I was watching YouTube one night, not looking for anything in particular when a short story was featured from the SCMP. It was about an old Hong Kong cha chaan teng inside one of the old buildings in TST. This old cha chaan teng had been in the location for decades and was famous for serving a tomato and egg noodle that looked "like vomit". It didn't seem all that appealing, but I thought I would go and see what it was like in person.
Walking through the intensely busy streets of Tsim Sha Tsui, we found ourselves at the building. Even then, it wasn't immediately clear how we would get to the restaurant itself. After circling the hallways for a bit, we realised we needed to find the staircases in the corner to go down into the basement area.
Once in the basement, we were surprised to find what felt like an entire street that had been transported into the basement of a building. The shop front genuinely looked like what you would normally expect at street level. This feeling was made stronger when someone drove a scooter by (how did he get down to the basement?) and the people who were all sitting around smoking.
We sat down and ordered some tea and the famous "vomit noodles". What came out to us matched up with the description. It was a egg and tomato soup noodle, but the way in which everything had been prepared really didn't create the most appealing of appearances. The eggs and tomato were blended into a slurry in the soup which made it all look a bit like it had already been partly digested.... like vomit.
Appearances can be deceiving though. We each tucked into the noodles and we all found it to be quite tasty. In fact, it was was tastier than many of the other cha chaan teng instant noodles I had tried before. For some reason which is unknown to me, instant noodles are one of the beloved staples of cha chaan tengs and small street food vendors (the ones that remain) all over Hong Kong. People talk about the "quality" of the soup and the "skill" of the cooks, with some of the famous places even having long lines of people waiting for their turn to try the noodles. I've never quite understood the appeal. There isn't anything particularly special about any of these stalls I've tried over the years and it's often seemed to be more of a case of reputation over substance. This was a bit different though. The soup and the noodles were genuinely very tasty and the entire approach to its preparation was unique.
Besides the food, the location itself was what made this place something worth visiting. Sitting in this fake street frontage cha chaan teng in the bowels of a large industrial building felt like something out of a sci fi story. It was like a scene which had been plucked from a description of a hive city, or some other story of an over-industrialised world in which people no longer see sunlight. I wondered whether this had in fact been in the inspiration for some writers over the years. Probably wouldn't be surprising at all if it was.
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