3 - Corridor Kitchens, Mushroom Pavilions: foodscapes of cooked food hawkers in post-war Hong Kong

Cooked food hawker stalls in their diverse forms have been ubiquitous in Hong Kong’s landscape, and indeed, central to its foodscape, through the latter half of the twentieth century. In the post-war period, itinerant hawkers dominated the landscape as key facilitators for the exploded population in squatter settlements (McGee, 1973). However, from the 1950s onwards, the foodscapes of cooked food hawkers transformed in response to government policies and urban developments, particularly in public housing estates (Smart, 1986). Several forms emerged: the introduction of the ‘fixed pitch’ for cooked food hawkers, also known as dai pai dong, attempted to arrange cooked food hawkers into coherent order; illegal hawker restaurants serving both traditional and Western fare at cheap prices in resettlement estate corridors and stairwells; modular ‘mushroom pavilions’, or dung gu ting, clustered in the courtyards of public housing estates to curb hawker activity; the multi-storey ‘restaurants’ that would establish the ‘eating-out’ culture necessary in a hyper-capitalist society. Whether illicit or not, these spaces offered opportunities to appropriate colonial structures, through the sensory, material routines and experiences of such foodscapes.

This paper explores the multitude spatial and material configurations of cooked food hawkers in Hong Kong with the objective of drawing out the complex networks and histories of such spaces. Taking a non-linear approach to history, the paper traces the links between varied iterations of cooked food hawkers and their connections to contemporary foodscapes, eating practices, memories and expectations.