{"id":99,"date":"2026-07-24T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/?p=99"},"modified":"2026-07-24T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T00:00:00","slug":"cha-chaan-teng","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/?p=99","title":{"rendered":"Inside the cha chaan teng"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The cha chaan teng appeared in the 1950s to serve Western-style food to Hong Kong Chinese who were not welcome in, or could not afford, the colonial restaurants. What emerged was a hybrid nobody planned.<\/p>\n<p>Milk tea is the anchor: strong Ceylon blends strained repeatedly through a cloth sack, then cut with evaporated milk. The good ones are bitter enough to need the sweetness, and the sack is never washed with detergent.<\/p>\n<p>The menu logic is speed. Macaroni in broth for breakfast, a set lunch with soup and a drink, pineapple buns that contain no pineapple, and French toast built from two slices, peanut butter, a deep fryer and a slab of butter.<\/p>\n<div class=\"pullquote\">One of the few rooms where a city&#39;s entire social range still eats the same lunch.<\/div>\n<p>Etiquette is brisk and not unfriendly. Share tables at peak, order in one sentence, and do not linger over the last of the tea when there is a queue at the door.<\/p>\n<p>Numbers are falling as rents rise and the founding generation retires. The survivors are worth seeking out for a specific reason: they are one of the few places where a city&#39;s entire social range still eats the same lunch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hong Kong&#8217;s tea restaurants are a post-war invention that turned colonial British habits into something entirely local.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":187,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,32],"tags":[33],"touriza_theme":[],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-food-drink","category-places","tag-hong-kong"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=99"},{"taxonomy":"touriza_theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftouriza_theme&post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}