Canteen Culture and Lore: Lemon Tarts, the Thousand-Person Feast, and the Women Workers' Glutinous Rice Dumplings

At CUHK, "where are we eating tonight?" is never a simple question — it conjures up the Medical Faculty's lemon tart, Chung Chi's no-frills "combo meals", the iced red bean drink at Benjamin Franklin Centre, the women workers' little shop that keeps its lights on late into the night, and the thousand-person communal feast in New Asia College's circular piazza. This article strings together these memories of food with a light touch, to see how a university built into a mountainside wrote its own collective memory through its canteens.

# 1. A Map of Signature Dishes: Every Canteen Has Its Claim to Fame

When CUHK students talk about "CUHK treasures" or "CUHK food", they rarely mean delicacies of land and sea. They mean cheap, filling, no-nonsense home cooking with a canteen personality all its own. Drawing on the School of Journalism and Communication's "A Bite of CUHK" special feature^※ and student word-of-mouth:

• Med Can — lemon tart: The chilled lemon tart at the Li Ka Shing Medical Building's snack counter is, in the JLMC feature's words, "famous near and far, and the uncles and aunties are ever so nice"^※. Served alongside two-choice rice plates and breakfast sets, it is a firm favourite, at just $20–$40 a head. According to HK01, the tart has been on sale for decades, and even then-Vice-Chancellor Joseph Sung was a regular^※. It goes on sale at 3 pm and is usually sold out within two hours — the built-in scarcity has become part of the legend.
• Benjamin Franklin Centre — iced red bean drink (Coffee Corner): The coffee corner's iced red bean drink is "full of condensed milk flavour"^※; its dinners lean spicy, and the fried fish slice with rice noodles and the Vietnamese cold vermicelli are frequent orders too.
• Chung Chi Student Canteen — "combo meals" (CC Can): The Chung Chi student canteen is described as "CUHK's famous no-frills meal — loads of choices, friendly prices, big portions"^※. Barbecued meat over rice and afternoon tea sets are the daily staples, while the brown-sugar pearl milk is the Instagram-friendly option.
• Lan Yuan — five-layer French toast and full English breakfast: Tucked beside Ho Tim Building, Lan Yuan does Western-style fare. "The five-layer French toast is huge — make sure you drag your friends along for it"^※, the feature advises; its house-made beef burger is also a signature.
• New Asia — iced red bean drink, pineapple buns, ham-and-egg sandwiches (NA Can): The New Asia Restaurant in the Esther Lee Building at Lok Kwan House is a proper Hong Kong-style cha chaan teng, complete with French toast and full breakfast sets.
• Women Workers' Cooperative — house-made glutinous rice dumplings and Taiwanese sausages: In the basement of Benjamin Franklin Centre, the women workers' little shop is best loved for its homemade snacks. Prices start at $4^※, and according to the student press, its ice cream undercuts the supermarket chains by a fair margin.
• Lee Woo Sing College — Cafe Tolo waffles: A rare "scenic signature" within a fully residential college. According to the "A Bite of CUHK" column in CUHK Newsletter, this college coffee shop overlooking Tolo Harbour serves a signature "sweet sweet waffle with ice cream" that is "made to order, taking fifteen to twenty minutes; served piping hot, three pieces to a plate, drizzled with chocolate sauce and dusted with icing sugar, alongside a small bowl of strawberries, blueberries and dragon fruit, and a scoop of chocolate, vanilla or strawberry ice cream"^※. The same column remarks that ordering dessert here, you can "savour each bite while feeling the embrace of green hills and blue sea." The difference from Med Can or the women workers' shop could not be plainer: the latter two win on flavour and warmth, Cafe Tolo on "a window view that only a university built into a mountainside can offer."

Each college canteen also guards its own private specialities — S.H. Ho's mouth-watering chicken, United College's cheeseburger curry rice and minced pork rice, Wu Yee Sun's pan-fried chicken chop, CW Chu's All Day Breakfast, and the kebab and pizza at Ebeneezer's, the halal outlet. This "map of signature dishes" shifts as caterers come and go, but the conviction that "every canteen has one dish worth a special trip" is shared across generations of CUHK students.

