dine•o•crat

Hong Kong has a unique blend of native vibrancy and colonial history which fascinates me and which I adore. Growing up in the 80s, I was told of Hong Kong as the place to get cheap designer clothing. And everything else, according to that vaguely racist yet catchy song from that era, " Made in Hong Kong ." How obsolete were my ideas! When I finally visited it, it did not live up at all to its neon-legwarmers era reputation. Instead, I was immersed in a frantic, modern cosmopolitanism that rivals that of New York or Paris. Instead of rock-bottom discounts, I was faced with sky-high prices inside gleaming designer stores. I was mesmerized by it almost immediately, from the airport all the way to the city itself. The view of the bay reminds me very much of San Francisco, down to the freeway that cuts through the city, the hills, and the water. This is from an area called North Point, which in turn reminds me of New York's Lower East Side meets Chinatown. It's a dens...

The French Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine wrote in verse of his dream lover as someone who is "never quite the same ... nor wholly different" ( " Mon rêve familier "). A cheese expert from France, interviewed by Jeffrey Steingarten , used the same line to describe Camembert , the great and legendary unpasteurized raw-milk cheese. He used it to describe its complexity, how the cheese would taste a bit different each time, but somehow the quality of it is also the same as you might remember it. I thought the same might apply to rice porridge, or "lugaw" in Tagalog, "lelut" in Kapampangan. Sure it's sometimes bland, but there are so many varieties and regional differences that a version of this ubiquitous and satisfying comfort food is bound to hit your Proustian g-spot. The right one, for me, releases an orgasmic torrent of memories. But even the blandest lugaw provides enough of a quickie, even as Chinese congee, because the texture and sme...