What Priscilla So and Brian Hung don’t know about beer probably isn’t worth knowing. So Priscilla has exactly the beer in mind to go with the Hong Kong-style french toast they serve at Harcourt, their new pub in Altrincham.
It’s an imperial stout from the Wander Beyond brewery, found under the arches at Piccadilly, and it weighs in at a robust 12.5%. It fits perfectly and tastes like coffee beans and chocolate, though for God’s sake don’t order a pint. You won’t be able to stand afterwards.
Harcourt is named after the Harcourt Road in Hong Kong, which is in turn named after Sir Cecil Harcourt, the governor of Hong Kong, after it was reclaimed from Japan at the end of the Second World War. It was also the staging ground for the ‘Umbrella Revolution’ in 2014, where protesters began standing up against government electoral reforms.
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It was also the place where Priscilla, Brian and many of their friends were tear gassed and pepper sprayed by authorities in 2019, while protesting the increasingly alarming stranglehold of the Chinese government over the former British colony.
Brian worked as a brewer and Priscilla in a craft beer bottle shop before they left Hong Kong, in the most recent wave of migration. It saw 76,000 people from Hong Kong move to the UK in 2022 alone.
They join others bringing the distinct flavours of Hong Kong to Manchester in recent months, along with the likes of Hong Kong Choi in Salford and the always-sold-out Pop Chop Curry House in Eccles.
“It felt like the situation was getting worse and worse every day,” she says. “I could not see any hope in Hong Kong. It’s not the Hong Kong I know. It feels so unfamiliar. Every day was so terrifying.
“I was hesitant to move away, because my family were going to stay. But one day, my mother said to me ‘you have to go, because this place is not a suitable place for you to live. You could lose your freedom forever’.”
“It was continuous,” Brian says. “People were protesting for months. Every weekend activity was protests. It takes over your life. By 2019, it was getting even more intense. After one or two protests, the government fought back with violence, with tear gas and pepper spray.
“People thought they would protest until things got better. But no, things just got worse and worse, from police brutality to the government of Hong Kong cooperating with China, attacking normal citizens. They pulled back the mask, and everything for the past 50 years felt like a lie. A breach of contract.”
Priscilla says leaving their families was immensely difficult. They felt helpless. Priscilla remembers in 2020, a few months after they’d left Hong Kong for South Korea, her mother had a bicycle accident and hit her head. She was in a coma for two weeks, but she could not go back to visit. “I wanted to be there, but I couldn’t do anything,” she says. “My heart was broken.”
Her mother still hasn’t fully recovered. “I am trying to live a new life here and be happy, but actually I’m still very worried about my family,” she says.
They now fear that having spoken out about their opposition to the government publicly and critically, it could prove problematic should they ever try to go back to Hong Kong, even to visit.
“We feel like having done some interviews about the political situation, that the Hong Kong government is quite aware of these kind of things,” she says.
While all this is never far from their minds, they’ve been welcomed with open arms in Altrincham since opening their doors only a month ago. “I remember in the first week we had a lot of locals coming in and showing their support,” says Priscilla. “And the business owners come in, buy some drinks and post their stories to Instagram. It’s a really good neighbourhood to be in.”
Greater Manchester became their new home after Brian got something of a dream job at the Cloudwater Brewery, as a barrel ageing manager. The couple were already big fans, the fame of the Piccadilly brewery stretching all around the world.
One evening at work, he heard Cantonese being spoken in the brewery tap room. He went up to see who it was, and it was a friend from Hong Kong called Kyle. Neither knew the other was living in Manchester, and he and his wife Fiona became firm friends with Priscilla and Brian.
A plan was soon hatched to open their own pub, which, given their shared expertise made perfect sense. Town was ruled out. They wanted something more relaxed and ‘neighbourhood’. It’s also helped that there’s now a sizable population of Hong Kongers in Sale and Altrincham, drawn there by the schools, so the expats are flooding in too.
Fiona works in the kitchen with her dad, a former chef, so the menu is as authentic as it can possibly be to a neighbourhood pub in Hong Kong. There are specials - this week ‘numbing’ turkey gizzards, numbing due to the excess of szechuan pepper - but also a solid core of street food classics from back home.
There are wings, deep fried or ‘typhoon shelter’ style, heavy with garlic. There’s a warming pile of beef shin slices with red chilis and pickles, and without question the best sesame prawn toast I’ve ever encountered. I love the bog standard stuff like everyone else. But this is something else.
Tossing the prawns in salted egg yolk seems to be the key. They’re deeply savoury, and to be enjoyed straight up with a beer or two, as they are in Hong Kong, not doused in soy sauce as we do here. And that French toast, layered with peanut butter and soaked in golden syrup or splattered with condensed milk, is quite magnificent.
The word is clearly getting out too. It’s a Wednesday, the first day of the week that they open, and it’s packed. I count one single table free by 7pm.
Priscilla curates the beers, and will always be majoring on the output of local breweries, as a way to say thank you to those who have made them so welcome here already. “This place feels like integration,” Brian says. “We picked the name because it was the place where a lot of protests happened, but also because it’s a very English name. The first stranger to step on the land of Hong Kong was a Harcourt. It’s a gesture that we’re trying to show.
“Our roots might be from Hong Kong,” says Priscilla. “But Manchester is now our home.”
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