Which matters when a London restaurant tries to pair one of these gravies with a protein it was never designed for.

I have visited two of them recently. Two gambles — one at Kricket in Shoreditch, one at Khao Bird in Soho.

Read more

So I've always found it odd that a cha chaan teng — 茶餐廳, Hong Kong's everyday tea-and-toast diner — sometimes needs a label bolted to the window: Hong Kong-style cafe. Hong Kong style. As if the place weren't quite sure you'd believe it otherwise.

There's a Cantonese idiom for exactly this move. 此地無銀三百両 (ci dei mou ngan saam baak loeng) — "no 300 taels of silver buried here". A man hides his silver in the ground, then, worried someone will dig it up, plants a sign over the spot: no silver buried here. The sign is how everyone knows. To protest a thing is to confess it.

Hong Kong style, reads the window. And I think: so it isn't, then.

Maybe I'm just unlucky. But every time I give one of these places a chance, something's off within minutes.

I know what the real thing is by heart. A proper cha chaan teng doesn't print 茶走 (cha jau) on its menu — milk tea with condensed milk in place of the usual evaporated milk — yet ask for one and the waiter won't raise an eyebrow. There's a set menu: a main and a drink, no negotiation. And there's food only Hong Kong could have arrived at — Western ingredients handled with a wok's logic. Spaghetti, stir-fried. Macaroni in soup, with a fried egg and a slab of luncheon meat. As the yolk broke into the macaroni soup, I heard myself say: "Yum."

The "-style" places miss all of it. Sichuan noodles turn up on the menu — that's not Hong Kong, that's a thousand miles away. The milk tea comes out thin, worse than the cha chaan teng downstairs from my old public housing block, which is not, to be fair, a low bar. And the renovation tries so hard to look "Chinese" — dark wood, red lanterns — when the real thing has no decor to speak of: fluorescent light, Formica, a laminated menu curling at the corners.

Once the word had my attention, it was everywhere.

Greek-style yogurt, a whole chiller of it. The method is the whole point: milk and live cultures, whey strained out slowly until you get the density, the tang, the protein count — around 9 to 10 grams per 100g rather than the usual 4 or 5. No thickeners faking the texture back in. In the UK, "Greek yoghurt" actually means all of that, plus Greece: a 2014 Court of Appeal ruling established that the name requires the origin, the straining, and no additives. The law, for once, got it right.

But "Greek-style" carries none of those requirements. That's the gap where anything lives — a properly strained British yogurt and a tub of modified starch and gum, side by side on the same shelf, sharing the same suffix. The label won't tell you which is which. The protein count will.

Relevant articles

Because that's the trick of it. Some food names are locked. Champagne only comes from Champagne; call your English fizz that and you'll hear from a lawyer. Parmigiano Reggiano is protected to the point of pettiness — which is why the imitations must mumble "Italian hard cheese" instead. Feta has to be Greek. Even Cumberland sausage counts: the real one is made in Cumbria, the pork coarsely chopped and high in content, carried by black and white pepper rather than a fistful of herbs — everything else can only call itself "Cumberland-style".

These names are promises with consequences attached. A cha chaan teng makes the same promise — food on the table in three minutes, a menu past a hundred items, every other dish quietly folding West into East — without any legal teeth behind it. The method is the point.

Which leaves "-style" as the one honest word on the whole window. The disclaimer doing its quiet job: not here, not quite, don't get your hopes up. No 300 taels of silver buried here — I just had to learn to read the sign the way it was written.

Leave a comment

Every Meal Counts is a reader-supported newsletter.

If you’re here and you’re reading, thank you.

Subscribe now

If you can, please share to your friend who also love food.

Share Every Meal Counts

Two weeks ago I had a terrible day at work. I won't go into it. What I will say is that I went for lunch alone, sat down at a ramen place near the office, ordered a bowl of tonkotsu, and let the soup do what I needed it to do.

It was, I think, my third or fourth bowl of tonkotsu that month.

Someone told me once — I was in my teens, and I've never been able to trace where this idea came from — that your comfort food is not something you choose. It is chosen for you, by your body, in a specific moment. The food you eat at your hungriest or most devastated point gets filed away permanently. From then on, the taste means safe. It means held.

I have no scientific proof of this. But I have myself.

I was in secondary school when it happened. It was the busiest period of my life: classes, studies, and I was on the exco of a Red Cross unit. One evening — I must have had a rushed lunch at noon and nothing since — I found myself at Red Cross headquarters at almost 8pm. I was starving. My blood sugar must have been through the floor. The meeting had not gone well; we had to redo half our planning. When you are a Form 3 student and the thing you are responsible for falls apart, it feels like the whole world has collapsed. It doesn't matter that no one else would remember it by the following week.

Standing outside in the cold, I did what you could do in a world without smartphones: I called a friend who lived nearby. "Can I come over? I need some food." I was expecting something quick — a biscuit, maybe a bar of chocolate. "I can make you an instant noodle," he said. I was a bit shocked. I had never expected a man to cook for me.

When I arrived, it was better than that. There was a leaf vegetable. And an egg.

My dad never cooked. My grandpa never cooked. I realised, much later, that this was the first time a man had ever cooked for me. I sat there and inhaled it — the warmth, the care, all of it at once. Nissin 出前一丁, Kyushu Tonkotsu flavour — the bright green packet with the little delivery boy on the front.

He was not my boyfriend and has never became one. Indeed we haven't spoken in more than twenty years. But because of that bowl, I have always had a place for him in my heart.

Relevant articles

Here is what the science says, more or less. Stress hormones released during intense emotional moments — cortisol, adrenaline — amplify memory consolidation via the amygdala. The hungrier or more distressed you are, the stronger the dopamine hit when food finally arrives. Warm and savoury specifically activates a parasympathetic response, a kind of physiological settling. Researchers have noted that foods become comfort foods through repeated emotionally charged encounters — not always a single moment.

But some nights carry enough weight for many.

My comfort food didn't stay fixed. It grew with me. In my twenties, when I could eat anything without any impact on my waistline, I added spam. I always asked specifically for Nissin Kyushu Tonkotsu at cha chaan tengs — some charged two dollars extra for that. I paid it without thinking, even on a budget. My friends never understood. I would rather skip the bus than save those two dollars. It was a small joy, entirely mine.

Somewhere in my thirties, I started caring about what I put in my body, so I swapped the instant packet for fresh ramen. Which is, when you think about it, exactly the same thing with better ingredients. Tonkotsu broth. Rich and milky-white. An egg on top.

I have eaten it in Hong Kong, in Singapore, in London, in cities I was passing through for work. I have eaten it when everything was fine and I just wanted a good bowl of noodles. I ate it two weeks ago, alone, because I needed it to hold me for an hour.

Comfort food travels. Once your body learns that a flavour means safe, it doesn't forget because you moved countries, or grew up, or switched to fresh noodles. The association goes deeper than habit. It's in the memory, in the hunger, in the specific warmth of a bowl that once arrived when you needed it most.

I don't know what my comfort food will look like in another twenty years. Probably something with a long, pale broth.

Probably with an egg, too.

Leave a comment

Every Meal Counts is a reader-supported newsletter.

If you’re here and you’re reading, thank you.

Subscribe now

If you can, please share to your friend who also love food.

Share Every Meal Counts

🧪Most kitchen rules are correct observations with the wrong conclusion attached. This Cooking Science series — exclusive to paid subscribers — goes looking for the actual mechanism: what’s happening in your pan, your oven, and your fridge, so you can cook with understanding instead of habit.

