into the cavernous dining hall pushing a stainless steel cart stacked high with bamboo steamers.
Fighting to be heard over the din of the room filled with hundreds of customers, So cleared her throat and began advertising the small, scrumptious dishes in her cart.
“Pork ribs! Beef meatballs! Quail egg siu mai!”
One by one, the baskets went as So and other servers crisscrossed the floor, stopping at each table to present their offerings.
Diners pointed at the dishes, enticed by the perfume of soy and steamed shrimp in rice rolls, the earthy aroma of lotus leaves wrapped around glutinous rice with sausage, and the sight of fluffy barbecued pork buns or glistening yellow egg tarts.
If someone ordered the beef meatballs, So would squirt the dish with Worcestershire sauce, as is customary.
She would recommend other dishes like the stuffed green peppers or the soup dumplings, her personal favourites.
With every sale, she stamped a white card that tallied orders, thanked the customers and moved on to the next table.
It’s this intimate interaction — street stall meets banquet hall, if you will — that distinguishes traditional parlours like the Metropol from other dim sum experiences on offer in Hong Kong.
And the city has many, including Michelin-starred restaurants, holes-in-the-wall, and for those craving it on the go, or at odd hours, 7-Eleven stores.
But the Metropol, one of only a handful of restaurants that still use carts, will close for good on September 27, after 35 years in business. And along with it, a beloved fixture of Hong Kong dining will fade away: the dim sum cart auntie.
For decades, the typically middle-aged women have become as synonymous with the dim sum experience as the famous shrimp dumplings and phoenix’s claw (aka steamed chicken feet) that have come to define this Cantonese style of dining of small dishes washed down with tea.
The women can be equal parts charming and gruff, as service staff tend to be in Hong Kong. They always add a human touch to one of the city’s most cherished rituals in a way that a server with a menu could never.
“It’s not the easiest job,” said Mamoru Hayashi, whose family owns the company that founded Metropol and two other restaurants in Hong Kong. “It’s hard to push those carts. You also have to be friendly, outgoing and loud enough so the customers can hear your voice.”
So, 62, who has worked for nearly half her life at the Metropol, can barely see over her cart, which she hunches over as she ploughs her way through the thick carpeting.
She wears a white paper hat and a pressed white uniform with a traditional Chinese collar, and prides herself on her ability to schmooze.
“I don’t just serve dim sum, I’m also happy to chitchat with the customers and tell them what’s good to eat,” she said.
“The regulars like to ask about my health and I always ask about their children.”
So, like the nearly dozen other dim sum cart aunties on staff, wept when she learned this summer that the restaurant would close.
She said that she has worked with the team for so long that they feel like family. The modest monthly pay of between HK$7000 and HK$14,000 ($1535 and $3000), was a godsend to her, given how few jobs are available for older and less-skilled workers like her.
“It makes me so sad,” she said. “I have no idea what I’ll do next.”
The closure is also a reflection of Hong Kong’s changing fortunes. Large restaurants like the Metropol, which are big enough to roll out dim sum carts, are a throwback to the high-flying decades starting in the 1980s when Hong Kong was flush with cash from a booming Chinese economy next door.
Profits streamed in for such restaurants as they hosted dinner banquets for weddings, industry groups and clan associations, where hundreds of guests could be feted with expensive seafood and French cognac.
Back then, the breakfast and lunchtime dim sum services were less important to a restaurant’s bottom line, especially as the most common dishes were about HK$40 . Customers could sit for hours gossiping over a few steamers and sip tea without raising an eyebrow from the staff.
Today’s economics do not allow for that.
Hotels have captured much of the wedding banquet business from stand-alone restaurants. China’s sluggish economy has forced Hong Kongers to tighten their belts.
Shenzhen, the metropolis across the mainland border, has emerged as a serious culinary competitor with lower prices. To survive, restaurants in Hong Kong often need to be smaller and leaner.
There are only a handful of banquet-style restaurants with dim sum carts left, such as Maxim’s Palace in City Hall, next to the picturesque Victoria Harbour.
Keeping the tradition alive all these years has not been easy for the restaurant, which is under pressure to serve the many office workers during their tight lunch breaks.
The Metropol complements the pushcarts with a cafeteria-style dim sum station in the middle of the restaurant.
Keeping the steamed dumplings hot, and the fried spring rolls and sesame balls crispy, is also a challenge in an operation so big.
The wait staff have to be able to read the room and know how much to stock in each cart.
“You need constant turnover to keep the dim sum fresh,” said Hayashi, 46, who represents the third generation in his family’s restaurant business. The family is Japanese with Chinese ancestry and used to operate the oldest Chinese restaurant in Japan.
Since Metropol announced in July that it would close, Hong Kongers have been flocking to the restaurant to dine one last time and snap pictures.
Customers have been asking if they may take, as souvenirs, the red acrylic signs displayed on each cart that carry the names of dishes. No, they may not. Workers had to bolt the wheels of a cart parked in the lobby for picture-taking because visitors kept pushing it and pretending to be servers.
Bosco Tung, a 74-year-old regular, shook his head as he scanned the dining room teeming with customers on a recent weekday.
Tung, a retired tailor who has had dim sum at Metropol nearly every day except Sundays since the restaurant opened, compared the public’s sudden interest in it to neglecting someone their whole life until their “funeral”.
“Suddenly all these people come. Where were they when it was normal business?” he asked.
One of the many people who paid their respects was Li Bo-sau, a former Metropol dim sum cart auntie who left the restaurant in 2015. Her senior home arranged a visit after they learned that it would close.
Li, 80, still considers her time working at Metropol among her happiest. She especially liked engaging with tourists who did not speak Cantonese.
If she had to explain what the beef meatballs were, she would sign horns with her fingers above her head. When it came to the popular steamed chicken feet, she would cluck and point at her feet.
Anyone within earshot of Li at the senior home has heard about her time at Metropol, employees at the home say. She likes showing visitors a clipping from a Japanese travel magazine that includes a picture of her younger self standing proudly behind a dim sum cart.
She keeps it folded inside an empty Blu Tack envelope; the clipping’s creases are worn white from the number of times she has opened it.
“I still dream of that place,” she said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: David Pierson and Berry Wang
Photographs by: Billy H.C. Kwok
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