bc magazine

Megabites: Great UK Food Festival

The latest promotion from Great in the basement of Pacifc Place is the UK Food Festival which features over 300 new products. Filling Great’s wonderful cheese room is an expanded range of UK cheese from Neal’s Yard, which sources farmhouse made cheese from across the Isles. Amongst others there’s Keen’s Cheddar, Kirkham Lancashire, Appleby’s Double Gloucester, Colston Bassett Blue Stilton and an interesting Shropshire blue as well as Ticklemore’s Goat’s Cheese…

Also featuring in the promotion are Dickinson & Morris pork pies. The humble British pork pie is actually a complicated culinary delight as anyone who has tried to make one at home can attest. Sealing the filling in the dough to create the jelly is an art unto itself. In the bakery there’s also a range of scones – perfect for afternoon tea, topped with jam and clotted cream, and yes Great is selling real clotted cream! Enough with this fake overly sweet stuff that masquerades as ‘cream’ in Asia and destroys so many fine cakes and deserts. There’s also battenberg cake, an English delight that features squares of sponge cake surrounded in marzipan.

Welsh lamb and Scottish seafood offer options and flavours to the more traditional sources available locally and of course there’s trifle…. The Great UK promotion runs until 3 September

The Book of the Hanging Gardens

RAPSOVOCE PERFORMANCE COLLECTIVE brings together pianist Nancy Loo, baritone Caleb Woo and soprano Jasmine Law, presenting a German song recital of Arnold Schoenberg’s Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten (The Book of the Hanging Gardens), Op. 15, and selections by Johannes Brahms, whom Schoenberg hailed as a great progressive, a great innovator in the realm of musical language.

The Book of the Hanging Gardens, Op. 15, is Schoenberg’s fifteen-part song cycle composed between 1908 and 1909, set to the poems of Stefan George. It is the first composition in Schoenberg’s atonal period. The poems of the ‘Hanging Gardens’ are all miniatures, elliptically relating the progress of an intense, ultimately doomed love-affair between two young lovers, ending with the woman’s departure and the disintegration of the garden.

Performers:
Jasmine Law 羅曉晴 (soprano)
Caleb Woo 胡永正 (baritone)
Nancy Loo 羅乃新 (piano)

Programme:
Johannes Brahms:
Am Sonntag Morgen Op. 49 No. 1
Feldeinsamkeit Op. 86 No. 6
Vier ernste Gesänge Op. 121
Arnold Schoenberg:
Das Buch der hängenden Gärten Op. 15

浪漫時期作曲家布拉姆斯被奧地利作曲家荀伯克譽為偉大的音樂語言創新者，影響了很多他的早期作品。荀伯克於1908-1909年間取材自德國詩人喬治·斯特凡的詩，創作出由十五首歌曲組成的聯篇歌曲《伊甸之書，作品編號十五》，是荀伯克的無調性作曲時期的第一個作品。《伊甸之書》講述一對年輕戀人之間的戀愛、進展，其中一人的離去和像伊甸園一般美的花園最後解體結束。

著名鋼琴家羅乃新將與年輕歌唱家羅曉晴及胡永正合作，呈現這套鮮有在本地音樂會舞台上出現的二十世紀經典曲目，以及布拉姆斯的聲樂作品。

For more info, please visit www.rapsovoce.org or write to [email protected]
Visit our event page on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1565306410360880/

The Book of the Hanging Gardens
RapsoVoce Performance Collective
When: 7:30pm, 22 August, 2015
Where: HKAPA, Recital Hall
Tickets: $180 from HKTicketing

Olympic Sevens Qualifying

The Hong Kong Sevens are the best global sporting social event around, in a world before the Internet and instant global communication the HK Sevens were known across the globe even by non-rugby players like myself. For my first tickets I queued overnight in a freezing Victoria Park and stayed three months in a city I’d planned to visit for a few days. That three months, turned into a lifetime and I’m now proudly a Hongkong and this wonderful city is my home. That first Sevens an ecstatic happy memory, the 21 that have followed, some of the best days of each year even though it’s hard work.

I love the Sevens and appreciate that they’re HK Rugby Football Union’s golden goose the multi-million annual tournament that stuffs the Union’s bank account to over-flowing. The competition that even now in the era of professional rugby, players dream of attending or playing at above almost any other. That ‘other’ was once perhaps singular, the Rugby World Cup, from 2016 the ‘other’ is a duo as the Olympics embraces Rugby 7s for the first time.

It’d be tough to say which is the biggest and best known sporting tournament in the world, the Olympics or the Football World Cup. The Olympics probably just shade it. The roar at the HK Stadium when Hong Kong won the shield in 2010 for their first trophy in a decade was amazing. But Lee Lai Shan wining gold at the Olympics was monumental as was Li Ching and Ko Lai Chak’s silver in 2004. Watching Sarah Lee win a bronze medal live at the London Olympics 2012 had me screaming at the computer monitor and walking around so proud and happy of a HongKonger’s achievement on the biggest of biggest sporting stages.