Subscribe now

There's a specific kind of letdown that lives in pub fish and chips. The batter arrives golden and loud, the chips are hot, there's a wedge of lemon and a little pot of tartare — and then you reach the fish itself, and it tastes of almost nothing. Soft, faintly of the sea, mostly of the fryer.

So you reach for the lemon. You reach for the tartare. Yet neither of them rescue the freshness you were expecting.

We talk about fish being "fresh" as if we all agree what we mean. Fresh is good; not-fresh is the flat thing under the batter. But what is freshness, actually? What's happening to a fish between the water and the plate?

Two clocks ticking

A fish starts changing the moment it dies, and two clocks start running — one you can smell, and one you can't.

The one you can smell runs against you. Sea fish carry a compound called trimethylamine oxide — TMAO — in their flesh, which helps them cope with cold, salty water. On its own it has no smell at all. But once the fish is dead, bacteria go to work and turn it into trimethylamine — TMA — and that is the unmistakable "fishy" smell.

So the smell isn't really the sign of a fish at all; it's the sign of a fish that's been kept waiting. It starts slow on ice, then climbs, and it climbs faster the warmer things get. A cold kitchen buys time. A warm pub kitchen on a busy Friday does not.

But cold has a limit too. Freeze a fish slowly, or leave it in there too long, and the water in its flesh grows into sharp little ice crystals that tear the muscle apart from the inside. You stop the smell that way, but you thaw out something soft and watery — the texture broken before it ever reaches the pan. Frozen fast and hard, a fish can keep beautifully; frozen carelessly, it just swaps one kind of ruin for another.

There's fat in the story too — how oily the fish is, what it ate, the season it was caught in — which lands as richness and is easily mistaken for freshness. But mostly, "fresh," in the way we mean it at the table, comes down to this: before the smell wins. And the lemon, the tartare — they're not quite cheating, but they aren't making the fish any fresher either. Acid quietens the smell; salt and fat shout over the top. It's a costume. And a costume only matters when there's something underneath you'd rather not show.

Learn the best from sushi chef

The other clock — the one you can't smell — runs the other way. As the muscle spends its last store of energy, it breaks down into a compound called inosinate: the same savoury, brothy note you get from a good stock or a dried scallop. It's the taste we read as a fish tasting of itself, and it builds up over hours, not seconds. Which is stranger than it sounds, when you follow it through — the freshest fish imaginable, the one still twitching, should taste of the least. And it does.

I didn't work this out from a book. I worked it out at a sushi counter, watching the chef set a piece of tuna otoro — the belly cut, pink and ribboned with white fat, the fattiest there is — on the wood in front of me. "Aged five days," he said. Quiet, certain, in the voice of a man who had no need for me to be impressed — the way you might mention that bread should cool before you cut it. Not a boast. Just how it was. I remember the small, silly jolt of it: I knew beef was aged. It had honestly never crossed my mind that fish could be — that the piece in front of me was better because someone had made it wait.

There's a catch, though: you can't age just any fish. It only works if the killing was clean. The chef's tuna would have been dispatched the Japanese way — ikejime (活け締め), a quick spike to the brain the moment it's landed — so the fish dies calm instead of thrashing itself ragged. A panicked death burns through exactly the stuff that later becomes flavour, and floods the flesh with the chemistry of struggle; a fish that fought to the end is half-spoiled before it touches the ice. Kill it cleanly in a more humane way, and you earn the days that ageing needs.

The savoury compound peaks around a day after death, not at the moment of the catch. Rest a fish properly — cold, clean, watched — and you're not letting it go off. You're letting it arrive. The problem was never that the fish hadn't been caught that morning — good frozen-at-sea fish, handled properly, can beat a "fresh" fillet that's spent three days in a leaky cold chain.

Try telling that to grandma

I would love to explain all of this to my grandmother. I will never get the chance.

For her, the whole question is settled before the fish is even dead. She wants 游水魚 — yau seui yu, "swimming fish" — the ones still circling the tanks at the wet market, so she can point to the one she wants and watch the fishmonger lift it out, tail still thrashing. 鮮 (sin), the word for that bright, living kind of freshness, sits close to the centre of how Cantonese cook. It isn't a bonus. It's almost a moral standard. And the proof is the plainest dish on the table: a whole fish steamed with nothing but ginger, spring onion, and a hiss of hot oil at the end. No batter. No sauce to hide behind. If the fish isn't good, everyone knows at once. Steaming is a lie detector.

Try telling her the fish might taste better if she let it rest for a day. To grandma, a rested fillet is just a fish someone forgot to cook.

And the funny thing is, she and the sushi chef want precisely the same thing — a fish that tastes most like itself. One of them gets there by waiting. The other refuses to wait a single second. The chef trusts time; grandma trusts her own eyes and a tank full of evidence.

I know which one has the better science on their side. I also know there is no arguing with a woman watching a fish swim.

Leave a comment

Every Meal Counts is a reader-supported newsletter.

If you’re here and you’re reading, thank you.

Subscribe now

If you can, please share to your friend who also love food.

Share Every Meal Counts

My partner and I visit the same restaurant to celebrate our anniversary every year. It's a nice Portuguese dinner on our first day-trip. Not exactly fine dining, but fancy enough for students who live on a budget — old school, classy, well-attended (almost like butler service), decent food, reasonable price. It's sitting on a quiet residential street. The biggest surprise always comes at the end with the cute wooden dessert trolley. I turned into a kid again looking at all the cakes and puddings.

It’s no longer the same

Now it's gone.

When we returned this year, the moment I stepped in, I realised something had changed. It's the same building, same renovation, almost the same set up, but something is missing.

"The table we sat at last year was gone." I told my partner, when I saw two computers sitting on the table. "Maybe they just need more office space temporarily?" He refused to admit there would be any substantial change at this place. It's 7.30pm, there's only one table of eight people in the restaurant, with a happy birthday balloon. "Do you think they also come here to celebrate every year?" I asked. My partner shrugged.

A young girl came out from the back of the restaurant after a minute. Her white shirt was lightly ironed, waist-length hair loosely tied behind her back. I expected to be invited over to the bar area to have a drink first, as the tables were clearly not fully set up. Yet she asked us to pick a table. We did, like in a casual cafe.

The plastic flower was the same one from before, but the tablecloths were wrinkled. I ordered a glass of house red, my partner asked what size the bottled beer was. "Eh.. it's a normal bottle," said the waitress. She didn't feel like she should have known the answer. "There are different sizes of beer, big and small — which is this?" My partner asked persistently. "It's like this." The waitress widened the gap between her two hands vertically, to indicate the size, but that could be any size. She ended up bringing the bottle to the table to show us, and only after a few minutes, she came back again. "For the red wine, what size do you want?"

Read more

Food in Fictions (FiFs) is a series about how food shows up in films, books, and other stories — and what it quietly says about the characters and the world they live in. I look at what’s on the table (and what isn’t), how actors eat, and when food becomes more than just a prop. This series runs when a scene sticks with me long enough that I need to write about it 🤤

Subscribe now

We made sure to catch Mel Brooks' hit musical _The Producers_ before its last day in London's Garrick Theatre on September 19th. I really love the wildness, lousiness and political sharpness.

The premise: two Broadway schemers deliberately mount the worst show imaginable, hoping it will flop so they can pocket the investors' money. In this journey together they encounter all types of people they need to please and win over — for trust, or for money. Including Roger De Bris.

At the peak of Keep It Gay — chorus line, feather boas, a director who treats camp as a competitive sport — the audience is laughing. I'm laughing. And then the champagne comes out. Something shifts. Not wrong, exactly. More like a chord that's almost in tune.