# 2. Cheese Foam and the Photo Op: The "Instagram Generation" Hits the Canteen

Over the past decade or so, a new layer has quietly settled over CUHK's canteens: "photo-op culture". Students no longer eat merely to refuel — they will make a special trip for a drink that photographs well and has a silly name. According to the "A Bite of CUHK" feature^※, this "trendy" texture is worth a closer look:

• United College's "Happy Corner" (inside UC Can): Specialising in cheese-foam-topped drinks, its signature names are half the fun — "Cheese Foam Panda Four Seasons Spring Tea", "Aladdin's Tea", "Uncle's Milk Tea"^※ — at $15–$30, a United College student's afternoon delight.
• Chung Chi Student Canteen's "brown-sugar pearl milk": Even the no-frills canteen has kept up with the times, putting brown-sugar pearl milk on the menu — an odd-couple pairing of "cheap combo meal with an on-trend drink".
• Pommerenke Can (Paper & Coffee): Up on the second floor of Pommerenke Student Centre, this one goes for a Japanese vibe — "decorated with Japanese tatami flooring"^※, according to the student press. Vegetable rice, slow-cooked pork knuckle and freshly ground coffee are the draws, at $30–$60; and loyalty points via a third-party app earn a year-round 10% discount — photo op and points programme in one.
• Royal Jubilee Residence's "Be the Light": A Taiwanese drinks shop that students have voted, per the student press, "best milk foam tea in cuhk"^※. (The same round-up also notes that it "has been suspected of wage arrears" — a single-source labour allegation covered in the contractor piece; we will not expand on it here.)

This "trendy" layer reflects a shift in how the same generation eats: canteens are no longer purely functional spaces "for shovelling food down between classes", but social stages for photographing, dating, collecting points and checking in. The cheap and filling combo meal sitting on the same menu as a photogenic cheese-foam tea is the real texture of today's CUHK canteen.

# 3. Late-Night Food: The Few Lights Still Burning up the Hill

CUHK is built into a hillside, with hostels far from the city centre — heading down the hill for a late-night snack is a costly expedition. So late-night food on campus has become a culture unique to this mountain town. According to public information and the freshman handbook:

• Chung Chi Student Canteen's late-night service: The Chung Chi canteen stays open late, from 9 pm to 2 am Sunday through Friday (closed Saturdays)^※; one-person hotpots and four-person chicken claypots are the late-night staples.
• The Women Workers' Cooperative's "all-night lamp": According to the freshman handbook, the shop's hours run from 07:30 to 1:30 am^※ — for students chasing deadlines and studying into the small hours, that light alone is a comfort. The student press records that the cooperative once teamed up with student volunteers after renewing its lease to run a "Special Shift", with students covering the late-night hours to extend the evening service.

A canteen open late has never just been about "having food". On a campus where missing the last shuttle means hiking up the hill on foot, a canteen light still burning is an unspoken pact between students.

# 4. The Thousand-Person Feast and High Table: Making "Dining Together" a Tradition

If everyday canteens are about eating on the fly, the colleges' grand communal meals elevate eating into ritual.

