Past my Peak

Tonight I went to Cafe Deco on the Peak, a restaurant looking down on Hong Kong from, well, the Peak. As the name suggests, it's decorated in an art deco style. Well, there are no giant pink neon Hello Kitty sculptures and there's quite a bit of fairly minimalist ironwork.

There is also an 'authentic 1920s oyster bar'; I don't know much about seafood, but I'm pretty sure if you're selling shellfish, one thing you don't stress is how vintage it is. (That's before we even get into the authentic Kumamoto oysters, fresh from Scotland. Isn't that like a genuine Scottish bagpiper, born and raised in Kyoto?)

Anyway, I had the authentic art deco pizza. Don't have the authentic art deco pizza. It's more like some crispbread with a bit of cheese squirted on top. For once, my strategy of always eating pizza was at fault, as the Indian food on offer looked much better than what I'd chosen. Curse my vegetarian, pariochial ways.

Afterwards, I had ice cream.

I like ice cream. Perhaps I should have had a steamed bun full of red bean paste, but there weren't any on offer. Just ice cream.

I did hear some people say that Cafe Deco is a tourist trap, but that's not such a bad thing. Authenticity doesn't always get you air conditioning or a nice view of the city. And besides, with the transient nature of most people's lives in Hong Kong, it's not like many of us can claim not to be tourists: we may be moving a bit slower, but we're all just passing through.

Ahem. That was deep.

No, really. I'm not just pontificating on the brevity of existence and the absence of permanence for the sake of it; I drank two pints of Kronenbourg on an empty stomach and now I'm neither here nor there, a fairly empty vessel making quite a bit of noise. And somebody else paid for it, which was jolly nice of them even if I did order a terrible pizza. The pasta's not bad, I seem to remember.

Oh, and the taxi driver who got me home from the Peak? His name was Sum Fun Dick. Really. If only my career consisted of reinforcing crass stereotypes, my evening would be made.

Although I suppose mentioning a crass stereotype only to decry it is having my cake and eating it.

Not that I had any cake, that is.