It takes me a moment to land on it: the glasses are short and round. The kind you'd reach for at a garden party, or a work drinks that's run slightly late. And the champagne itself is pink.

I have a very specific idea of what champagne is supposed to look like. Tall flute. Pale gold. Bubbles climbing in near-single file, slow and purposeful. This was two departures from that grammar, simultaneously, at peak volume.

The flute won because it performs the fizz.

The coupe came first — that wide, shallow glass your grandmother might have had, the one that looks like a miniature birdbath. It was the standard for most of champagne's formal history. The flute displaced it not because it tasted better, but because the narrow shape keeps bubbles rising longer. Visibly, dramatically, for the duration of the drink. The scientists who study this are blunter than the marketing: the flute actually scores worse on aroma — its narrow bowl oversaturates your nose with CO₂, masking the flavour it's supposed to showcase. We switched because the flute is better theatre. Which means we were never really drinking champagne. We were drinking the display of it.

There is one practical exception.

The coupe still earns its place at champagne towers — that wide, shallow bowl is exactly what lets the liquid overflow and cascade downward, glass to glass. But The Producers doesn't have a tower. The champagne comes in on a tray, handed to people one glass at a time. Which leaves the coupe without its alibi.

The wrong glass for the right man.

Rosé champagne adds a further layer. It sits in an odd register: more celebratory than white, but softer, slightly camp. It suggests a particular kind of celebration — bridal shower, not midnight countdown. Not the serious kind.

Which brings me to Roger De Bris.

Roger is the musical's director-for-hire — a man so extravagantly camp he arrives to his own audition in a ballgown. He is a man of theatrical conviction and questionable grammar. His celebration is maximally performed: the gesture without the rules, the feeling without the form. It turns out rosé in a wide, round glass codes for camp nostalgia and flirtation — the same liquid in a flute reads as polished and aspirational. Which means Roger's props, deliberately or not, are a precise character note. Pink. Wrong glass. Absolute sincerity. That's Roger De Bris in a sentence.

The Producers keeps showing us people celebrating things they probably shouldn't: a guaranteed flop, a producer's scheme, a director's vanity project. The slightly wrong champagne fits all of it perfectly.

Maybe it's deliberate. Maybe it's a happy accident that turned out true. I've stopped needing to know which.

Celebration was never really about the drink. It's the decision that this moment is worth marking — and meaning it. Roger gets that right, even when he gets everything else wrong.

I read it twice.

That's a dim sum order.

The trolley

Anyone who grew up going to yum cha knows the specific calculus of the trolley — which dishes you clock from across the room, which ones you reach for before anyone else at the table gets a chance. Chicken feet were always one of those. Braised in black bean sauce, sticky, gelatinous, requiring a particular patience to eat properly. My grandmother had a quiet efficiency I've never matched. My auntie ate them like she was the only person at the table.

Wooly was chewing one contentedly on the kitchen floor.

My first reaction was something close to offended. These are not scraps. Not the bits left over after everything good has been taken. And then the feeling shifted into something more like pity — the sort you feel when you realise someone has been eating around the best parts their whole life and doesn't even know it. Not because they're bad at food. Just because at some point the knowledge stopped being passed on, and now the finest things end up in a bag with a picture of a happy Labrador on the front.

Two explanations

I'd always had two explanations for why this gap existed — between the dog bowl and the dim sum trolley.

The first: East Asians are simply less precious about these things. More practical. Every part of the animal has value, and a food culture that recognises that is more complete. I felt an uncomplicated pride about this, the way you might about a sensible recycling habit.

The second, which felt even more airtight: sheer logic. One chicken yields plenty of breast meat. It has exactly two feet. One heart. One gizzard. A pig has two ears. The parts that appear only once or twice per animal should, by any reasonable supply-and-demand reading, be the rarest and therefore the most precious. I used to find it genuinely baffling that this wasn't obvious to everyone. The market was broken by squeamishness, not by any actual shortage.

Phoenix talons

A chicken foot looks like a chicken foot. It has skin, knuckles, nails — everything that marks it as part of something that was once alive and moving. There's a half-universal human response to that: not quite squeamishness, but a specific discomfort with things that remind us too clearly of the animal they came from. Boneless chicken breast doesn't trigger it. A foot does. And no amount of supply-and-demand logic overrides that feeling — disgust, it turns out, is strong enough to suppress an entire market.

What we call 鳳爪 — fung jaau, phoenix talons — is a specific answer to that specific problem. First boiled. Then dried completely. Deep-fried. Soaked in ice water for half an hour until the skin puckers and wrinkles away from its original shape. Marinated for hours. Then braised in fermented black beans for twenty minutes more. Every step removes something — the rawness, the colour, the texture of a thing that was once a foot. What's left is a different object entirely: gelatinous, sticky, the collagen broken down into something that coats the back of your teeth in the best possible way. And then the name: not chicken feet. Phoenix talons. Someone chose that carefully, and it does work the preparation alone can't.

This wasn't pragmatism I'd inherited. It was craft — applied, over generations, to a real problem. The scarcity logic does hold. But it only holds because someone spent centuries making these parts desirable enough for the economics to matter. It didn't happen on its own. It was earned.

They were so close

The English had trotters. Tripe. Cow heel. In the north, up until the 1950s, tripe shops were as common as fish-and-chip shops — a hundred and forty-odd in some towns. People ate all of it. Then prosperity arrived, the recipes stopped being passed down, and the parts drifted quietly into pet food. The scarcity logic was always available to them. They just never built the thing that would have made it stick. Nobody did the work. And so here we are: the rarest parts of the chicken, in a bag next to some kibble.

It's genuinely a bit sad. They were so close.

Wooly finished his phoenix talons and looked up at me for another one. He's a Labrador. He would eat a stone if it smelled interesting. But he knew what he had, in his way. He wasn't confused about the value. He didn't need the name, or the bamboo steamer, or a century of culinary refinement. He just knew it was the good stuff.

I gave him a pig's ear and tried not to feel too rueful about the whole thing.

Leave a comment

Every Meal Counts is a reader-supported newsletter.

If you’re here and you’re reading, thank you.

Subscribe now

If you can, please share to your friend who also love food.

Share Every Meal Counts

Someone, at some point, sat in front of a spreadsheet and typed: 300 kg of Atlantic salmon. 116 kg of Norwegian brown cheese. 6,000 oranges.

This was not a supermarket order. It was Norway's World Cup cargo manifest.

The newspapers called it extreme. Sports scientists called it "eliminating unnecessary variability." I read it and thought: I know exactly what that is.

The extra miles

Some mornings I want macaroni soup. The cha chaan teng kind — broth that's simultaneously clear and somehow rich, elbow pasta cooked well past al dente the way you'd never see in an Italian kitchen, maybe a slice of spam on the side. I live in London. I have never struggled to find food. And yet.

I'll go to the Chinese supermarket for the right dried macaroni. Make the stock from scratch. Find the specific brand of satay paste — not any satay paste, that one — for the days I want the noodle version instead. I do all this not because London is lacking, but because some mornings my body needs to know where it is.

What the gut knows

Turns out there's a name for what's happening, if not quite a clinical trial.

Gastrointestinal problems affect 30–50% of endurance athletes competing abroad — not from bad food, but from new food. Different microbes, different fibres, different timing. The gut-brain axis, that two-way channel between your stomach and your nervous system, responds to novelty. Not always well. Food familiarity was rated 4.07 out of 5 for importance by athletes at the Commonwealth Games — as significant as nutrient composition, ranked above smell and appearance. Norway's team chef put it plainly: familiar foods "can contribute both to nutrition and overall well-being during a demanding competition."