The Olympics, for all their faults, are when the world focuses on sport almost exclusively for a couple of weeks. Hong Kong’s men’s and women’s rugby 7s teams, both have a chance to be among the twelve countries who qualify to compete at Rio2016. The Olympics only happen every four years so qualifying is a hard and rare opportunity, and the fame of the HKSevens has given Hong Kong home advantage for both tournaments.

Really, you didn’t know – I’m not surprised. Tickets for the November 7-8 Qualification Tournament went on sale last week. Yet there’s no mention of this on the website of the HKRFU. Nothing on it’s facebook page, not even a tweet (account suspended). There’s been no press release about tickets going onsale. No details of how many tickets are available locally to the general public (are the Union worried that having 38,000 tickets for sale will reveal how much they are screwing the public allocation at the 7s – come on the public are not stupid, they know they get screwed every March on tickets). Nothing, nada! A black hole of promotion, advertising and awareness.

It is quite frankly a disgrace, Hong Kong might not win the gold medal at Rio2016 but qualifying would be a fantastic achievement. The roar of packed HK Stadium might be the eighth man that pushes Hong Kong across the qualification try-line against our two toughest regional rivals Japan and China. So why does the HKRFU ignore this wonderful opportunity? Are they incompetent? Jealous that the Olympics will injure their annual golden goose? Or is Olympic rugby, like women’s rugby a part of the game to be suffered by the male dinosaurs who run the local game because they’re not feted and fawned upon, their ego’s stroked, as they are by all those $uper rich corporate$ desperate for access to the holy grail of sevens tickets!

Sort it out! The players and fans deserve better!

HKRFU website 18 August, 2015 - 4 days after tickets went onsale. — HKRFU website 18 August, 2015 – 4 days after tickets went onsale.

Megabites: 17 August, 2015 – Hattendo

The bridges from Wanchai MTR station to the Convention Centre almost 800m away are a solid heaving mass of sweaty humanity… and why not for what waits inside the HK Food Expo 2015 are discounts galore and a wide range of new food and drinks not yet (and maybe never to be) available in Hong Kong. Halls 1 and 3 of the Food Expo are the public halls, where new and old products are for sale at attractive discounts. Hall 5 is the trade/media closed to the public until lunch time on Saturday.

Within minutes of the trade hall opening to the public, there’s a crowd 10 deep surrounding the small Hattendo stand. These whipped cream filled buns are massively popular in Japan with shops recently opening in Korea and Manila. The bun is made from a blend of bread and cake mix and has a lovely soft feel and texture which never lets the creamy filling drip out. There’s a range of fillings custard, whipped cream, matcha, sweet bean and chocolate. In Japan, you’re only allowed to sell soft serve ice-cream in restaurants, but no such rules exist here in Hong Kong so take your regular Hattendo and fill it full of ice-cream. Delicious, hopefully we’ll see the first store open in Hong Kong soon! http://hattendo.jp/cream-buns

European Meat: Polish Cocktails – 12 August, 2015

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As part of the Food Expo, European Meat hosted a cocktail party with The Association of Butchers and Producers of Processed Meat of the Republic of Poland, The Polish Chamber of Commerce HK and the Polish Association of Butchers and Charcuterie to raise awareness of the quality of Polish meat. They also served up a delightful section of hot and cold Polish dishes, so tasty that the question is – why isn’t there a Polish restaurant in Hong Kong?
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Last Orders @ Delaney’s Wanchai – 13 August, 2015

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Regulars and former staff – including Delaney’s first General Manager Micky Doherty who flew in from Thailand specially – raised a glass to 21 years of memories as Delaney’s Wanchai closed it’s doors for the final time.
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Olympic Sevens Qualifier Tickets Onsale 14 August

An anonymous source has informed bc that tickets for the Women’s and Men’s Olympic Rugby 7s Qualifier tournament on the 7-8 November at the HK Stadium will go onsale on the 14th August from Ticketflap (www.ticketflap.com).

That 24 hours before the tickets are scheduled to go onsale there’s been no announcement to public is another example of the Union unable to organise a piss-up in a brewery. This despite rugby’s renowned enjoyment of the personal waitress service and beverages that many Wanchai and Angeles’s breweries offer.

While tickets prices were released weeks ago, $360 (2-day pass), $200 (1-day pass), there’s been no information from the HKRFU or Asia Rugby about the number of tickets for public sale. There should though, be more than the 3000/day HK Sevens tickets that the public were allowed to maul over in March.

