i want my baby-back, baby-back...

It's July, the time of year where my parents fire up the grill on a regular basis. While my brain knows I am in Hong Kong and not in the States, my stomach doesn't know better. Hence, I've been getting these strong cravings for such American items as hot dogs, steaks, and corn on the cob. Chinese people have been eating corn on the cob for a few centuries now, so any vegetable market here sells that. Since my favorite hot dog (at least while growing up) isn't sold even in Boston - different regions of America having their own hot dog preferences - my stomach knows not to be too finicky when it comes to mechanically separated meat. The big question for me was: can I find a decent steak or some barbequed meat at an affordable price?

One of my teachers recommended that I should head over to a cha chaan teng to order a steak. (The term "cha chaan teng", which literally means "tea meal chamber", is meant to evoke the English term "luncheonette". Luncheonettes are a type of sit-down fast-food restaurant: more formal than a cafeteria, less formal than a diner. Except for Waffle Houses or Howard Johnson's, most luncheonettes in America were killed off by the rise of drive-thru fast food chains.) I had never went to a cha chaan teng before, figuring these places merely served Chinese food in a Westernized lunch-counter setting. I was told: "No, they also serve Westernized food to Chinese locals at affordable prices. You need to try a cha chaan teng at least once - they're a unique part of Hong Kong."

The first cha chaan teng I went to had no menus in English, just Chinese. Menu item names in Chinese are notoriously complicated: "phoenix claws" are actually "chicken's feet", "mandarin duck" is actually a half-tea/half-coffee beverage. Even native Chinese can have trouble matching the highfalutin item names to the actual dishes! So even with my knowledge of 800 characters, the menu still confused me. As I started to grab my phrase book, the waitress sprang toward my seat, said "No, no, no!" (pointing to the phrase book and menu), pointed to the four daily specials (listed as A, B, C, and D) on the marker-board, and walked away. Thirty seconds later, after I had looked up all of two characters from that board, she returned to ask me, insistently, "A, B, C, D? A, B, C, D?" Since item C had a character meaning "beef", I hoped the characters I didn't know meant "steak". Nope, I ended up ordering a dish of beef with flat rice noodles. Tasty, but it wasn't steak.

The next day, I went to a cha chaan teng that had an English name. Once I sat down, I grabbed the English menu that was on the table -- only to have the waiter sprint to my table and take the menu out of my hands! "Sorry, that's only for lunch and dinner" he said. "Between two and five, you have to use this afternoon tea menu." Afternoon tea in Hong Kong, I should note, is not dim sum (morning tea), but a quick Western snack. Steaks are not considered snack food, even in Texas. So when the waiter handed me the Chinese-only menu for afternoon tea, I didn't bother looking for barbeque. Instead I ordered (what I thought was) toast and tea, and was pleasantly surprised when the waiter brought butter, syrup, and a mammoth slice of deep-fried cinnamon French toast to my table. Another tasty meal, but not what I was craving.

After those two attempts, I decided to swallow my pride and go to an American-style joint in the tourist ghetto. Dan Ryan's is Hong Kong owned, but tries really hard to appeal to Americans. Few other places would open at 7 am on a Monday morning just so people can watch some obscure game. So I knew, even before I opened the bilingual menu, that my quest for summer grub was about to end. It may have been the most expensive half-rack of baby-back ribs I ever ate (HK$165!), but it was also among the most satisfying half-rack of ribs I ever ate.