The cargo manifest wasn't paranoia. It was a cortisol strategy.

Everyone does this

Here is what's worth knowing: everyone does this.

Argentina shipped 500 kg of beef to Qatar in 2022 — asado rituals intact, regardless of what the host country offered. Japan fields near-identical menus at every tournament: hamburger steak, miso-marinated fish, eel. Italy brings Parmesan, olive oil, prosciutto. The US brings oatmeal, Cheerios, peanut butter, and A1 Steak Sauce. Ask any Indian migrant what's in their suitcase: spices first, pickles second, snacks before clothes. None of it is about distrust. It's about what the gut already knows.

A 2024 study of nine cha chaan tengs across the UK — Nottingham, Manchester, London — found that BNO migrants visit "for motivations beyond simply food." Of course they do. The plastic stools, the bilingual menus, the milk tea arriving without being asked for. You're not there for the calories. You're there because you know what's coming next.

The cargo manifest and the suitcase noodle packet are the same impulse. Different scale, same nervous system.

Erling Haaland, in his own words: "I eat the heart and liver… I think eating quality food that is as local as possible is the most important thing." That's from a documentary, not a nutrition coach's whiteboard. The 6,000-calorie-a-day figure that went viral is media extrapolation — no team nutritionist has it on record. But the organ meats? Real. Local butcher, ancestral Norwegian food, nothing wasted. Not biohacking. Eating like he never left.

Not my taste

England brought baked beans on toast. A tin of Heinz, buttered bread, a few hours before kick-off. Beanz Meanz Goalz.

Not my taste. I won't pretend otherwise.

But I understand it completely. Before the biggest game of your career — or just before a hard morning — you want the thing that tastes like normal. Not optimal. Not clean. Not macro-balanced. Normal.

Kane's beans, Haaland's heart, my macaroni soup at 7am: all doing the same work. The nervous system doesn't care about your macros. It cares about whether it recognises what it's eating.

Feed it something familiar. The rest follows.

Leave a comment

Every Meal Counts is a reader-supported newsletter.

If you’re here and you’re reading, thank you.

Subscribe now

If you can, please share to your friend who also love food.

Share Every Meal Counts

Not in a dramatic way — no spreadsheets, no meal prep containers lined up on Sunday. Just a quiet, ongoing suspicion that the thing I was grabbing in the morning wasn't quite doing what I hoped. I wanted something that would keep me going, not something I'd forget about by 10am.

Overnight oats kept appearing. Nutrition accounts, a colleague at work, a newsletter I half-read. Eventually I gave in. I spooned oats into a jar the night before, added some milk, put it in the fridge, and felt mildly virtuous about it.

I mentioned it to my mum. She didn't say anything terrible. She just looked at me the way she looks at things she finds slightly sad. Cold oats from a jar — where's the warmth? Where's the congee and nice pot of pu-erh (a fermented dark tea) to keep your tummy warm? The thing that actually sits with you?

I didn't argue. But I'd been reading, and I knew the case for this was stronger than the jar made it look. The problem wasn't overnight oats. It was that almost everyone making it was getting something fundamentally wrong.

What happens in the jar

Cold water slowly softens the oat without breaking it down the way heat does. That matters — because intact oat starch behaves differently in your body. Instead of being digested quickly, it travels further down your gut where bacteria feed on it. Think of it as breakfast that keeps working after you've left the dining table for over an hour.

Relevant articles

Soaking also quietly dismantles something in the oat that was working against you. Raw grains naturally contain a compound that grips onto minerals — iron, zinc, calcium — and stops your body from absorbing them properly. Leave the oats in liquid overnight, and an enzyme activates that breaks this grip. You end up getting significantly more from the same bowl.

And then there's the soluble fibre. When it reaches your gut, it forms a thick gel that slows sugar into your bloodstream, intercepts cholesterol on its way through, and keeps you full well past the time you'd normally start eyeing the biscuit tin.

The overnight part isn't a lifestyle choice. It's a transformation that delivers something better than the oat itself.

The one line most people get wrong

The trouble is that many viral overnight oats recipes call for quick oats. And this is where it falls apart.

Quick oats are pre-cooked and re-dried before they reach your jar. The starch has already been partially gelatinised in the factory. By the time you add milk and leave them overnight, most of those benefits are already gone. You're eating fast carbs in a jar, which is not what you signed up for.

What to use instead: rolled oats — whole oat groats that have been steamed and pressed flat. The overnight process works as intended. Or steel-cut oats, the least processed form, chopped rather than pressed. They need a longer soak (8–12 hours) and have more bite, but they give the most back. I personally find steel-cut gives a nutty flavour and I really like the chew of it.

One line on the packet is doing more work than the toppings ever will.

Making it yours

The base — oats, liquid, overnight — is a technique. It doesn't come with a required aesthetic. Swap dairy milk for soy milk and you get the same creaminess, extra protein, and a base that doesn't feel borrowed from someone else's wellness routine.

From there, look to what you already know. Most people online go for blueberry and banana, apple and cinnamon, vanilla, cocoa powder, even peanut butter. I like them too. But they always feel a bit unrooted for me.

I prefer red bean for sweetness and fibre. Steamed taro stirred through for that soft, familiar creaminess. Goji berries instead of blueberries — slightly floral, a little tart, and if you grew up eating them in tong sui (糖水, sweet soup), they need no introduction. Black sesame stirred into the oats the night before: earthy, deeply nutty, the colour of something that knows what it's doing.

None of this is a statement. It's just using what tastes right to you — and it happens to work.

A place to start

The base

Rolled oats + soy milk, 1:1.5 ratio. Minimum 6 hours, overnight is ideal. No cooking.

Three combinations to try:

• Red bean & goji — sweet, warming, familiar

• Black sesame & longan — earthy, floral, goes deep

• Taro & coconut milk — soft, creamy, the colour of something good

  Thinking of somehow who might need this?

  Share

  Give a gift subscription

You don't have to eat someone else's breakfast to start the day well.

Overnight oats has earned its place — but only when you understand what it's actually doing, and only when you make it on your own terms. The technique is Swiss. The ingredients can be wherever you're from. You can reclaim what you eat without sacrificing what it tastes like to you. There's always a way in.

My mum might still prefer congee. Some mornings, so would I.

Leave a comment

🧪Most kitchen rules are correct observations with the wrong conclusion attached. This Cooking Science series — exclusive to paid subscribers — goes looking for the actual mechanism: what’s happening in your pan, your oven, and your fridge, so you can cook with understanding instead of habit.

Subscribe now

I was about to wrap something. I tear off a sheet, hold it up — and stop. Because at some point, someone told me the shiny side matters. I just can't remember which way it's supposed to face.

Mum says shiny side out. A recipe found online says shiny side in. A food forum has seventeen replies and no consensus. Everyone is confident. Nobody agrees.

More Articles from Cooking Science Series

Both versions exist. That's the tell.

What I found when I looked into this: the shiny-side rule doesn't just circulate — it circulates in two contradictory versions. "Shiny side in" is the most common, and honestly, it has a logic to it. Shiny means reflective, reflective means heat bouncing back at your food, therefore: shiny side facing in. It sounds reasonable. It feels like science.

But "shiny side out" also exists — in older forums, in casual kitchen chat, passed down with the same authority as the first version.

And that's when I thought: hang on. If this rule had a real origin — a cookbook, a manufacturer's instruction, a TV show moment that everyone watched — we'd all be saying the same thing. The fact that two contradictory versions are travelling with equal confidence is itself the answer. This rule came from nowhere. No traceable first moment. No primary source. Just repetition, somewhere along the way splitting in two, both versions surviving because nobody ever stopped to check.

