The TikTok Chinatown
How TikTok is shaping the future of Chinatown, one corndog at a time
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The TikTok Chinatown
If I had to pinpoint the moment central London came roaring back, it would be the second Bank Holiday weekend in May, the first after restaurants had reopened two weeks previously. It was a year and four months since whispers of the virus had started to rumble around the UK, stripping Chinatown of most of its custom, giving us the first taste of what a deserted central London might look like. Part of it was racism, as was mentioned at the time, but there was something else too. People don’t take news in other parts of the word seriously unless they have some sort of emotional connection to it – many British Chinese, as well as Chinese students and tourists, had heard first-hand about what was happening in Wuhan and preferred not to risk eating out in big groups, as would usually happen around Lunar New Year. The effect of this was that Chinatown, almost instantly, lost every single one of its major customer demographics.
Soon after lockdown, when it became clear that international travel was off the cards indefinitely, I wondered if the major player in the Soho Chinatown (its majority landlord Shaftesbury) had bet on the wrong horse. Over the last three to four years, it has become clear that Chinatown is moving, or is being moved, from a predominantly Cantonese neighbourhood of restaurants and cheap lunch spots to a pan-Asian Disneyland of casual snacking options that you can find in any modern Chinese city – dessert parlours, bubble tea cafés, fried chicken joints – mainly geared towards a peripatetic Chinese tourist demographic and a temporary Chinese student market. I suspected that maybe the needle might have to turn back slightly, that those who operate Chinatown might start to see the worth of the restaurants that reflect its heritage and history, beyond their value as good selling points.
I soon realised, stuck in a 30-person strong queue snaking its way up Charing Cross Road, that I was completely wrong. Or I was right, but in the wrong way. For Chinatown to be resilient it has to capture multiple demographics, not just a tourist crowd but also those who are in London permanently. One of these crowds comprise old men like me, having beef brisket noodles at Old Town and taking a picture of the saucers at Wong Kei every so often and feeling virtuous for it. This demographic is far less important than we think it is. The most powerful demographic is much younger, the same demographic in the queue made up of a rainbow alliance of 15-year-olds of every class and colour, Taiwanese fried chicken in one hand, phone in the other, and waiting for a Korean corn dog. And the reason they’re all here is because of one app: TikTok.
Every generation has its native medium, one that allows it to achieve a type of fluency possible only to those who are steeped in it. It’s likely that your’s are Instagram or Twitter, apps which are already considered cheugy by our new taste overlords. I’m not saying anyone over the age of 25 with a TikTok account needs to be put on a register, but there’s something a bit “how do you do, fellow kids?” about anyone with the ability to grow facial hair being on there – it is Generation Z’s medium and I’m happy to leave it to them. Nevertheless, I have a lurker’s account because it’s the only way to keep up with the subaltern trends bubbling beneath the surface, the ones which you might be unaware of when you read Eater London, Hot Dinners or your favourite Instagram influencers, but ones which are significant enough to change the fabric of our cities. It’s the same reason George Reynolds has retired his seminal Insta Stories column for Eater London, to be replaced by one on TikTok at an unspecified future date: Instagram is only documenting trends, TikTok is actively creating them.
Chinatown is now filled with restaurants whose names you might not know but which are ‘TikTok-famous’. On that sweltering afternoon in May, it felt like half of London’s teenage population was there doing some kind of crawl between them: Taiwanese fried chicken at Good Friend, pandan cake at Chinatown Bakery, fluffy Japanese souffle at Hefaure, brown sugar bubble tea at Yi Fang and Xing Fu Tang, taiyaki at Taiyakiya, ube bilog at Mamasons, and, the new hypebeast, Korean corn dogs at Bunsik, with chunky, potato-cube encrusted exteriors, like an edible, jewelled sceptre filled with nothing but cheese pull. In the Bunsik queue we asked everyone why they were there: without exception each one said TikTok and that it was their first time visiting. Many were TikTok-ing other items while in the queue, giving them ratings out of 5 or 10, or talking about where they were going next.
