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Cantonese food, and why breakfast takes three hours
早茶 is the institution that organises Cantonese social life, and calling it brunch or dim sum misses what it is for. It runs from about six in the morning until midday, it is cheap, and the point is to sit for two or three hours with family, friends or business contacts over endless tea and small dishes. Older people go daily, often with a newspaper. Families go at weekends, three generations at a round table. Business is done at it. In Guangzhou and Hong Kong a teahouse at eight on a Sunday morning is as loud as a market. The food is worth understanding as a cuisine rather than a list. Cantonese cooking — 粤菜 — is one of the four or eight great regional traditions depending on who is counting, and its governing value is 鲜: the freshness and intrinsic flavour of the ingredient, which seasoning should reveal rather than cover. Hence 清蒸 for fish, 白切 for chicken, restrained use of chilli, and the reputation for eating anything — which is a caricature of something real, a willingness to use the whole animal and a wide range of species. The saying 食在广州, eating is in Guangzhou, is claimed by Cantonese people and conceded by most others. Three practical things. Tea is chosen first and matters: 普洱 dark and digestive, 菊花 floral and cooling, 铁观音 oolong, 寿眉 white. The 茶位费 is not a scam, it is how the tea is charged for. And the finger-tapping is real etiquette — two fingers lightly on the table when somebody fills your cup, which the standard story attributes to a Qing emperor travelling incognito, and which everybody does without thinking. On the language, this lesson is doing something quietly. Every Cantonese word in it — 饮茶, 埋单, 一盅两件 — is said in Guangzhou in a Mandarin conversation, because they are the names of the things. That is the mildest form of what the next lesson is about: not two separate languages used separately, but one city in which both are in play at once, and a visitor who knows the Mandarin word for everything still has to learn a second set.