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Cuisine originating from Hong Kong

Hong Kong cuisine is mainly influenced by Cantonese cuisine, European cuisines (especially British cuisine) and non Cantonese Chinese cuisines (especially Hakka, Teochew, Hokkien and Shanghainese), as well as Japanese, Korean and Southeast Asian cuisines, due to Hong Kong's past as a British colony and a long history of being an international port of commerce. Complex combinations and international gourmet expertise have given Hong Kong the labels of "Gourmet Paradise" and "World's Fair of Food".

Modern Hong Kong has a predominantly service based economy, and restaurant businesses serve as a main economic contributor. With the fourth densest population per square metre in the world and serving a population of 7 million, Hong Kong is host to a restaurant industry with intense competition. Due to its small geographical size, Hong Kong contains a high number of restaurants per unit area. With Cantonese ethnicity making up 94% of the resident population, Cantonese cuisine is naturally served at home. A majority of Chinese in Hong Kong are Cantonese in addition to sizable numbers of Hakka, Teochew and Shanghainese peoples, and home dishes are Cantonese with occasional mixes of the other three types of cuisines. Rice is predominantly the main staple for home meals. Home ingredients are picked up from local grocery stores and independent produce shops, although supermarkets have become progressively more popular. Hong Kong homes and kitchens tend to be small due to a high population density, and traditional Chinese cuisine often requires the freshest possible ingredients, so food shopping is undertaken frequently and in smaller quantities than is now usual in the West. Take out and dining out is also very common, since people are often too busy to cook with an average 47 hour work week.

The cuisine of Hong Kong traces its origins to its founding as a British colonial outpost in 1841. Soon after the colony was founded, many Western merchants along with Chinese emigrants from nearby Canton flocked there to conduct business. Initially, Hong Kong society consisted of expatriate upper class Westerners, working class Chinese coolies, farmers and fishermen, and middle class Chinese merchants. The simple peasant cuisine was rudimentary compared to the cuisine of 19th century Canton (now commonly known as Guangzhou). Before 1935 when prostitution was still legal in Hong Kong, female escorts often accompanied diners to restaurant meals, especially those of a business entertainment nature. Until the Second World War, opium was also offered. For the majority of Chinese who were not part of the merchant class, dining out in restaurants was non existent and consisted of simple Cantonese country fares. Meat only appeared in festive occasions and celebrations such as birthdays were often done by catering services who prepared the meals at the celebrant's home. The restaurant scene for Europeans in Hong Kong remained separate from Chinese dining. Elaborate Western style restaurants existed at the likes of Hongkong Hotel and subsequently Gloucester Hotel.

Hong Kong's dining lagged behind the then leader of Chinese cuisine, Canton, for a long time and many Hong Kong chefs spent their formative years in Canton. Canton was renowned for its food, and there was a traditional saying of "The food is in Canton" (食在廣州). Cantonese cuisine in Canton reached its peak during the 1920s and was renowned in the care in preparation even for peasant fares such as Char siu or boat congee. 大三元酒家 was renowned for its braised shark fin dish that charged 60 silver yuan, equivalent to 6 months' wage for a working class family. The Guandong cooking style eventually trickled down to the culinary scene in Hong Kong.

The victory of Chinese Communists in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 created a wave of refugees into Hong Kong. A sizeable number of refugees were from non Cantonese speaking parts of China, including the Yangtze River Delta, and introduced Shanghai cuisine to Hong Kong. On the other hand, most renowned chefs of Canton, now known as Guangzhou in pinyin romanisation, settled in Hong Kong to escape from Communist rule in mainland China. Prostitution and opium had by then long faded from the restaurant scene, and to survive, many restaurants started to tap into profitable new markets by offering yum cha and wedding banquets, which coincided with an increasing interest in Western fare by the Chinese in Hong Kong. Seafood started to become specialised delicacies in the 1960s, followed by game in the 1970s. This wave of prosperity also propelled Hong Kong Chinese's awareness of foreign food trends, and many were willing to try foreign ingredients such as asparagus and crayfish from Australia. Foreign food styles such as Japanese and Southeast Asian cuisine started to influence local food, and the pace of change accelerated during the late 1970s and early 1980s. This gave birth to nouvelle Cantonese cuisine that incorporated foreign dishes such as sashimi into Cantonese banquets. For the first time, many Hong Kong Chinese started to have the economic means to visit many Western restaurants of the domain of mainly wealthy expatriate Westerners such as Gaddi's of the Peninsula Hotel. During these years, there was great wealth growth from stock market investments, and one visible manifestation of the resultant nouveau riche mentality in 1970s Hong Kong were sayings such as "mixing shark fin soup with rice" .