• New Asia College's Thousand-Person Feast: New Asia's signature large-scale gathering. According to public records, the feast is held in the New Asia circular piazza, where during the College Anniversary large numbers of teachers, students and alumni sit down together for a festive basin feast (poon choi) and performances^※. New Asia was founded in 1949 by scholars Ch'ien Mu, Tang Chun-i and Chang Pik-kaai, with a strong humanist tradition; the anniversary period runs from the Confucius Birthday in September (the statutory anniversary date) to the founding day on 10 October, taking in a "Dai Daa Dei" carnival, the Thousand-Person Feast and puzzle games^※. A thousand people sharing basin food is the most concrete image of the "New Asia spirit" and of college belonging. Beyond the feast, the venue itself is a small slice of history. According to New Asia's official social-media column, the piazza's fan-shaped open-air design descends from the round hall at the old Farm Road campus, and was among the original facilities when the new Sha Tin campus was built^※; from the 41st anniversary in 1990, the College began setting name plaques of graduates into the Echoing Wall, with the first batch covering names from 1952 to 1989^※; when space ran out, the College and the alumni association launched an expansion in 2015, and three new walls were added in November 2019, with room for names to be carved through 2064^※. The same lawn holds a sculpture by sculptor Tung Kin-chu in memory of his mother, and a neighbouring wall is given over as a "free forum" for students to post notices and opinions^※. In other words, the aroma of the feast's basin food drifts across a space inscribed with the names of generations of New Asia people — "eating" and "leaving your name" are, here, one and the same act.
• High Table Dinners: A formal long-table dinner tradition inherited from the residential colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, it has been adopted by the colleges as part of whole-person education. At Shaw College, for instance, the High Table Dinner is a non-formal education event under college general education, where speakers share with students over a formal meal on topics ranging from social service and environmental protection to art, mediation and wine tasting^※. The newer colleges (S.H. Ho, Morningside, CW Chu and others) have gone further, making High Table a "compulsory communal meal" to be attended a set number of times each academic year — eating, etiquette and staff–student interaction, all designed as one piece. The same tradition has its counterpart across the harbour on Hong Kong Island: according to Chinese Wikipedia, the High Table Dinner at HKU's University Hall dates back to the Hall's founding, with fellows required to dress formally and wear the traditional green gown, followed by a discussion session after the meal^※ — the details differ between the two universities, but the idea of "teaching etiquette and networks through a formal meal" runs through both, and it shows that High Table is not unique to CUHK but a shared tradition of Hong Kong's residential college system.

These grand communal meals and the everyday canteens are two sides of the same coin: the canteen answers the belly, the feast and the High Table answer belonging. The human warmth of the basin feast and the etiquette of the long table are the chapter that CUHK's college system writes into its dining tables.

# 5. The Women Workers' Cooperative: "Another Way of Eating" in One Small Shop

Of all the canteen stories, the women workers' little shop in the basement of Benjamin Franklin Centre is the most singular — it is not just a place selling glutinous rice dumplings and Taiwanese sausages, but an experiment in "how campus resources should be used."

According to the Hong Kong Women Workers' Association, the CUHK Women Workers' Mutual Cooperative was organised by the Association with a group of unemployed women, and was the first cooperative to develop university resources, born of a 2000 campaign by the CUHK Student Grassroots Concern Group to have the shop run by a grassroots organisation^※. The cooperative was formally established in March 2001, initially offering photocopying services, sharing revenue with the Student Union out of the profits after costs; the snack shop only opened in November of the same year^※ — in other words, the glutinous rice dumplings and Taiwanese sausages were not the cooperative's starting point, but its second step after it had gained a foothold on campus. Its way of doing business could not be more different from the usual contractor's: "mutual aid at the grassroots, collective management by the women workers, joint decision-making, fair division of labour"^※ — no boss; pricing, hours and what to sell are all decided by the members, one person one vote. According to an HK01 feature, the cooperative's members are mostly middle-aged women left unemployed by economic restructuring; "they sell twenty-odd snacks, with the 'lo mein' especially popular, at reasonable prices and generous portions; wages are paid by the hour, above the minimum wage, with annual leave"^※.

This little shop also bridges "campus" and "society". According to the same feature, over the years the cooperative has used charity sales and other means to "stand in solidarity with the Kwun Tong cleaners, the rebar workers' strike, and the compensation claims of CUHK's outsourced painters, and has visited cooperatives in South Korea, Taiwan and mainland China"^※. For many students, buying a glutinous rice dumpling at the women workers' shop is not just a late-night snack — it is an endorsement of "another way of eating."

Its lease renewals have never been smooth sailing — every few years it faces the hurdle of university tendering, and has come close to losing its spot on several occasions. That fuller, more dramatic storyline belongs to this module's Contractors, Outsourcing and Monopoly Disputes. In this article on canteen culture, what we remember is that light still burning late into the night, and the small kindnesses, priced from $4, handed over the counter by a few "uncles and aunties".

