Yat Lok Barbecue Restaurant, RIP, 1957-2018 (Patreon)

There’s this idea that I’ve heard people repeat that kinda irks me. When talking about great food cities, there’s this line that “of course Hong Kong/New York/Tokyo/[insert expensive city here] have the best food. The rent’s so high that only the most outstanding restaurants can survive”.

There’s a logic there, but at the end of the day it just seems totally incongruent with my personal experience. High rent locations don’t seem to produce the best restaurants, else the best pizza in New York’d be in Times Square, right? If anything, there seems to be an almost inverse relationship between rents and quality. The best food in Guangzhou and Chengdu is found either on the outskirts of the city or old neighborhoods. The best food in LA’s found in strip malls. How economic geography affects a food scene just… doesn’t seem that simple.  

Yat Lok restaurant is now closed. Yat Lok was a Hong Kong institution dating back to the 50s, a restaurant specializing in Cantonese roast meats.  All their stuff was quality, but what they were famous for was their roast goose. The delta has its fair share of excellent goose, but Yat Lok’s stood out: the skin was marvelously crispy and the fat just… melted when you ate it. I’m terrible at describing food, but the point was that it was the best damn roast goose I’ve had anywhere in Guangdong – thus making it perhaps the best roast goose in the world.

Now, a while back the owner’s son opened another branch of the restaurant in Central. It’s still there, it’s good, but a bit pricier and nothing special. The father (now 61) stayed in Tai Po market (out in the New Territories) and personally oversaw everything at that original location to ensure quality. I suppose he wanted to retire - which he has every right to - and it seems the family luckily owned the building the were operating out of. With links to the Mainland deepening, the price of real estate along transit routes in the New Territories is exploding. That building that the family owned was pretty big (had a few shops/restaurants in it) and was right on the main square in Tai Po market. It’s currently getting a little bit of a makeover and listing at – get this – HKD $1 billion.

They prolly won’t get that much in the end, but that’s still a ridiculous amount of money. I mean, fuck – I certainly don’t blame them for selling. How could you possibly say no? Take the money, enjoy a well deserved retirement. 

Old restaurants close, new restaurants open. It’s natural, it’s what happens. A place like Yat Lok closing isn’t the tragedy – the tragedy is the banality of what replaces them.

As a city develops, it gets more expensive. As it gets more expensive, the fixed and upfront costs of running a restaurant increase. As the fixed and upfront costs of running a restaurant increase, it’s less and less likely that a normal family can scrape together the funds of opening a place. And then… the people the only people that can afford to open a restaurant are investors.

Nothing against investors. Their job is to evaluate risk and return among a number of different opportunities. Imagine you were the chef-owner of Yat Lok back when you opened in 1957 and you had to pitch your restaurant to an investor:

Chef-Owner: We’re going to open a roast meat restaurant, we need $XYZ to start off.

Investor: Ok, so there’s a lot of roast meat restaurants in Hong Kong, what makes you different?

Chef-Owner: Well, we’re going to make the very best roast goose in the city!

Investor: Uh… ok… I mean, I dunno how you plan on besting Yung Kee. What’s your marketing plan?

Chef-Owner: We’re gunna hang up a sign and let word-of-mouth drive our business.

Investor: Any ideas for expansion? I like roast goose and all but what’d really interest me is something scalable. 

Chef-Owner: No, making roast goose properly is very difficult, I’ll need to be there at all times to ensure quality.

That’d all be a non-starter of course. An investor doesn’t want to put their money into something like Yat Lok, they’d wanna invest in stuff like “Café de Coral” or “Five Guys”. You know, shit with a real possibility of return. That’s their job. Even when you’re looking at small scale kinda investors that specialize in restaurants, the food is less important than the concept. 

But why is that? At the end of the day, as consumers, we gotta look straight in the mirror.

If you looked at the clientele of Yat Lok, you’d notice that they were fucking old. There was a certain charm to it, seeing people in their 70s and 80s come and chat with the owners and such. There was a solid number of middle aged people too. But seeing anyone under the age of 35 there was a rare sight unless they were with their family – although every once in a while I’d see a smattering of young white tourists there trying to ‘follow the trail’ of Anthony Bourdain (he ate at Yat Lok once in his show, ZPZ does employ some great fixers).

