The first dish served to me at The Harcourt Pub in Altrincham, south Manchester, is an expression of protest and geopolitical strife through the cheery medium of fried bread and seafood. On the menu, it doesn’t sound significant. It is that British Saturday night Chinese takeaway staple, prawn toast. But instead of those familiar sesame seed-crusted white-bread triangles, these are golden cubes seemingly made to glow by the addition of a crumbly, salted egg yolk that coats the mouth. This is prawn toast in an indulgent Hong Kong style, which makes sense given the pub’s back-story. It takes its name from Hong Kong’s Harcourt Road which, between September and December 2014, was occupied by the pro-democracy Umbrella Revolution.
Ultimately, the revolution was quashed. The Chinese government instituted a security crackdown and, in January 2021, the British government responded by launching a new visa scheme for Hong Kong residents with British National Overseas status. According to the most recent figures, about 200,000 Hongkongers have used those visas to settle in the UK, about 40,000 of whom are in the north-west of England, the largest concentration anywhere in the country.
A significant number have settled in Altrincham. There are good schools here, apparently. Priscilla and Brian Hung, the couple behind this pub, are among them. With those new arrivals has come a food offering; one subtly and sweetly different to the standard Cantonese repertoire, which has long formed the bedrock of the UK’s Chinese restaurant sector. Hence salted egg-yolk prawn toast. I could say democracy’s loss is Britain’s gain, but that would be gauche of me.
A few miles north in Salford, tucked into the bottom of a council block, there’s a café called Sakura, where homesick Chinese students lean in over steaming bowls of noodles and plates of French toast slicked with tooth-achingly sweet condensed milk, Hong Kong style. In Reading, there’s Good Old Days, a takeaway with a few tables, where a former chef from the Hong Kong Jockey Club forces you to look anew at humble sweet and sour dishes. And then there’s the Harcourt, which feels like a slab of Chinese culture cemented into a cornerstone of British tradition.
Salted egg-yolk prawn toast goes well with the citrus tones of a Cloudwater Hazy IPA, as do the typhoon shelter-style deep-fried chicken wings, under drifts of deep-fried crushed garlic and chilli, breezy with five spice. It’s named after the dishes that fishermen would cook onboard while sheltering from vicious weather in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay. Generally, typhoon style is associated with seafood but, as Priscilla later tells me, chicken wings feel British pub appropriate. Here, they just taste of Hong Kong.
Priscilla, who is small and compact with a plume of pink dyed hair bursting from under her baseball cap, is behind the bar taking food orders and working the taps. Brian trained as a brewer in Hong Kong. Alongside his day job with beer giant Anheuser-Busch, he helps the two chefs from back home, and oversees the changing blackboard drinks menu: the lagers, hazy pale ales and west coast IPAs. There are stacks of board games and against the bare brick wall in mauve neon is the legend “Stay as sweet as you are”. They sell Black Country pork scratchings, which are the good pork scratchings, and Frazzles. The mood is profoundly pub, even if the space is a little more high-street wine bar.
Before visiting, I show the menu to Chinese food expert and FT contributor Fuchsia Dunlop. She is taken by the weekend offering of both seafood and curry chicken rice gratins, rich with the dairy products brought to Hong Kong by westerners, but found less commonly elsewhere in China. There’s also char siu pork and fried egg with rice. “That dish is known as sorrowful rice and was made famous by the cult 1990s Chinese film The God of Cookery,” Dunlop says. They do like a film reference; on the wall behind the bar in traditional Chinese script is a neon sign which reads In the Mood for Love, another classic Chinese movie, this one set in 1960s British Hong Kong.
I ask Priscilla if sorrowful rice might be available, even though it’s a weekday. She shakes her head, sadly. Not today. Instead, we have the breaded salt-and-pepper pork chop, with more crispy garlic and a fried egg with a runny yolk that lubricates what might otherwise be a drying bowlful.
There is “Hawthorn fruit” sweet and sour chicken in a lip-smacker of a thickened gravy, which is both of those things but also more savoury, courtesy of the hawthorn berries with their tang like overripe apples. It’s some distance from the bright orange, candy-store version of sweet and sour that Britain understood as Chinese food in the 1970s.
There’s also braised beef with extra wobbly tendon for those with a taste for the gelatinous. Although it sits on a mound of steaming white rice, there’s something curiously site-specific about the dish. It recalls those traditional British braises, such as scouse and Monmouth stew, which eke out the cheapest cuts of meat in the name of dinner. It’s Chinese cookery by way of Liverpool or Manchester.
That’s the key to this food. It’s not refined. It’s not delicate. It’s solid and comforting; cooking that makes a damp and difficult day so much easier. It’s precision engineered to go with a pint, or after you’ve accidentally downed six of them and forgotten to eat.
We finish with the obligatory Hong Kong dessert of cubed French toast, here sandwiching peanut butter and drenched in both butter and condensed milk because restraint is for others. Perhaps it makes you think of the sandwich beloved of Elvis. Perhaps, fleetingly, it occurs to you it was the last thing he ate before he died. If so, what a way to go.
The Harcourt Pub
80 Stamford New Road, Altrincham, Manchester WA14 1BS; @harcourt_pub; 07770 054993
Small plates and street food £5.20-£11
Large plates £11.80-£15.50
Dessert £6.20
Email Jay at jay.rayner@ft.com
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