China initiated economic reforms when Deng Xiaoping came to power after Mao Zedong died. The opening up of the country gave chefs from Hong Kong chances to reestablish links with chefs from mainland China severed in 1949 and opportunities to gain awareness of various regional Chinese cuisines. Many of these cuisines also contributed to nouvelle Cantonese cuisines in Hong Kong. The lift of martial law in Taiwan in 1987 jump started Taiwanese links with mainland China and has caused a proliferation of eateries specialising in Taiwanese cuisine in Hong Kong as Taiwanese tourists and businessmen used Hong Kong as a midpoint for visits to mainland China. From 1978 until 1997 there was no dispute Hong Kong was the epicenter of Chinese, not only Cantonese, cuisine worldwide, with Chinese restaurants in mainland China and Taiwan, and among overseas Chinese communities, racing to employ chefs trained or worked in Hong Kong and emulating dishes improved upon or invented in Hong Kong. Hong Kong–style Cantonese cuisine became a coinword for innovative Chinese cuisine during this period. It was even unofficially rumoured the Chinese government had secretly consulted the head chef for the 北京樓 of Hong Kong, part of the Maxim's restaurant and catering conglomerate, to teach chefs back at the renowned Quanjude restaurant in Beijing how to make good Peking duck, Quanjude's signature dish, in the early 1980s as the skills to produce the dish were largely lost during the Cultural Revolution.

After Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, the Asian financial crisis and SARS epidemic led to a decade long depression. The boom in Hong Kong culinary scene came to a halt and many restaurants were shuttered, including a number of renowned eateries such as Sun Tung Lok. It is argued that the catch up in prosperity among populations from coastal regions of China, particularly the nouveau riche (derogatory Chinese: daai foon 大款) and corrupted officials (derogatory Chinese: daai ye 大爺), has driven up the demand of many delicacies such as abalone and grouper, and many celebratory dishes have become outrageously expensive that they are beyond the reach of even many upper middle class Hong Kong families. At the same time, Hong Kong people's tastes have become cosmopolitan when compared with one generation ago. Many are now able to appreciate specific European cuisines rather than one generic "Western cuisine", and appreciation of other Asian cuisines, especially Japanese cuisine and Thai cuisine has been ever increasing. These have produced a proliferation of many specialist ethnic cuisine restaurants geared towards young middle class couples on one hand, and a consolidation of fine dining Cantonese restaurants on the other. As of the early 21st century Hong Kong, notwithstanding the partial recovery of Hong Kong's economy from the slump in 2003 due to the SARS epidemic, many pundits argue that contemporary Hong Kong's economy is heavily skewed towards real estate development and financial services. This provides prosperity to only a select few minority and an uncertain long term economic fortune vis a vis more diversified mega rich cities in China such as Shanghai and Guangzhou, and the territory therefore no longer possesses the economic base to support mass level super fine dining that is required to sustain an active dining culture. A common perception of Hong Kong's current culinary culture is one being in decline and resting on past laurels. For example, culinary magazines such as Eat and Travel Weekly report fewer fundamentally new dishes being invented in Hong Kong post 2000 than the 1980s heyday, and many restaurants tend to resort to popularise haute dishes invented in the 1980s. Modern Hong Kong's labour market has also disrupted the traditional ways of grooming Chinese chefs, which henceforth been trained in a very long and drawn one to one practical apprenticeships. Very few chefs are willing to sacrifice their time and effort to produce traditional cooking that discourages cutting corners, and emphasises techniques over ingredients' net economic worth. On the other hand, a minority of optimistic pundits argue Hong Kong may well develop a foodie culture similar to other developed economies and preserve the best of traditional cooking. Historically, Hong Kong's food source came from a combination of mini stores instead of supermarkets. Some of the stores included: rice dealers , serving as mini rice storage warehouses; wine shops , which offered beverages; convenient stores (, Cantonese rendering of "store"), which were single convenient stores, most notable for serving fresh baked bread. The main component was wet markets – one of the first market gatherings in Hong Kong was Central Market that began in the 1840s. The idea of a single facility or supermarket that provided all food ingredients did not take place until the early 1970s when Wellcome, a local grocery chain, changed its format into a supermarket. Air conditioned supermarkets did not become standardised until the 1980s. The early 21st century Western environmentalism or sustainability inspired food trends, such as natural food, organic food, non genetically modified food, local food, and farmer's markets, have been ignored by a majority of Hong Kong's populations. The Western farmer's market share some similarities with the traditional Chinese wet markets, however support of wet markets is largely based on traditional Chinese cultural preference rather than sustainability, and wet markets contain many features that are condemned by modern Western environmentalists on the grounds of "animal cruelty" (live animals sold for food) and "high food miles" (fruits and seafood from another continent).