Our New Hong Kong Cafes: A Little Bit of WTF

LA Cafe opened up on the second floor of the Pacific Rim Center a year ago, and I passed its banner outside the shopping-condo complex for months before realizing that it was part of a Chinese restaurant trend whose popularity in Seattle won't stop growing: the Hong Kong–style cafe.

Hong Kong is world-renowned for its dim sum and fresh, Cantonese seafood. But Seattle's Hong Kong–style cafes dish up all the dishes that you'll find in the street stalls and tea shops specializing in sai chaan, or "Western cuisine." In the International District, LA Cafe, Purple Dot, and 663 Bistro all have menus whose descriptions read like a 1930s cookbook author's idea of Chinese food. Dishes like sole with creamed corn, stir-fried spaghetti with beef and black pepper, and "ham and fried egg with macaroni in soup" simultaneously frustrate, entice, and repel the uninitiated.

My first visit to LA Cafe wasn't auspicious. Both soups tasted like nursing-home cuisine: watery, bland, not quite up to Campbell's standard of excellence. Spooned over a fat layer of white rice, our fish definitely tasted "home-style"; thick slices of fresh ginger were the only speck of life in a thick, clear sauce so bland we could almost taste the cornstarch. Hong Kong's famous XO sauce is said to be named after the "XO" on cognac labels, referring to the priciness of its ingredients; but while I could see flecks of ham on the cafe's rice noodles with XO sauce, I could taste none of the garlic, dried scallops, shrimp, and chiles that usually make it so punchy. The best thing on the table was a plate of crisp-tender, golf-ball-sized baby bok choy heads stir-fried with garlic. Of course, it's a dish that Cantonese cooks learn to master about the time they hit puberty.

Part of the problem is that LA Cafe's menu has more than 190 items, and the specials menu another 50. Should you start with the milk tea, in Hong Kong called "silk stocking tea" because it was originally steeped through panty hose to achieve the right strength and creamy mouthfeel? Perhaps a nice cold glass of milk with Horlicks? Or a parfait glass of sweet red beans, shaved ice, and sweetened condensed milk?

Everyone around us—the couples in their jade-colored booths, the big families sitting around cherry-red tables—was eating big plates of noodles and grilled steaks. The place was a pop paradise, spotless and lit to a perennial high noon, its candy-colored walls and furniture accented with little vases of plastic fruits and a ceramic napa cabbage almost worthy of Jeff Koons.

I figured I just ordered wrong, so I returned twice more, compelled to figure out what all these dishes were and because I wanted to find something I actually liked. But I kept striking out. The culinary hit of all three visits was "Luncheon Meat Chow InStant Noodle": kinky ramen noodles stir-fried with scallion greens, onions, and cubes of a Spam-like substance. Everything else barely rose beyond the level of edible, whether it was the stir-fried spaghetti with beef and so much black pepper that it set my mouth aflame, or the pork chops baked over rice in a gloopy tomato sauce, or the fish balls with egg noodles in a watery chicken broth tinted notebook-paper yellow—hello, bouillon cubes.

LA Cafe is a cute place, but the owners either need to reduce the eclectic menu down to its greatest hits or figure out how to make all 250 dishes better. On my third visit, I was explaining to my tablemates that I was planning to come back again to try the "digital fried rice" and the grilled ox tongue with onion sauce, when one of them stopped me. "Why are you putting yourself through this?" he demanded.

What's inspiring the proliferation of Hong Kong cuisine in Seattle right now? In the past couple of years, the "Western-style" cafes have also been joined by more modest restaurants that specialize—with much greater success—in congee and noodle soups (Mike's Noodle House, Hong Kong Noodle House), as well as steamed rice baked in stoneware pots (HK Homestyle Cafe).

"In recent years there has been greater immigration coming from Hong Kong, particularly after 1997," said May Wan, executive director of Seattle's Chinese Chamber of Commerce. The other factor, she explained, is the major Hong Kong expat communities in Vancouver and Los Angeles that have emerged since the Brits returned the island colony to the Chinese. Both West Coast cities have emerged as sites of pilgrimage for foodies from cities with smaller Chinese populations such as Seattle. In fact, LA Cafe's owners, Yuk Chun Ho and Wai Wing Ho, moved up north from Los Angeles in order to spread the love. If I'm counting right, this makes their food blissfully postmodern, a simulacrum of a simulacrum of a simulacrum.