Nostalgia on a plate

Loyal Dining conjures up Hong Kong's past with a retro ambience and dishes your parents enjoyed while they were dating. Rebecca Lo steps back in time to find out more.

There is a Cantonese expression that any Hong Kong native over the age of 30 would know. When referring to an imported product, the slang is that it is loi lo or coming from old friends. At a time when the cost of international travel was prohibitive for most people, products from Europe or North America were prized and flaunted to display their owners' impeccably worldly taste.

That goes for dining, too. Dishes such as beef Wellington, Swiss chicken wings and Portuguese baked rice were decidedly Hong Kong twists on Western staples. Young couples in the '60s and '70s would seek out restaurants that serve these dishes, partly to rebel against the unrelenting Cantonese fare they had at home. Holding hands while sipping "black cows" (Coke float with chocolate ice cream) or "snow whites" (7UP float with vanilla ice cream), they wooed contentedly.

Flash forward 50 years, and the tong laus (five-story traditional walk-up buildings) where fusion restaurants used to dominate have mostly been replaced by glass skyscrapers. Retro is in vogue primarily because it is so difficult to find authenticity. And one restaurant group is capitalizing on the trend by dishing up nostalgia on a plate with aplomb.

Loyal Dining, the phonetic translation of loi lo, revives familiar dishes and makes them relevant to today's diners. Take Swiss chicken wings. An urban legend has it that decades ago, a Swiss tourist in Hong Kong asked for a plate of chicken wings in a diner but the waiter couldn't understand what he wanted. The chef experimented with a combination of sweet and savory, using soy sauce as the base. Voila! The dish was named after the tourist's nationality and is about as retro as bouffant hair.

Loyal Dining's Western cuisine executive chef Liu Chi-hong and Chinese cuisine executive chef Ho Tai-shing worked with BMA Catering Management's executive director Cherry Lo on dishes such as Swiss chicken wings. "We thought about what we used to eat as kids," Lo says.