Between food, culture, and friendship: Hong Kong collective Black Window reflects on its unorthodox veggie eatery
After more than three and a half years of running a vegetarian restaurant in Sham Shui Po, with the shop also functioning as a space for cultural events, the people behind Hong Kong collective Black Window were exhausted – for good reason. The now-shuttered, unorthodox eatery, located in one of the city’s poorest districts, was […]
After more than three and a half years of running a vegetarian restaurant in Sham Shui Po, with the shop also functioning as a space for cultural events, the people behind Hong Kong collective Black Window were exhausted – for good reason.
The now-shuttered, unorthodox eatery, located in one of the city’s poorest districts, was a crucible for local artists, vegetarians, and those who found mainstream society too apathetic.
“It was not just a place to eat, it was also a place to connect with people,” said musician Sum Lok-kei, a regular at Black Window.
“I think Hong Kong needs badly a space like this, the function of which is not pre-determined,” he said in Cantonese. “Because in Hong Kong, most spaces have been compartmentalised for a specific purpose.”
To cater to all visitors, Black Window members had to work relentlessly, all the while managing to survive in the highly competitive food and beverage market in Hong Kong.
Black Window was opened in July 2021, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, with members hoping that it could become a vessel of possibilities, rather than just another eatery on Google Reviews.
To that end, they made a number of counterintuitive business decisions. They changed the menu every day. They listed their best-sellers as “pay-as-you-wish” dishes. They closed the kitchen every Tuesday but allowed people to hang out, relax, or join events such as art workshops or reading sessions.
The restaurant business was the “primary vehicle” to pay the rent and sustain the livelihood of staff, but it should not be the only purpose, said Nin Chan, one of the 20-odd members of Black Window.
But the sheer intensity of running a restaurant took a toll, both physically and emotionally, on its members. Some worked 15-hour shifts as a chef, others did 12-hour shifts as front staff.
“The harsh reality is that every day you need to not lose money,” Chan told HKFP in late February, weeks before Black Window closed its doors. “And because of that, it kind of forces you into a certain kind of mindset… and you have to prioritise things differently sometimes.”
That amount of labour also squeezed the time of members – some of whom were pursuing their own creative projects and other freelance commitments besides Black Window.
“It’s not sustainable for the physical and mental health of the people. Like the anxiety and the strain, and just – kind of – the physical exertion, it’s really becoming something insurmountable,” Chan said.
Coupled with economic woes that hit Hong Kong since last year, with a noticeable wave of businesses closing down, especially in the retail and food and beverage sectors, Black Window experienced a loss in income and decided to put up the shutters at the end of March.
Cultural practitioners have mourned the loss. “It is very regrettable,” artist Au Wah-yan said in Cantonese. “It is rare that a place is able to synergise the idealism and the practice, and with such energy.”
Pay-as-you-wish food
The original members of Black Window met during a series of social movements in Hong Kong over a decade ago, from the anti-high-speed railway movement in 2010 to the Occupy Central campaign in 2011.
They later started an experimental space called “So Boring” in Yau Ma Tei – now referred to as the “old shop.”
During their gatherings, members would often cook for each other. They later expanded the activities to serve the neighbourhood, allowing diners to pay whatever amount they wished for a meal.
For Chan, who was primarily a cook at Black Window, the act of preparing and serving food for others goes beyond a mere transaction.
“Food itself is something very political,” he said. “The way [people] compose their dish or the flavour profile of that dish also reflects a certain way in which those people live in that [part of the] world.”
Black Window attempted to introduce new possibilities, offering vegetarian cuisines uncommonly found in Hong Kong, ranging from Palestinian to Burmese dishes.
It intended to broaden Hongkongers’ choices for food while also connecting them to the cultures behind the dishes.
“[For] Hong Kong people, there are certain foods that we gravitate towards or… associate with home or whatever,” said Chan, who grew up in Canada. “But when this kind of comfort zone becomes a routine or a habit, it kind of ties into or encompasses a kind of closed-mindedness.”
He pointed out that food had always been the “focal axis” of Black Window’s connection with its visitors. “How could we fully use the food as a medium to communicate things besides food, you know, because the food itself has a context,” he said.
