There is no other restaurant in Greater Manchester quite like Hong Kong Choi. There just isn’t. It is unique.
Where else, for example, can you find a classic, perfectly-executed French lobster bisque, with a puff pastry lid, authentic Hong Kong borscht, melting beef brisket soup with rice noodles, a Hong Kong style bolognese, or baked pork chops with bubbling cheese on pineapple and tomato fried rice all on the same menu?
I’ll answer that. Nowhere. This is a style of fusion cuisine direct from the ancient port city, the route on the maritime Silk Road where trade from the east collided with trade from the west. Dishes like those above might sound mixed up. A fusion too far, at least for more pedestrian western tastes. But, in this light and airy room in Salford, they make absolute perfect sense.
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Britta is the youngest member of the Choi family, who run the place. She speaks in perfect American-accented English, thanks to her international school education and a spell at college in Colorado, where she double-majored in environmental policy and German. When she’s not helping her mum and dad out at the restaurant, she works for uber-developers Bruntwood in town.
Back home, this style of cooking is called ‘cha chaan teng’, translated as a ‘tea restaurant’, a kind of casual ‘diner style’ of eating that is traditional in Hong Kong, with restaurants fiercely competing to get busy workers in, fed and out again in under half an hour.
However, what Britta, her dad Simon, her mum Yvette and chefs William and Ah Yip do here is take this casual style of cooking and elevate it. Between them are decades of experience at the stove, mostly at five-star hotels, and you can tell.
Simon, friendly and welcoming, began cooking at 15, and has spent much of his working life in high-end hotel kitchens in the thriving centre of Hong Kong Island, before he and the family moved to the UK in 2021, opening the restaurant in October the same year.
He was second in command when The Langham hotel in Hong Kong won a Michelin Star, so his training is a varied mix of styles from classic French to traditional Chinese. He works on burners that have more in common with jet engines than your average gas hob. Most chefs wouldn’t have a clue where to start using these things. Your dinner would be incinerated in a heartbeat.
It’s maybe little wonder, then, that word of Hong Kong Choi has spread far and wide. They’ve had visitors from London, Scotland and Wales, who have travelled especially after hearing about what’s coming out of this small but dedicated kitchen.
“We’ve grown the business through word of mouth,” Britta says. “That’s kind of how we wanted to do it in the first place, just slowly grow it.” She says the first few weeks they were open were ‘kind of quiet’. But that was about it. By their first Chinese New Year in 2022, they were pretty set. “We never did any advertising. We didn’t need to, and didn’t really want to. We wanted to create a community around us naturally.”
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They’re now clobbered every day from opening to closing, so much so that they can’t even manage takeaway trade, so they simply don’t do it.
While their arrival in the UK has been a pretty successful transition, how they left Hong Kong was less so. Politics is a thorny area for her, and for the family. It’s certainly not something that they want to associate with the restaurant, but the unrest, violent protests and increasing threat to Hong Kong from muscle-flexing Beijing was of course instrumental in their move here.
When the UK eased its immigration policy and extended its ‘route to citizenship’ to Hong Kongers, after China began increasingly exerting its power over the former British colony in 2019, they leapt at the chance.
“We couldn’t just stand by and watch what was going on in Hong Kong any longer,” she says. “But we want to be politically neutral here. We think more about this place as being a community space for people, so we have a lot of people from mainland China who come and eat here, Chinese students, Chinese business owners, and we’ve built really good relationships with them all.
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“A restaurant is not a space where we need to be political. Food should bring people together. All the friends I have made since moving here have been through the restaurant.”
Having a restaurant has indeed been invaluable for the family in becoming the centre of a community of this new wave of arrivals from Hong Kong. “It’s been so wonderful,” she says. “The woman over there talking to my mom? She used to be a customer, she lives down the road, and had moved here from Hong Kong with her family. Now she works here with us. People [from the Hong Kong community] come and say ‘let us know how we can help’.”
While the ‘cha chaan teng’ style of cooking in Hong Kong is more about convenience, speed and price, i.e. it’s cheap, Hong Kong Choi elevates the cuisine to something a bit more refined. Main dishes may weigh in between £10 to £20, but will easily feed two, even three people. “Our portions are huge!” Britta laughs.
And as for their origins, they’re steeped in hundreds of years of culinary and cultural history. “It has to do with our colonial history,” she says. “As an international port city, we’d have spices coming in from everywhere. Macau, our neighbouring city, was a Portuguese colony, so that’s where our Portuguese chicken dish comes from.
“But to be more specific, it’s a Hong Kong take on a Macanese take on a Portuguese baked rice dish. We had someone from Portugal here who said it tasted just like something their grandmother used to make.
“The African chicken is specifically using spices that were brought from African to Macau from the Portuguese trade routes, and some of those made their way into the dish. We have Japanese influences on the menu too, or Mediterranean with the lamb rack. That’s just a straight up French dish because we like making it.
“The Hong Kong borscht came from when Russian chefs came to Shanghai and shared recipes for their borscht soup, and then they brought it back to Hong Kong. It’s the result of all that migration happening.”
The menu is endlessly fascinating as a result. The brisket is some of the best I’ve ever had, the broth restorative and complex from hours of simmering, and the beef falling to pieces. And if there’s a more warming winter dish than the pork chop baked rice, spiked underneath a fried pork cutlet with pineapple and tomato fried rice, I’d travel to eat it. That’s not to mention the peanut butter French Toast, a slab of purest fried gold.
After arriving in the UK from what was a tumultuous time in their homeland, the problems they are currently facing are mostly good ones. Like being full a lot of the time. “Some people get really upset,” she says. “It can be tough, we tell people to make reservations, but people think we’re in the middle of nowhere, so no one’s going to come and then they find we’re full. So it’s difficult to explain that sometimes."
Such success is testament to what they're trying to do here. “We don’t want to be just another Chinese restaurant, and we’re not just another Chinese restaurant, and we’re not even another Hong Kong restaurant,” Britta says. “We want to stand out as something else. We’re building something that’s completely different and it’s modern.”
Hong Kong Choi, Unit 4C, 175 Broughton Ln, Salford M7 1US
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