Read more

Last week I wrote about Taiwan Travelogue — a novel set in 1938 colonial Taiwan, where a Japanese writer travels the island hunting for the "authentic" local food. What unsettled me about that book was how familiar her hunger felt. That piece went somewhere darker: authenticity as a colonial fantasy, a fixed idea we project onto places that never agreed to stay still.

Relevant articles

This one is about the smaller, quieter version of the same problem. The word on your lips before you've even ordered.

When "authentic" just means "tasty"

When you read food commentary or reviews, or browse foodie TikTok or Reels, you'll often see the compliment: "this is authentic Italian / French / Chinese / Spanish / Korean / Japanese / Mexican food."

I've always been puzzled by this. Why not simply say "it's tasty"? Or more specifically: "the texture is soft and yielding, the saltiness perfectly balanced against the richness of the broth"? "Authentic" is doing the work of a compliment without actually saying anything. It sounds like praise, but it has no content.

It's used as a synonym for "tasty" in most contexts — but without the guarantee. At least "tasty" means something happened in your mouth. "Authentic" just means the flavour matches an idea you had.

And what idea, exactly? We're not even talking about "traditional food," which carries at least an argument: a dish consumed across generations has presumably been refined to be worth it. Authenticity doesn't claim that. It simply means the taste is, in theory, 99.99% the same as it would be in the country of origin. Which immediately raises the question: whose version of that country? And when?

Time capsules and dim sum

Food trends now shift every two to three years. Even food consumed within a single generation can look completely different from one end to the other.

The dim sum I loved as a child is no longer commonly found in Hong Kong. But it's still common in London, because Chinatown there is like a time capsule — staffed by chefs from a previous wave of immigration, serving a version of the cuisine that's been quietly preserved in amber. To me, it feels like home. Ask a Hong Konger born after the 2000s, and they might find it outdated, even a little foreign. Same dishes. Entirely different verdict.

There is no fixed point we're comparing against. 正宗 (jing-zung) — the Cantonese word for authentic, literally "proper/orthodox" — implies a correct original that everyone agrees on. That original doesn't exist. It never did. It was always moving.

Feeding the ego, not the taste buds

Authenticity is more of a marketing concept than a cultural one. We reach for it to signal taste literacy — to show we've been somewhere, eaten the real thing, earned the right to judge. We consume the word to feed our ego more than our taste buds.

Take pineapple on pizza. It was dismissed as inauthentic by Italians — loudly, during a pandemic, when food supplies were short and cultural grievances were apparently not — while Hawaiians took no offence. Reasonably: the dish was invented by a Canadian restaurateur inspired by the Chinese tradition of combining sweet and sour flavours. It's an evolution. What it is not, by any honest definition, is a profanity against Italian cuisine.

The honest version of "authentic" is simply: does this taste like something I already love? That's all it ever meant. We just reached for a grander word because "familiar" doesn't sound like a compliment.

Leave a comment

Every Meal Counts is a reader-supported newsletter.

If you’re here and you’re reading, thank you.

Subscribe now

If you can, please share to your friend who also love food.

Share Every Meal Counts

Subscribe now

In the second Devil Wears Prada, Miranda gets asked to lunch. Not at Smith & Wollensky, not anywhere with a maître d' who knows her order. The staff cafeteria — invited down by Runway's new owner, a younger man with a great deal of energy and no patience for anything slow or precious, who wants her at his table with a row of consultants.

She goes the way you'd walk into cold water.

It's the same room, read two opposite ways. For the new owner the cafeteria is the whole point — fast, unfussy, a little performance of being far too important to care where he eats (A bit like the tech giant bosses are far too busy to care what they wear everyday). For Miranda it's a demotion with a tray. The same lunch: beneath him to fuss over, beneath her to be seen at.

Where a person eats tells you something true about them, usually before they've said a word. The colleague who will only do coffee somewhere with a single-origin chalkboard. The boss who books the same corner table for fifteen years. Miranda has built a whole self on never being caught at a tray, never being photographed mid-bite, lunch as something other people do. So which is she here — a snob? Or simply someone who has never once lowered her standards, and reads the cafeteria as the room where standards go to be lowered?

The same cafeteria, across both films, is where Andy and Nigel go to talk. The Nigel.

Nigel arguably has the best taste in the building, in fashion and in life choices. He is the one who teaches Andy that the clothes mean something and how to deal with her frustration; he's the show's compass for what is good and what is not. And Nigel eats at the cafeteria, happily, no flinch. If the man with the surest taste at Runway sits down with a tray, the cafeteria cannot really be beneath quality. Which means Miranda's problem was never the food. It was being seen there. Not flavour — class.

Still, I won't pretend Miranda is imagining it. A Western cafeteria does look dull, and I've never quite shaken that feeling either — the beige queue, the greens gone the colour of a school jumper. But it isn't the ingredients. It's time. Most of that food has been sitting on a steam table at sixty-odd degrees for hours: too wet and too cool to brown, long enough for the greens to dull from bright to olive. It's cooked for safety and for labour, to survive a long lunch rush without poisoning anyone — not to be eaten at its best. So Miranda's right that this tray is sad. She's wrong to think a cafeteria has to be.

Because where I grew up, the canteen isn't a punishment. 大家樂 — Daai Ga Lok, roughly "everybody's happy" — has called itself the canteen of Hong Kong since 1968, and means it. Baked pork chop rice comes out of the oven with the cheese still going, not off a hot plate. There's milk tea, a counter of eight other things, and a lunchtime queue of people who could afford to eat anywhere, choosing this. Picking the canteen there doesn't mean you've given up on quality. Often it means you know exactly where the good stuff is.

That's the tell Miranda missed. Not whether you'll eat at a canteen — but whether your canteen was built to feed you or to process you. In her world, being seen to eat is a weakness. In mine, the first thing my mother says down the phone is 食咗飯未 — have you eaten yet — which is just I love you wearing an apron. One of those rooms has its priorities straight. It isn't the one with the untouched tray.

Leave a comment

Every Meal Counts is a reader-supported newsletter.

If you’re here and you’re reading, thank you.

Subscribe now

If you can, please share to your friend who also love food.

Share Every Meal Counts

Food in Fictions (FiFs) is a series about how food shows up in films, books, and other stories — and what it quietly says about the characters and the world they live in. I look at what’s on the table (and what isn’t), how actors eat, and when food becomes more than just a prop. This series runs when a scene sticks with me long enough that I need to write about it 🤤

Subscribe now

Amsterdam, 2006. I was standing in a youth hostel kitchen, the kind with one working hob and a smell of instant noodles that never quite left the walls. Four young men were cooking. One of them turned to me and asked, "Where are you from?"

It's a question you'd flinch at now — loaded, a little rude, the sort of thing we've learned to wince at. But it opened a door rather than closing one. Twenty years later, they are still my friends.

I thought about that kitchen the whole time I was reading Taiwan Travelogue, the winner of The International Booker Prize 2026.

Read more

Subscribe now

Last week we looked at what salt actually does: chemistry on the steak, physics in the wok. This week: why you've probably been measuring it wrong your whole life — and a quick, opinionated guide to the different salts sitting in your cupboard.

Relevant articles

Why your recipes keep lying to you

A teaspoon of salt is not a teaspoon of salt.

Salt crystals come in radically different shapes and densities. Table salt is fine-grained and densely packed. Diamond Crystal kosher salt is made by an evaporation process that forms hollow, multifaceted pyramidal crystals — light, airy, low density. A teaspoon of Diamond Crystal contains roughly half the sodium of a teaspoon of table salt. Morton kosher sits in between, significantly denser than Diamond Crystal.