The women’s qualifier is an 8 team event, the first part of a two leg qualification process that culminates in Tokyo on 28-29 November 2015. Teams competing in the women’s event are China, Hong Kong, Japan, Kazakhstan, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Uzbekistan.

The men’s tournament is a 12 team event featuring with the men’s winner claiming Asia’s sole automatic slot amongst the 12 teams participating in the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where Rugby Sevens will make its much anticipated debut.

Teams competing in the men’s event are Hong Kong, Chinese Taipei, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, South Korea, Thailand and China

Asia Rugby Sevens Olympic Qualifier
Date: 7-8 November, 2015
Venue: HK Stadium
Tickets: $360 (2-day pass), $200 (1-day pass), under 12 free from Ticketflap
More info: Public sale from 14 August

Wanchai Belles

After 21 year it’s last orders at Delaney’s Wanchai and bc spoke to two of Wanchai’s loveliest ladies Clare and Jeanette, as well as David “No problem, i’ll fix it” the bar’s longest serving employee about their memories and experiences over that time.

Clare: I started in 1997 the same time as Jeanette as a waitress on the 2nd floor. I left in 1999 only to rejoin Delaney’s in 2003 as Duty Manager, I have been the GM for around 8 years.

Jeanette: What is there to say about my years in Delaney’s Wanchai? Although, I have only been back at the Wanchai branch for just over 4 years, the company has played a major role in my 18 years here in Hong Kong. From a waitress up on the second floor in 1997, progressing to Floor Head. I left to go to the original Dublin Jack, on Cochrane Street in March 1999.

David: I started in December 1997 as a bartender on the 2nd floor, it was a very busy bar when I started. How I’m the man who fixes things and keeps the bar running smoothly.

Is there a single night at Delaneys that stands out as your favourite night?
Clare: I think for me personally one of the highlights in my time at Delaneys was the Spurs Legends night ,this fell on my birthday so was an added bonus & was just something totally different to our normal nights!!
Jeanette: One evening that will always be remembered, for me personally, will be the night we had our “Meet The Barbarians Event”. That was a lot of fun, and a chance to meet some great rugby players. Although I am not a great fan of football, the Spurs Legends night was also fantastic. To see the bar packed to the rafters with such dedicated Spurs fans from all over the region was actually very emotional!
David: I’ve worked through 17th St.Paddy days and 17 Rugby 7’s here which was unforgettable.

Best moment/memory?
Clare: The other great nights that stick in mind are St Patrick’s Day each year with the Dargle band flying over from Ireland, & the Rugby 7’s weekends were always hard work but a lot of fun.
Jeanette: Highs? Rugby 7’s weekends are always fun, if not very hard work. St. Patrick’s Day always sticks in my mind, although I’m not sure that it has always been fun! As a rugby fan, the last world cup in 2011 was one of my most fun times.
David: My great nights was always on the weekends with all the footy and rugby games it’s hard to make every customer happy, but good when I can.

Worst moment/memory at Delaneys?
Clare: I think some of the worst nights I have had have been during the football World Cups especially when they have been at silly o clock times & people are at their worst & the hours we have worked have been incredibly long.
Jeanette: Lows? Any time that involves football! Ha Ha!
Gary: The worst times were the 2002 World Cup coz the kick-off time in HK (noon/day time) and when England are playing football, the doors are always shut 2 hours before kick-off and people get angry when we can’t let them in.

What will you miss most/least about Dalaneys Wanchai?
Clare: I think in the 12yrs I have been here the one thing I will miss are the amazing people I have worked with & all the customers that have gone on to become good friends over the years.
Jeanette: Things I will miss? The wonderful customers we have here, some of which I have known since the my early days here in 1997. Some are now close friends, and many hold a place in my heart.
Things I won’t miss? Wanchai. The area is changing, and I don’t think for the better.
David: I will miss all of the people I’ve met here, I’ve made so many friends.

What memories will you take away?
Clare: It has always been a family at Delaney’s Wanchai & that is one of the biggest things I will miss….although I am happy to leave the Wanchai area as that has gone downhill in my opinion over the past few years!
Jeanette: Delaney’s as a company are a very close knit bunch, from the Directors at the top down to all the front-of-house and back-of-house staff. We have been through some wonderful times together. We have laughed and cried, we have had our ups and downs, but we have always been together. I will take those memories away with me and hold them for ever close.
David: Working here for 18 years, Delaney’s is just like my 2nd home, a home has so many memories.

What next?
Clare: I am looking forward to a rest for a little while & then I will see what happens next!
Jeanette: I will be having a well earned rest, and taking a look at what I would like to do next. At the moment, no plans are in place so i’m open to interesting offers.
David: The next step, I will look for a new job. If they open a new Delaneys, I am happy to come back stick everything back together.

Delaney’s Wanchai shuts it’s doors for the final time on 13 August, should be a bit of a craic!