# 6. A Memory of Prices: Generations of "Cheap, Good, Great"

Running quietly through CUHK canteen culture is the thread of price. In the collective memory of students, what makes the canteen endearing is precisely that it is cheap: Med Can's meals at just over $20, the women workers' $4 snacks, United College's $18 student meal^※, Chung Chi's big-and-cheap combo plates — these figures shift with inflation and changing caterers, but they have built a shared expectation that "CUHK canteens should stay affordable."

Precisely because that expectation runs so deep, "price hikes", "chain-ification" and "more expensive and worse-tasting" are guaranteed to touch a nerve — which only shows that, in the CUHK psyche, the canteen has never just been "a place to eat", but part of mountain-town life, a vessel of identity and emotion. In the price of a two-choice rice plate sits generations of memory of this university.

# 7. An Archaeology of Canteen Buildings: From "A Meeting Place for Three Colleges" to "The Triangular Chocolate Building"

Canteens sit where they sit not by accident, but as sediment of the campus's expansion. Benjamin Franklin Centre and Chung Chi Student Canteen are two cases in point.

• Benjamin Franklin Centre: The building that today is stuffed with eateries was in fact among the oldest public buildings on campus. According to the Office of Student Affairs, the Centre opened in 1969, and before the three founding colleges — Chung Chi, New Asia and United — had moved into the new Sha Tin campus from their scattered sites, it was the first central building where teachers and students of all three colleges could gather^※. In other words, before the very idea of the "mountain town" had taken shape, Benjamin Franklin Centre was already the place that brought the scattered people of CUHK together — it was first "everyone's clubhouse", and only later, naturally, grew into today's main-campus canteen hub. That is the historical footnote to its continuing status as the busiest node in the campus-wide canteen system.
• Chung Chi Student Canteen: The name of the Chung Chi student canteen is itself a piece of trivia. Drawing on public sources, "Chung Chi" (Chinese: 众志) is a homophone of "Chung Chi" (Chinese: 崇基), and the building's shape resembles a triangular block of chocolate, sited on the shore of Unicom Pond^※. When Chung Chi moved to its present Ma Liu Shui site in 1956, the hall-and-canteen building was completed at the same time — the nickname "no-frills combo meal" is a second layer of meaning added by students decades later, but "Chung Chi" (众志, "all wills united") was, from the very start, the College's aspiration for its own spirit.

This "former life" of canteen buildings rarely makes the freshman handbook, yet it says something important: many of the places where CUHK people eat were never built for eating — they began as clubs, teaching blocks or halls, and were only gradually taken over by the demands of food.

# 8. Sitting Down to Eat Together: CUHK's Place Among the "Eight Canteens"

Zoom out beyond CUHK's campus, and canteen culture is a shared talking point across Hong Kong's eight UGC-funded universities, each constantly compared with the others. According to an informal survey of several universities' canteens on a study-abroad agency platform (a single source, a casual round-up, not an academic study), "HKUST's canteens are often praised for their sea view, CityU's AC1 has become a photo-op hotspot for its MTR-adjacent location and cheap, generous portions, while CUHK is described as a 'mountain-view canteen in pleasant surroundings'"^※. The same piece also notes that one university's canteen is repeatedly derided as "inedible" — as for which university and whether the verdict is fair, readers should judge for themselves. We include it here merely as supporting evidence that "CUHK is not the only university obsessed with its canteens."

This comparative frame also explains why "mountain" and "sea" keep recurring in the earlier sections of this article: CUHK is built into a hillside, with canteens scattered among colleges and slopes — Med Can's lemon tart hides in the medical building's basement, Cafe Tolo's waffles look out over Tolo Harbour, Chung Chi's canteen rests against Unicom Pond. The terrain decides that "eating" and "scenery" can hardly be separated at CUHK. Compared with institutions built around a single main canteen, CUHK's dispersed canteen network is, in a sense, the college system and full-residential living extended to the dining table.

Related reading: The Mountain Town's Canteen System, Contractors, Outsourcing and Monopoly Disputes, CUHK Canteen Food Safety Incidents, Hostels, Hall Culture and College Traditions.