Tourism: a blessing or a curse for local restaurants?
Outside Hong Kong Central’s iconic Lan Fong Yuen stands a line of customers ready to be seated. As the line extends down the steady slope of the street, customers are browsing through Instagram and Little Red Book, looking at photos of women stocking milk tea and buttery french toast. It seems to me they are tourists, especially from their clothing style and recognizable mother tongues.
It is finally my turn to be seated: it is a ‘lucky’ day of shared tables. I am seated with a few young Korean tourists, who proceed to point at the photos on the menu and signal the quantity they would like to order. Of course, they order the toast and two cups of Hong Kong style milk tea. In a matter of minutes, their food and drinks arrive. Whilst one slightly tilts the angle of the dish, the other quickly snaps a photo or two to capture their ‘authentic’ experience.
These days, holiday plans and itineraries almost all start from social media. As we find ourselves doom scrolling through reels and short videos, the occasional videos about local restaurant experiences in an overseas location may spark the interest of its users. These videos, although short, with their snappy videography, leave many individuals with the fear of missing out if they were to never experience it firsthand.
When it comes to selecting restaurants to dine at, it is very common that tourists prioritise aesthetic value and presentation over taste and comfort, leaning towards the instagrammable and photogenic items on the menu. Restaurants that are in “trend” become checkpoints throughout their trip in the city. In order to feel accomplished, they must go ahead and “da kat” , “打卡” (the common internet slang for visiting a popular, trendy location).
Other than aesthetics, it is also common practice for tourists to select the “most exotic” item on the menu, especially something they wouldn’t find back in their home country. A combination of mystery and suspense for a new dish provides a thrilling dining experience. For example, I visited a local restaurant in Hong Kong with my friend from the UK. It was quite amusing to see someone get excited over snake soup when it was a normal dish in Hong Kong Cantonese culture.
Nevertheless, we should be mindful in not crossing boundaries when it comes to exoticising these traditional restaurants based on their aesthetic value and how “rare” they are. It runs the risk of treating them as theme parks, rather than the hub of community and authenticity that many local individuals see them as.
In many of the conversations I had with different restaurant owners, they all mentioned the role of the internet in bridging the gap between Hong Kong’s restaurant industry and overseas customers. Many of them mentioned that they were grateful that apps like Little Red Book, (the so called “Chinese Instagram”) existed.
“It takes just one video and there you go – a trend. The next day, you know, there’s double the visitors coming in to try just that one dish,” one owner mentioned when I visited the Dai Pai Dong near the busy central business hub in Tsim Sha Tsui.
It is most definite that social media has brought these smaller restaurants more exposure and an economic boost, especially after the pandemic when there was a window where Hong Kong’s restaurant industry was collapsing. Whilst many local restaurants do have regular customers, growing dependency on tourism as means of economic survival may occur, especially in these few years where tourist trends have returned to regular patterns.
Yet, there are risks that come with this overreliance. Trends of tourism fluctuate seasonally, which leads to fluctuating and unstable income, especially during quiet months. Dependency on tourism also runs the risk of local community disconnection. When restaurants begin to twist their menu to adjust to the taste of tourists, it inevitably generates an awkward divide between the local community and themselves, which could lead to losing regular customers.
On one hand, some restaurants may just so happen to be the start of a new trend. As they see growth in their business, they could be seen as the ‘winners’ of tourism. But what happens to those who do not get the spotlight? While some restaurants gain immeasurably from the influx of tourists, others lose out: restaurants who don’t find themselves on the “trendy” page of Little Red Book may struggle with expanding their customer outreach. Thus, tourism can be both a blessing and a curse.
So the next time you’re planning a new journey, try to pivot away from the “trends” and the “viral page”, and instead, engage with the local community to discover the most authentic taste of the local cuisine.