This is the source of countless failed dishes. Samin Nosrat's Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat was tested with Diamond Crystal. Follow her recipes using Morton or table salt by the teaspoon and you're using nearly double the salt she intended.

The fix is to put down the teaspoon and use a scale instead. Weigh the salt — and use whatever type you have. Diamond Crystal, Morton, table salt: a gram is a gram of NaCl regardless of crystal shape, so the type stops mattering the moment you're working in grams. The reliable dry-brine target is 0.5–1% of the meat's weight in salt — 0.5% for long rests (24–48 hours) or delicate cuts, up to 1% for shorter rests or thick, robust pieces. For an 800g chicken: 4–8g on a scale.

A brief, opinionated tour

While we're here — because not all salt is equal, and some of it is quietly lying to you.

Table salt is the one your parents had and your recipe assumes. Fine, dense, usually iodised. It dissolves fast and it packs hard into a spoon. If a recipe just says "salt", it means this — use less than you think.

Diamond Crystal kosher is what most professional cooks reach for. The crystals are hollow little pyramids — light, airy, easy to pinch between your fingers and feel as they fall. It's genuinely more intuitive to use by hand. The catch: it's about half as dense as table salt by volume, so if you swap it in by the teaspoon you'll under-season everything. Always swap by weight.

Subscribe now

Morton kosher sits between the two. Good salt, but it's not interchangeable with Diamond Crystal spoon-for-spoon — which has confused home cooks following American recipes for decades.

Maldon and fleur de sel are for the plate, not the pot. Their value is entirely textural: those large, fragile flakes give a brief crunch and a clean burst of saltiness before they dissolve on the tongue. Heat destroys them. Add them last, when they can still do something.

Pink Himalayan salt is, I'm sorry to say, mostly a story. It's still sodium chloride. The pink is iron oxide — rust, essentially. The trace minerals are real but present in amounts too small to matter at any normal intake. It's also usually not iodised, which is worth knowing if you've quietly replaced all your table salt with the pretty pink stuff. It tastes fine. It just isn't doing anything your regular sea salt isn't doing.

淮鹽 (Huai salt) is harder to explain to someone who didn't grow up with it. It's a historic regional salt from China's Jiangsu/Two-Huai salt districts, considered prestigious for centuries — not because a chemist would find anything unusual in it, but because of the world around it: the trade routes, the state monopolies, the fact that controlling salt in imperial China meant controlling power. It's still sodium chloride. In Hong Kong kitchens, 淮鹽 usually means 五香淮鹽 — the seasoned version, blended with five-spice powder, served in a small dish alongside fried squid or salt-and-pepper chicken so you can dip as you go. Same salt. Just with a few thousand years of history baked in.

Salt is probably the first thing you ever put on food. It was already on the table before you learned to cook. You've shaken it, pinched it, forgotten it, added too much of it, reached for it without thinking.

The ingredients that seem too basic to think about are often the ones doing the most. Salt was doing chemistry on your steak, building a thermal battery in your wok, editing what your tongue hears, and carrying centuries of trade routes in a single grain.

To make your food better, you don't need rarer ingredients or more complex techniques. You just need to understand what you're already holding.

Salt was always working. You just didn't know to watch.

Next in the Cooking Science series: aluminium foil — shiny side up, or down? Neither. Here's why.

Share

🧪Most kitchen rules are correct observations with the wrong conclusion attached. This Cooking Science series — exclusive to paid subscribers — goes looking for the actual mechanism: what’s happening in your pan, your oven, and your fridge, so you can cook with understanding instead of habit.

Subscribe now

Last time, we salted a steak. We talked about timing — why an hour ahead beats a minute before. But we skipped over the more interesting question: what is salt actually doing in there? And why does the same ingredient that works on a steak also sits in a wok at 200°C, never touching the food, and still somehow cook it?

Same crystal. Two completely different sciences.

What salt does when you can't see it

At its core, salt is two things held together: sodium (Na⁺) and chloride (Cl⁻), locked in a crystal lattice. The moment salt touches moisture — the surface of a steak, say — that lattice breaks apart. The ions separate and dissolve, each one surrounded by a little jacket of water molecules. The salt vanishes. But it's still entirely there, just invisible, and now it can move.

Salt is "thirsty." When you sprinkle it on the surface of a steak, you're creating a salt-heavy zone on the outside. The muscle cells inside, with far less salt, respond by pushing their moisture toward it — trying to even things out. This is osmosis, and it's why a salted steak looks wet after a few minutes. The surface is losing water, and the Na⁺ and Cl⁻ ions are now sitting in that liquid, ready to move.

Then they move inward, slowly. In dense muscle tissue, ions diffuse at roughly 1mm per 24 hours — which is why early salting matters so much. An hour ahead gets you a few millimetres. The night before gets you considerably deeper.

Here's where it gets genuinely surprising:

once the ions reach the outer tissue at the right concentration, they start to interact with myosin — the dominant structural protein in muscle. They cause it to partially unfold and form a loose gel-like network. When heat is applied, that network sets and holds water rather than squeezing it out. The muscle fibres that would normally tighten and wring moisture away are now, thanks to the salt, holding onto it.

Salt doesn't add moisture to meat. It restructures the protein so the moisture already in the meat stays put.

There's one more thing, and it's the reason a pinch of salt makes coffee taste less bitter and dark chocolate taste rounder: sodium ions interact with bitter taste receptors on the tongue, suppressing perceived bitterness by up to 70% in some compounds without equally suppressing sweetness. When bitterness is quieted, other flavours come forward. Salt isn't just seasoning. It's editing what you hear.

Relevant articles

The wok that thinks it's an oven

Now, a wok.

Traditional 鹽焗雞 — Hakka salt-baked chicken — begins with the salt, not the chicken. You put several kilos of coarse salt into a dry wok and stir-fry it over medium heat. The salt crackles as residual moisture burns off. It turns faintly golden. Smoke rises, carrying a mineral smell. The salt is now very hot — well above boiling point — and completely dehydrated.

Then: a whole chicken, rubbed with sand ginger, five-spice, and a little Shaoxing wine, wrapped tightly in two layers of parchment paper. The inner layer keeps the juices in. The outer layer keeps the salt out. You remove two-thirds of the hot salt, set the parcel in, pour the rest over the top until the chicken is buried, cover the wok, and turn the heat to low.

After thirty minutes, you turn the flame off entirely. The chicken continues cooking for another twenty minutes in darkness and silence.

It is not seasoning the chicken. Sodium ions cannot penetrate two layers of parchment. The chicken's only seasoning is the marinade applied before wrapping. The salt stays outside, completely.

What it is doing is thermal. Coarse salt has a high specific heat capacity — it absorbs and stores a large amount of energy per unit of mass. When you heat several kilos of it and pack it around the chicken, you've built a surrogate oven inside a wok. That salt distributes heat evenly across every surface of the parcel at once, with no hot spots, no uneven flame exposure. The breast cooks at the same rate as the thigh.

When the flame goes off, the thermal mass of all that hot salt continues to radiate heat steadily for twenty more minutes. The salt acts as a thermal battery: charged on the stove, discharged slowly into the food. And the volatile aromatic molecules from the hot salt — the sand ginger, any star anise added to it — are small enough to permeate the parchment and into the chicken's skin. The chicken tastes of the salt without ever touching it.

The Hakka had no formula for specific heat capacity. They just knew that buried in enough hot salt, the chicken came out right every time.

Same ingredient, same kitchen, same cupboard. But which salt — and how much? That's next week. Cooking Science #2b.

Just Bitching. Subjective and Judgemental.

