Drinks, with a side of gender

They're the dirty beer nuts no-one wants

In Hong Kong, it’s still incredibly common for servers to suggest dishes like so: “the ladies will enjoy the fish, as it’s lighter, and the gentlemen will enjoy the steak”. It’s especially rife in beverage service, where, if I (someone who presents as female, and dorky) gave a bartender carte blanche, would be likely to get a variation on a low abv fruit juice cocktail, or a “fruity” white wine. Whenever this happens I want to yell “STOP!” with the terror of someone who’s just heard two pieces of styrofoam being rubbed together, and recently I had started doing that (well, less terrorising and more… Asian-polite), but am always met with puzzled looks – as if I was the weird one.

In 2020, TVB, the largest free-to-air channel in the city, had a show called “女人必學100道菜” (100 Dishes Every Woman Needs to Learn). The streets continue to be laden with dieting products promising to “block” carbs, make your tits bigger and waist smaller, botox your calves, or whatever the newest craze is, and almost always has a female-presenting model. For male-presenting people, it’s always something about hair – honestly I don’t give a flying f about anybody’s hair as long as it’s clean.

A while back (I tweeted about it but sadly can’t find it anymore) there was an ad for a restaurant booking service, in which a man offered to take his partner (female, of course 🙄) out for dinner to give the woman a night off (cooking). And lines like this in an actual press release: “As most [nationality] men adore mangoes while ladies prefer strawberries…”, and ladies’ nights – wow – my inbox is full of those. Asia has more women in leadership roles than the rest of the world – somehow that hasn’t been reflected in the daily misogyny.

So, father’s day is coming up, and I’m seeing ads for dad-appropriate foods, like, you guessed it – whisk(e)y. Now, I’ve been trying to talk about gendered foods as an annoying social phenomenon, but let’s be honest, this newsletter is mostly about my deep-set personal peeves. And whisk(e)y is definitely a trigger, because I love whisk(e)y, yet society can’t deal with it. Yeah, I can hear all you (men) saying “stop whining sweetheart, you can drink whatever you damn well like,” and while true, imaginary bigot, I also don’t want silently raised eyebrows, people asking if I’ve had a rough day, or “neat???” (with three question marks in their voice) – things that never happen to male-presenting people when they order a dark liquor neat.

To play devil’s advocate, I wanted to give an example of how it might be okay for anyone to suggest food or drink based on gender, but I’ve written and deleted those possibilities five times now, because it’s never okay, except maybe for biological reasons eg. pregnancy. There might be an argument for it if the dish were medicinal (eg. in Chinese Medicine – but surely, no-one should feel like they can’t eat dong guai if they wanted to?) Consider this my plea for everyone in F&B to stop assigning a gender to food. Put posters around your office, add it to training manuals and curricula, fine people every time they do it… I don’t care how, but it has to be done.

Thanks for reading the transcript of my therapy session (j/k). If you like this level of pettiness, you may want to subscribe.

Hong Kong food things I really want to tell everyone about

I went to a little pre-opening media shindig at Leading Nation’s (Elephant Grounds, La Rambla, Yakiniku Mafia, The Diplomat) new brasserie Margo – the place is teeny tiny and has a cute “speakeasy” upstairs, but the main thing I want to tell you here is that the kitchen is led by Mario Paeke, previously chef de cuisine at SOMM, which has been superb every time I’d been, so I have high hopes for Margo.

Chefs leaving Hong Kong: Jowett Yu from Ho Lee Fook and Max Levy from Okra will be saying their farewells this summer. Okra’s final dinners upstairs were booked out almost immediately, sigh.

Zero Foodprint Asia: Peggy Chan (Grassroots Initiatives) has brought the US non-profit to HK. Its programmes support restaurants who want to help us out of the climate crisis, source locally and better, and offers a real and easy solution – a fund that goes right back into local farming/soil projects that restore carbon. No carbon “offsets” in far-flung countries, no charitable giving – this is money that will go straight back into Hong Kong’s soils, which will capture our carbon and improve our food. Disclaimer: there’s little question that this is a subject close to my heart. I’m on the advisory board of ZFPA and Capsule48 made the launch video.