Hong Kong fast-food chain Café de Coral has submitted an application for baked pork chop rice – its signature dish – to be included on the city’s intangible cultural heritage list.
In May, the restaurant group, which has more than 160 outlets in the city, rolled out limited-edition discount coupons to get the dish for HK$20 (US$2.60) – less than half what it usually costs – to mark its application.
Baked pork chop rice is typically made by baking a mixture of cheese, tomato sauce, pork chop and vegetables atop a bed of fried rice.
It is a quintessential dish of Hong Kong’s “soy sauce Western” – a hybrid cuisine fusing Cantonese and European ingredients that emerged in the city in the mid-20th century, during British colonial rule.