Subscribe now

I used to think everyone cared this much about what they ate.

Not in a fancy way. Not in a buying-heirloom-tomatoes-from-a-farm-shop way. Just in a basic, daily, if-I-am-going-to-put-this-in-my-mouth-it-should-probably-be-worth-it way.

Then I moved to London and realised some things called lunch did not feel like lunch to me at all.

There is a particular kind of lunch that still makes me feel slightly winded. A plastic tub of hummus. A bag of baby carrots, damp at the edges. I sat across the table watching my colleague eat it as “lunch” -- the quotation marks feel necessary, because I was never sure about calling it lunch. Another colleague had a triangle sandwich bought because it was the least offensive option in the fridge. Sometimes a salad with leaves so tired they seem to have given up before you have.

I know these are technically food. I know they contain nutrients. I know they can be practical, affordable, and sometimes exactly what the day allows. But there is something about them that makes my brain pause before accepting the word meal.

I don’t mean this as judgement, but as a rule, I have never eaten any meal deals. I understand the tyranny of a meeting at one, another at two, and the nearest decent thing being too far away to justify the walk. London teaches you to make peace with fluorescent fridges and sandwiches named after concepts rather than flavours.

But still. Some part of me always wants to ask: is this really lunch?

Relevant articles

• Instant noodles are a personality test

• The Pure Joy of Eating

• Let’s get fat, literally

Not because it is cheap. Not because it is simple. A good bowl of rice with an egg is simple. A microwave rice bowl with greens, spring onion, and sesame oil is cheap. My confusion is not about money or effort. It is about whether the food registers as a meal at all.

There is a Cantonese phrase I keep coming back to: 頹食 — to eat any old thing, to make do without much care. It is not always an insult. Sometimes it is just what happens when life is too full. But it has a particular sadness to it. A shrug built into the eating.

And somewhere in me, that shrug never quite landed.

Some say “food is fuel”. I disagree. I understand what people mean by it. We need energy. There are days when eating really is logistics: what can I get, what will hold me until dinner, what can I eat between two meetings without making my afternoon worse?

But “food is fuel” has always felt too small. Fuel is what you put in a car so it can go somewhere else. It is not meant to be noticed. Nobody asks whether petrol had a good texture.

Food does have to keep us alive, obviously. But if that is the only thing it is allowed to do, something gets flattened. I believe ordinary food deserves to be better. To be good.

The microwave rice I would make in an office kitchen is not grand. It is not nutritionally perfect. It is still a packet of rice, reheated quickly, probably eaten from whatever bowl is available. But I would crack in an egg. I would throw in some vegetables if I had them. I would add spring onion, sesame oil, maybe chilli crisp if there was a jar somewhere. Five minutes, maybe seven.

The difference is not sophistication. It is care.

A few office lunches that still count:

• Microwave rice bowl — eggs, kimchi, sesame oil.

• Tinned sardines on sourdough — sardines in olive oil, toast, rocket on the side.

• Loaded sweet potato — baked sweet potato, canned chickpeas or beans, and whatever sauce you can manage: Greek yoghurt with garlic powder and dried parsley, jarred basil pesto, or any cheese you like.

None of this is impressive. That is the point. It is food that still says: I am here, I am eating, this small part of the day counts.

Maybe that is why I take every meal so seriously. Not because every meal has to be special. Because even an ordinary one should not feel like giving up.

Leave a comment

🧪Most kitchen rules are correct observations with the wrong conclusion attached. This Cooking Science series — exclusive to paid subscribers — goes looking for the actual mechanism: what’s happening in your pan, your oven, and your fridge, so you can cook with understanding instead of habit.

Subscribe now

I’ve failed — more than I’d like to admit — to make a proper candlelit dinner steak in our flat. One good cut. A hot pan. Some kind of wine. The lights dimmed to a degree that feels intentional rather than power-saving.

The steak has been, most of those times, rubbery.

The worst was my husband’s birthday. Thick ribeye, clean cast iron, oil shimmering at the right temperature. The pan hissed beautifully when the steak hit it. I cut into it after the rest. Grey-pink, all the way through to the edge. No crust. He chewed twice and told me it was lovely.

It wasn’t lovely. I knew it. He knew it.

That was the night I started reading.

The rule I’d been carrying around without ever questioning was don’t salt the steak ahead of time, you’ll dry it out. Salt right before the pan. The orthodoxy of every Sunday-roast Englishwoman who’d taught me anything about beef, Italian cookbooks, half-watched YouTube tutorials.

It’s wrong. Or rather: it’s correctly observed, and completely the wrong conclusion.

Salt a steak, look at it ten minutes later, and the surface is wet. Little beads of juice glistening on the meat. This is the bit everyone saw and panicked about. They assumed the salt was pulling the moisture out of the steak and out of your dinner. They were half-right.

(There’s a sister myth I’d like to retire too: salt does not “seal in the juices.” A steak isn’t a juice box.)

Here’s the other half.

Read more

Trump visited China last week. There was a summit, there were handshakes in front of flags. I didn’t follow any of it very closely. What I did follow, obsessively, was the menu.

Someone photographed the banquet card — a clean white rectangle, the national emblem printed in red at the top, every word in Chinese, no translation offered.

I read it three times.

There’s a concept in Chinese that doesn’t translate cleanly: 請客 (ching hak). The character 請 means to invite; 客 means guest. Together they describe the act of hosting — and embedded in that act is an obligation. You don’t give guests what’s convenient. You give them your best. You put yourself out. The generosity is the point.

Which is why I kept staring at the 冰花水煎包 (Snow‑flake water‑fried buns).

Water-fried buns are street food that originated in Song-dynasty Kaifeng, sold from carts, eaten standing up. The “Snow‑flake” version gets its name from the lacy, crystallised skirt that forms when a thin flour slurry hits the hot pan and evaporates into something that looks, briefly, like frost.

Chinese media called the buns “碳水外交” — carbohydrate diplomacy, a joke about choosing comfort food over ceremony. But I wonder if there’s something more deliberate in that choice: that China has decided its everyday food is its best — that the street, the cart, the morning queue carry the same cultural weight as the imperial kitchen. That street food from the wealthiest dynasty in Chinese history is not a step down. It’s a different kind of statement entirely.

The Song was arguably the wealthiest and most economically advanced civilisation on earth at the time. Historians call it a “Medieval Economic Revolution.” Its cities had restaurants, paper money, printed books, compass and gunpowder. It’s like the Song were already on iPhone 17 Pro while Europe was still on Nokia 3210.

No official statement required. The buns have always known what they are.

Share

Then there’s the question of whether this menu works as a meal.

Chinese cuisine is not one thing. It was never one thing. It’s a collection of regional traditions that share a writing system and not much else — the food of Sichuan and the food of Guangdong have about as much in common as Portuguese and Romanian. What’s on this table crosses several of those traditions at once. The roast duck is Beijing, imperial, northern. The crispy beef is also northern. The lobster and the buns trace to different coastal and central traditions. The salmon in mustard sauce arrived in mainland China via Japanese restaurants and international hotel kitchens and technically belongs to none of these lineages. And then there’s the tiramisu.

A chef designing a menu designs an arc. Temperature, texture, intensity, relief — things should move somewhere. I find it genuinely hard to map the journey from 豆汤鲜蔬 (Bean soup with fresh vegetables), which is gentle and clean broth that asks nothing of you, to tiramisu, which is rich and coffee-soaked and Italian. What is the palate meant to do in that gap?

And then there’s what’s absent. No Cantonese food. No Sichuan. No xiao long bao, which is probably the single most globally recognisable Chinese dish. These are the regional cuisines the Western world has already fallen for — precise, technically demanding, celebrated on every continent.