Sum, the musician, sang the praises of the restaurant. “The food there is actually really good,” he said. Black Window’s version of Indian spinach curry palak paneer was his personal favourite.
Black Window’s vegetarian dishes were innovative and, at times, “subversive,” said writer Kwok Tsz-ki, who held at least two reading sessions at Black Window.
“There was one dish that was really memorable, which was a sashimi bowl that resembled tuna,” he said in Cantonese. “I couldn’t guess what it was, and it turned out to be watermelon marinated in soy sauce.”
Black Window insisted on using local ingredients, mostly harvested by farmers labouring in the New Territories. Some farmers had also been long-time friends of Black Window, dating back to their participation in protests against development plans in the area.
“Being a restaurant has provided us with a position to engage in local agriculture,” Jojo Wong, another Black Window member, told HKFP in late February.
Besides using local vegetables in their dishes, Black Window also used fruit jams produced by local farmers in cocktails, she said. Black Window itself had also been a pick-up spot for people who ordered vegetables from local farmers.
Even some tables in Black Window were remnants of Mapopo Community Farm, a site activists fought to preserve amid the government’s project to turn a vast area in the New Territories into the Northern Metropolis. The land of Mapopo Community Farm was confiscated in 2021.
At the back of the restaurant, stairs led to a second floor, where a wall of bookshelves stored a large collection of reading materials, from Japanese manga and local literature to works by European philosophers and Marxist classics.
A conspicuous etching press sat at a corner, with print artworks hanging above the machine. They all belonged to a local printing art collective called Printhow – testament to how other artists in the city found the room to develop their work at Black Window.
Not only were two of Black Window’s members involved with Printhow, but Printhow artist Au also frequently helped in Black Window’s kitchen.
Au herself organised three six-session printing workshops at Black Window over the past two years, with participants coming from all walks of life. Some were regulars at Black Window, others were artists who wanted to try their hand at printing art.
One participant was a man who learned about the workshop while serving a sentence in prison, Au said. He joined the class after his release.
“The places for the workshops were filled up quickly each time,” Au said. “It showed there was a big demand and people actually liked to learn in this kind of alternative space.”
It was the same for Kwok’s reading sessions, during which he led participants to read Irish literary titles like James Joyce’s classic Ulysses.
“I didn’t really know the backgrounds of the participants, but both sessions had been fun,” he said.
The eatery was especially valuable as a meeting place during Covid-19, when stringent anti-pandemic rules intermittently banned social gatherings in public, Sum said.
“Black Window gave me the impression that whenever you walked into it, you would meet interesting people and then you could start a conversation,” he added.
But Black Window also had a distinctly political identity that might appeal to like-minded individuals, Kwok said.
“Black Window’s approach is sensitive to the world, to what is happening outside of Hong Kong,” he said. “You could see this from the leaflets and information displayed in the shop.”
Black Window “has all kinds of insignia, like pro-Palestinian stuff or whatever, that’s coded in a certain way, even though the politics is kind of open to everyone,” Chan said, sitting in front of a wall filled with posters and zines, including those that explained the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
When HKFP visited Black Window in late February, members were busy recycling leftover material in the kitchen. Wong said they had mixed emotions towards the place’s looming end, feeling a sense of both relief and grief.
Despite the tremendous labour needed to keep the place afloat, Chan found best friends among the team members.
“We’re all friends and we’re all concerned about each other’s well-being, but at the same time we need to get through the day,” he said. “It’s like we’re in a dragon boat or something. If somebody is not rowing, it’s gonna have a huge cumulative effect for the rest of the day.
“The burden of communication is just on each of us.”
But that was the ultimate experiment for Black Window, Chan said, which was about treating people with care and responsibility.
“I feel like the intensity and the ethical gravity of the relationships here, and how seriously we have to take each other… that’s how we imagine the world should be,” he said.
“It’s the process of living and discovering what kind of life we can live, and that world becomes richer and richer with the people that come here… our frame of reference for what this world encompasses becomes broader and broader. Even within the confines of these four walls and Black Window.”
The end of the Sham Shui Po eatery meant members of Black Window could take a rest from the hard work of the past three years, Wong said, but it would not be the end.
“Some of us had been quite emotional, but overall we didn’t cry the shit out,” she said. “As long as each one of us is still here, I think it is OK.”
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