KARL CHIU FOR TIME
	MIXED UP: Fusion food, as defined by a street stall in Hong Kong

Posted Monday, July 31, 2006; 20:00 HKT

At every Hong Kong daipaidong, or fast-food stall, you can ask for your chili spareribs—or fish cake and bitter gourd, or braised beef tendons—to come with spaghetti instead of rice. When office workers crowd the tables at lunchtime, or young families show up for dinner, there's a good chance that half of them will be eating forkfuls of pasta instead of the grain traditionally feted as the staple food of Chinese anywhere. Spaghetti is treated like a Chinese noodle ("Italian noodle" as it's literally called in Cantonese), and comes stir-fried in peanut oil, not reverently tossed with pesto and pecorino. But it's pasta nonetheless, and its habitual appearance at the Chinese table is a big clue as to the identity of the European nation with which Hong Kong feels the most culinary kinship. The British colonized the city for 156 years, but you won't ever find chips or mashed potatoes at a daipaidong.

No, the only Western nation to have properly breached Hong Kong's kitchens has been Italy, and its culinary colonization has not been limited to spaghetti. Macaroni is a universal breakfast item: it comes topped with a fried egg and floating, with spring onions and diced vegetables, in a Chinese-style broth. It's so commonplace that Hong Kong branches of McDonald's serve it every morning, alongside the McMuffins and hotcakes. Eavesdrop on a supermarket conversation and you might hear children pestering their parents for "Italian wontons" (ravioli). Or step into any bakery—you'll find mini pizzas as well as red-bean pastries and sesame pork buns.

Sensing an uncommonly receptive audience, the Italians have made inroads into Hong Kong's high-end dining, too. One of the handful of restaurants in Asia to have won the coveted Insegna del Romano—an annual award given to the best Italian restaurant outside Italy—is Nicholini's, at the Conrad Hong Kong Hotel. And the "Worldwide Ambassador of the White Truffle," that apogee of northern Italian delicacies, is Umberto Bombana, chef de cuisine at the Toscana restaurant in the Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong. When the world's most expensive truffle—a 1.2-kilogram chunk of tuber magnatum pico—was auctioned in 2005, it was bought by a Hong Kong consortium and presented to Bombana with instructions that it be prepared for a banquet.

Italian cooking gives Hong Kong diners, who are notoriously snobbish about their food, several readily apprehensible points of reference. The meat-and-two-veg approach of much Western cuisine seems amusingly coarse to Chinese traditionalists, as it did, for example, to my maternal grandparents. When brought to an English or a French restaurant, and confronted with great sides of beef or racks of lamb, they would pause and take in the mountains of charred flesh with slightly condescending smiles before mustering the will to pick up knife and fork. But at Italian meals, where everything is cut up into dainty pieces and accompanied by, say, fettuccine or risotto—or where dishes come not in individual serves but family-sized portions made for sharing (as they do in many Italian restaurants)—they felt perfectly at home.

Scholars of comparative cuisine will find many other Sino-Italian correspondences besides styles of service and the love of rice and pasta. There's a shared use of thick tomato sauce as the basis of many dishes; ketchup, from the Cantonese keah—an abbreviation of fahn-keah, or tomato—and tsup, or sauce, is incidentally a Chinese invention. The traditional starter at a Chinese banquet, a platter of smoked and roasted meats, finds its counterpart in antipasti (which is billed, with wonderful confusion, at one Hong Kong Italian restaurant chain as "Italian sushi"). And while the Italian practice of serving pasta first, followed by fish and meat courses, is an inversion of the custom at formal Chinese dinners—when plain rice and noodles are served toward the end of the meal—the notion of carbohydrates constituting an entirely separate course is a familiar one. Then there's the total lack of gustatory inhibition. With its backslapping, slurping, dripping sauces and familial injunctions to "Eat! Eat!" the Italian table is as colorful and as noisy as any Chinese one. Conclusively sealing the connection is the fact that both Italian and Chinese cuisines are foods of diaspora. Turn up in any small town, almost anywhere in the world, and the two international restaurants you're certain of finding are a pizza parlor and a Chinese takeaway.

Speaking of Chinese takeaways, you are of course aware that Marco Polo did not, as was long supposed, take noodles back to Italy after his wanderings. They evolved independently in both Italy and China. Indeed, Marco Polo's influence on Italian cuisine is not at all certain—but that's okay. The one group of Europeans that doesn't need the help of the Chinese in the kitchen are the Italians. If Marco Polo were an Englishman, on the other hand, the Chinese could have sent him back with an entire retinue of imperial cooks and made a contribution where it was needed most.