Their absence is a choice. I don’t know exactly what kind.

One last thing, and I say this gently.

It was widely reported that 香酥牛肉 — the crispy beef — was chosen with Trump’s preferences in mind. He likes beef. He likes it well-done. The kitchen obliged. That’s good hosting.

But if I look at this menu as someone who thinks about food and bodies for a living: the vegetable presence is thin. 豆汤鲜蔬 is a light broth. Everything else skews heavily towards protein and fat — duck skin, enriched lobster stock, layered pastry — followed by a dessert course that runs three items deep before it reaches the fruit. The American dietary guidelines have been nudging people towards more plants and less meat for decades. The Chinese nutritional pagoda isn’t far off that either.

Neither set of countries seems to have taken those guidelines to the table that evening. And these are, let’s remember, the men making decisions about the rest of our lives.

I’m not being preachy. I’m just a little worried.

Share Every Meal Counts

When I host — really host, the way 請客 demands — I tend to make Chinese food in Western dress. A wonton filling piped into a choux shell. Red-braised pork belly served in a little white ramekin with a spoon, no rice. The idea being: here is something that belongs to me, made legible for you, without apology on either side.

Maybe that’s what the Great Hall of the People was attempting, across nine courses, for an audience of two. I just think they could have used more vegetables.

Leave a comment

“It’s a hole,” she said, drawing a small circle on her stomach with one finger. “You drink the Calvados in the middle of the meal, and it makes a hole. So you can keep eating.”

A small glass of apple brandy, taken cul-sec — downed in one. Often poured over apple sorbet now, originally just neat. Then everyone goes back to eating.

I have been turning the idea over since. Not the brandy, the seriousness.

The French have an anthem for it since1989, and the first line is, roughly, Friend, raise your glass, for here is the moment to do the Norman hole in one go and without ceremony. The anthem belongs to La Confrérie du Trou Normand — the Brotherhood of the Norman Hole — a confraternity founded in 1966 in Vimoutiers, in the apple-and-cider country of Pays d’Auge. They defend Calvados as a kind of golden elixir. They wear robes. There are sashes.

I tried to imagine the British equivalent and failed. A Confraternity of Warm Beer, sashes and all, sung at every village fete. The British wouldn’t.

Hong Kong, on the other hand, would. There are online confraternities for the egg tart. For Hong Kong milk tea. For siu mei. They argue lineage, defend recipes, rank shops, gatekeep what counts. We just don’t put it in a robe. The French take a small thing and make it national. We take a small thing and make it a forum thread. Either way, the gravity is real.

Relevant links (All in Cantonese)

• Siu Mai confraternities

• Rice Roll confraternities

• Hong Kong Wonton Noodles Group

OECD time-use data puts the French daily eating and drinking at around 2 hours and 13 minutes. The Italians come close at 2h07, the Spanish at 2h06. The South Koreans manage a respectable 1h45. The British, who I live among, sit at about half the French. I guess that tells a lot.

It travels, too. Every region in France has its own trou. Trou lorrain with mirabelle plum brandy. Trou alsacien with marc de Gewurztraminer. Trou bourguignon. Trou champenois — sorbet with Champagne. The Norman version is the one with the anthem and the brotherhood and the tourism board, but the form spreads as easily as the courses do.

Here is the strange part. The thing the ritual claims to do, it doesn’t do.

The folk theory is that strong alcohol punches through the fat in your stomach, dissolves it the way a degreasing spray cuts through oil on a roasting tin, and so opens up space. It feels intuitive. The stomach, sadly, is not a kitchen sink. Controlled studies show the opposite: ethanol at common drinking strengths slows gastric emptying compared with water. Cold sorbet slows it further. The hole is in your perception, not in your stomach.

What does happen: the alcohol dissolves the fat coating your tongue, the sorbet rinses your mouth, and the whole little ritual — the standing, the clinking, the cold sharp sip — creates a sensory break that makes you feel lighter. The palate resets. The stomach does not. You also add a small but real load of alcohol and sugar to a meal already heavy, and the loosened inhibition makes it easier to say yes to the next course.

So a 400-year-old practice survives, defended by a confraternity in 1966, set to music in 1989, on the strength of a premise that turns out to be wrong.

And yet it survived.

What gets passed down isn’t always what works — it’s what we agreed was worth remembering. The trou normand made it through four centuries not because it makes a hole in the stomach, but because it makes one in the meal: a deliberate pause, scripted and shared, that says this is worth interrupting for.

Chocolate has become the moral Rorschach test of modern eating.

One camp says it’s basically a dental hitman. Another says cacao is “good fats” and antioxidants in a trench coat. Someone else insists the answer is 70% or 80% dark, as if virtue comes with a percentage label.

Chocolate, alongside red wine, might be the most confusing food on the planet.

But here’s what I actually think: the stress of trying to make every square “good enough” can do more damage than the square itself. And we’re fighting the wrong villain.

My confession

I love chocolate. Not in a cutesy way, but genuinely — it’s one of my life’s great joys.

I’ve also spent too many years doing chocolate maths: tallying percentages, feeling guilty about milk versus dark, performing little mental workouts to “earn” a bite.

I was so busy optimising that I forgot to enjoy the thing I supposedly loved.

So yes, I’m giving myself (and you) permission to relax.

This isn’t permission to eat a family-sized Dairy Milk for breakfast (though no judgement if you do). This is permission to stop treating every bite like a moral referendum. Post-run reward? Tuesday pick-me-up? End-of-week ritual? Go for it.

One square won’t kill you. Two squares won’t kill you.

Life is short, and small pleasures matter.

The real villain

If we’re going to worry about something, let’s worry about the right thing.

Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are the actual problem. Many commercial chocolate bars are packed with ingredients that read like a chemistry experiment: emulsifiers, artificial flavours, “vegetable fats” that aren’t cocoa butter, stabilisers you can’t pronounce.

They’re less chocolate bar, more science project.

So if you’re going to eat chocolate, make it actual chocolate.

A shortcut: skip anything with ingredients beyond:

• cocoa mass (or cocoa liquor)

• cocoa butter

• sugar

A note for anyone watching sugar: some diabetic-friendly chocolates use stevia or erythritol as sweeteners. Depending on how strict you are about UPFs, you might count those as processed too. I’m not here to police that — just to suggest reading labels and making a deliberate choice.

The irony is that an “healthy” 85% bar with a long ingredient list might be worse than a simple 70% bar with three ingredients.

Quality over percentage theatre.

Some quick maths

For my fellow overthinkers, here are the numbers:

Type Sugar per 100g One square UK milk chocolate ~50g ~5g sugar UK dark chocolate (70%) ~29–30g ~3–4g sugar WHO daily limit (strict) 25g added sugar One square = 11–20% WHO daily limit (standard) 50g added sugar One square = 6–10%

Moderate consumption — say 5–30g per occasion, once or twice weekly — fits comfortably within those guidelines.

Translation: the sugar isn’t the villain. The fake ingredients are.

What I’m actually saying

Don’t stress about the occasional chocolate square. Stress kills, too.

Do care about what’s in your chocolate. If it’s a small pleasure that brings you joy, and it’s actually chocolate (not a UPF disguised as a treat), enjoy it without guilt.

Save your anxiety for the real battles — the processed rubbish that’s everywhere, in everything. Read labels. Choose quality when you can. Then eat it without overthinking.

Life’s too short to optimise every single bite. But it’s also too short to waste your chocolate moment on something that’s 60% palm oil and sadness.

Choose well, then relax.

Leave a comment