So fresh it’s moving
Bowrington Road market in Hong Kong’s Wan Chai district, gives a glimpse of a city that still manages to resist the modernising influences and development of the urban mess around it, offering a taste, smell, sight and sound of Hong Kong as it has been since its early days.
Located just off Canal Road on the border between Causeway Bay and Wan Chai, it is one of many such wet markets across Hong Kong, each one similar in its devotion to freshness. There are bucher shops with their red wares hanging; carcases strewn over wooden chopping blocks ready for the knife. There are seafood stalls with a variety of fish, crabs and shellfish that your average supermarket shopper would barely think possible, all of it as fresh as you can get without catching it yourself and eating it live off your line.
Indeed, most prospective purchases are so fresh as to be available for selection and prompt butchering while the customer waits. Fish are the main recipients of this swift slaughter-to-order, with scales scattered, bellies sliced and innards ripped out, before finally having some kind of belated coup de grâce administered or else thrown gutted and bleeding onto a deathbed of reddening ice until bought.
But Bowrington Road market deals in more than just gore. There are fruit and vegetable stalls selling anything the discerning chef could ever want to throw in his wok. There are even seafood restaurants at street level and a Cooked Food Centre on the top floor of the indoor market, where cheap is the price, delicious the food, and raucous the atmosphere. If you’re not familiar with the Hong Kong phenomenon that is the Cooked Food Centre, think large hall packed shoulder-touching with polythene-covered garden furniture and multiple kitchens serving no-nonsense, tasty local food to their noisy and appreciative customers.
If you are looking to eat, choose the Cooked Food Centre over the restaurants on the road. It’s cheaper, the portions more generous and the food much nicer. The first restaurant you encounter when you enter is the pick of those inside. It’s the one with the pink table covers. Enter via the staircase on the Bowrington Road side of the building or the lift at the bottom. Opening hours are 6am to 2am, seven days a week. Let’s hope the staff don’t have to work through their breaks.
