NOTES AND QUERIES
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Nowadays there are not many old typical tea-houses left in Hong Kong. Such establishments have become fewer and fewer in number as the old ones closed down their business or their premises were pulled down for redevelopment. New establishments, as a rule, combine the business of a Chinese restaurant and a tea-house together and call themselves either Chau Ka (茶家) or Chau Lau (茶樓). The main difference between a typical Chinese tea-house and a Chinese restaurant is that the former does not serve full meals and also closes business at much earlier hours than the latter. Sumptuous dinner parties are never celebrated at Chinese tea-houses.
Dim Sum (點心) or Chinese delicacies — the name means 'to stimulate the heart' — are the main food items available in a tea-house; whilst there is a very wide choice of tea from many different varieties of leaf. It is not common for the regular tea-house goers to take dim sum to such an extent as to completely fill their stomachs. What they are really after is only a pot of good tea and two pieces of tasty delicacies (*). They usually pay the bill at the cashier's counter with the exact amount, as it is very uncommon in this type of places for tips to be offered to the waiters.
Another special feature that can be found in a Chinese tea-house is that the customers do not order the delicacies or dim sum but wait for them to come out from the kitchen. They are carried in trays by a number of fokis who parade before the customers in different corners of the tea-house trying to attract attention by shouting out the names of the items they are carrying. In the older type tea-houses the customers are as a rule provided with a bowl containing boiling hot water for sterilizing their eating and drinking utensils, notwithstanding the fact that such utensils might have already been thoroughly washed and cleaned. The provision of a large number of spittoons in the seating accommodation also forms a special feature of the older type Chinese tea-houses.
(2) addition by the Tour Organizer
A Chinese book entitled 香港掌故:張知民編著, apparently published in the 1950s, has a chapter dealing with the tea houses of 50 years before. Then, the dim sum used to be packed in a ...
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