Ordinary Gweilo

When I lived in the UK, I used to enjoy eating in Chinese restaurants.  Well, how was I to know that it wasn’t real Chinese food?  By the same token, eating so-called "Western" food in Hong Kong is generally a fairly painful experience, as Chopped Onions reminds us:

Order “French” onion soup, in a "western restaurant" and you get water flavoured with beef bouillon-powder and MSG, topped with a melted “cheese” that tastes of burnt plastic.

“Waiter, this is not French onion soup!”

“This Hong Kong style”

Locals have never eaten real French Onion Soup, so they are none the wiser, just as I used to think that Chicken Chow Mein and Sweet and Sour Pork were what Chinese people eat every day.

Fumier weighs in with the observation that going upmarket doesn’t help.  The local "Western" breakfast may not exactly be authentic, but it is at least cheap.  Breakfast at the Flying Pan isn’t:

Certainly the prices would not be out of place in London: at HK$85 for a full (if you do not regard tea or coffee as being a breakfast component) breakfast. However, I would beg to suggest that having just cinammon and salt containers on the table indicates a certain lack of attention to detail, especially since the average punter might assume the cinammon to be pepper. Hmmm, sausage and cinammon for that truly authentic western breakfast experience. Or perhaps this is the Flying Pan’s own "Hong Kong style".