In Shenzhen too, you’ll notice that young people don’t tend to gravitate around the best restaurants – sometimes me and Steph joke that if you see a restaurant crowded with people in their 20s and 30s it’s a sure-fire sign that the restaurant’s shit. But why? Why are young people so content with mediocre food in the face of a ‘trendy concept’ or a ‘cool environment’? If you asked em, they’d likely vehemently disagree that the food’s bad. I think in the end, the answer’s actually… modernity.

Stay with me here. Modernity’s great, I’m certainly not the kinda guy that thinks we gotta turn the clock back on society. I’m not the sort that wistfully tours around rice paddies in Asia and bemoans the fact that these societies are growing and urbanizing. It fucking deserves the same comforts that the West has. But it sure ain’t good for the food scene. Seeing Mainland China make that change at light speed, right before your eyes… as an American, you begin to start to realize what America has already lost.   

With modernity comes… modern family structures. Again, this is by and large a very good thing. Back in the day, women were expected to stay at home and cook for the family. The shift of women into the workforce has been good, and important, and critical… but it has had a profound effect on how we eat.

See, if you go to some places that still have this sort of more traditional family structure, there’s this idea that going out to a restaurant’s kinda like a ‘last resort’. “Well… Grandma’s not feeling like cooking tonight, let’s just eat out”, that kind of thing. Cooking skills were passed on from generation to generation, and family cookbooks were a prized possession. And it makes sense – if you had two equally talented cooks, one of them working in home kitchen and another trying to feed at dinner rush… of course the one at home would make a better meal.

So because people were good cooks (or their parents, or their grandparents, or their spouses), it created a sort of baseline, a minimum, for food quality. See, restaurants ain’t just competing with eachother – they’re competing with you. Suppose there was a restaurant that open where all they did was pour you cereal (and charge your triple the price). It wouldn’t last very long. Why? Because no matter how good the chef was at pouring cereal, most people would just think to themselves “nah… I can pour my own damn cereal”. In economics, this is called a “substitute good” – there’d be an indifference curve at play, but the idea’s the same.

As the generations’ve passed, people’ve gotten less and less adept at cooking for themselves. As we become worse cooks, there’s less of a reason for restaurants to strive for truly excellent food – instead, being incentivized to focus on the fluffier cultural aspects of dining out. Making a brand experience that people can identify with or aspire to is the name of the game. So as old restaurants close and the older generations leave the scene, there’s just nothing to replace them… nothing to carry the torch.

This relentless drumbeat of diminished expectations can even infect restaurants that wanted to do a good job. Why bother doing that extra step to pull out the myoglobin in the Dim Sum ribs, when the customers don’t seem to care either way?

Where we go from here

It’d be irresponsible of me to go on this whole diatribe without mentioning America's food renaissance in the same breath. See, food in United States probably already reached its nadir back in the 90s. Once you got chain restaurants literally microwaving shit like they’re TV dinners and having the gall to charge $10-20 bucks for the service… there’s really nowhere to go but up.

But in explaining what happened there, I think it’s impossible to separate the revival of the food scene with the revival in cooking as an activity. Food Network started to gain steam in the 90s, and really blew up after 9/11. Seemingly overnight… cooking became something ‘cool’, especially among my generation (the older millennials). The internet then helped pockets of expertise spread throughout the country, and all of a sudden people were starting to whip up some really good tasting food again.

Maybe not everyone, everywhere… but enough to tip the scales. Small ‘hipster’ restaurants start popping up, and chains start going out of business. While that may cause some financial analysts to bemoan that ‘millennials are killing Applebees’, I say good fucking riddance. Applebees and Olive Garden and their ilk were symptoms of a profound cultural rot in American society, pock-marking the landscape with an ever-present reminder of just how far we’d fallen. The new little ‘hipster’ joints might not be as good as what we’d lost decades ago, but they’re certainly better than the corporate bullshit they’re replacing. 

So if you want better food, learn to cook. And this goes double for something like Chinese food. We’ve had commenters complain about how there’s no ‘real’ Chinese food where they live and complain that the Chinese restaurants near them only served ‘Americanized crap’. And yet, the vast majority of Chinese restaurant owners abroad would, I imagine, absolutely love to serve actual dishes from where they’re from. But the Americanized stuff sells in a world where people don’t know the difference between a fortune cookie and a moon cake.

When you learn how to cook something, you’re not only making something tasty for yourself and your family… you’re also helping to re-establish a baseline, an expectation. We live in a world where we can’t rely on our mothers and grandmothers to provide that anymore. We gotta do that for ourselves.