The quality of some of this food is almost incidental. The corndogs happened to be depressing: undercooked, doughy batter, cheese that had the texture and taste of an elastic band, all fizzing with sugar. But they couldn’t have been more perfect for TikTok. The aesthetics of TikTok are similar to Instagram but crucially different in a few ways. While Instagram privileges precision and clean lines, table shots and flat lays, TikTok’s video-based platform focuses on movement, which allows for a better appreciation of texture. On video, cheese pulls – already a hit on Instagram – reach some kind of apotheosis, undermining the attempt of Instagram to make them pretty. Here they have an eroticism reminiscent of the saliva between two lovers’ mouths, a messiness that reminds you that the process of eating is a physical, sticky thing. TikTok loves buns that can be splayed apart to display innards, fluffy things that leave the echo of fingers on their surface, saucy things, things that flow, things that melt, things that can be pulled. It loves things that are doing things and things which can have things being done to them. It’s not exactly #uglydelicious, that David Chang hashtag to describe the food which does not translate to a visual medium, but neither does it fall within the traditional parameters of what is considered tasteful or beautiful.
Whether Chinatown is naturally full of these things, or if Chinatown is purposely being filled with these things, is something I can’t quite work out. Much of TikTok hype is unpredictable – Good Friend has been around for years but has only blown up in the last few months, generating previously unthinkable queues. Mamasons spent years building up an Instagram presence only for TikTok to amplify it almost immediately, bringing in a new, younger audience in a fraction of the time. Bunsik, who sold out repeatedly during its first few weeks and had to plead on TikTok for patience, seemed to be genuinely taken back by its virality. Still, the density of snacks in Chinatown also plays into TikTok’s other feature – the ability to feature multiple dishes and restaurants in one video. Omar Shah, the co-founder of Mamasons, told me:
Chinatown has the most interesting range of food, drinks and desserts in a half-mile radius in London. If I wanted to capture a ton of food content in a day, Chinatown would be my go-to destination.
In a post-pandemic world where most young people have been starved of eating out (and, more crucially, content), Shah posits that the Chinatown TikTok boom has been propelled in part by it being the place where the most content can be found in the shortest amount of time. As of writing, the #bunsiklondon hashtag has 750,000 views and #mamasons has around half a million; if you scroll through the #chinatownlondon hashtag you will find hundreds of videos of every restaurant I’ve mentioned and almost none of any others. I found one video of Wong Kei.
TikTok fuels the perpetual motion machine of change: the more snack, drinks and dessert places that open within Chinatown, the more TikTok will document them, the more popular they will become, and the more will open. The kids might be saving Chinatown, but it’s a monkey’s paw: these places will inevitably supplant much of what we consider Chinatown to be.
Perhaps the most interesting question about Chinatown is not whether it’s changing, or how it’s changing, but whether it is actually a Chinatown anymore. And maybe also, whether the concept of a Chinatown even has any relevance in 2021.
The very idea of Chinatown was set into motion almost 400 years ago, when tea was brought over to the West for the first time, sparking a wave of obsessive Sinophilia in Europe and particularly in Britain. At this point in time, the Qing dynasty was a much more impressive entity than any European power and had the monopoly on many things the British wanted and would eventually move whole industries to copy – particularly the Staffordshire potteries, which flourished after the secret to making porcelain was discovered. The East India Company, a corporation strongly aligned with (but distinct to) the British State, had started peddling opium in China through their agents in exchange for silver, aiming to rebalance a trade deficit mainly centred around tea, the last Chinese monopoly. This led to the British State stepping in and eventually the first Opium War, after which Hong Kong was ceded to the British.
It is this moment that the historian Ian Morris, in his book Why The West Rules ─ For Now cites as the moment the balance of global power swung decisively away from China and ‘the East’ and towards ‘the West’, a paradigm that continued for 150 years and during which labour moved westwards. The first Chinatowns were mirror images of Hong Kong and the treaty ports, particularly Canton (now Guangzhou); shards of other cities embedded into the urban landscape of Europe and the Americas. They represented the fundamental inequality between the West and China – most Chinatowns were hard-won spaces, eked out of cheap real estate and often cast as hotbeds of vice and seediness. During this wave of Sinophobia, interest in Chinese culture waned, but the one thing that flourished was an interest in their food. The willingness of the first Chinese restaurateurs to create an ersatz version of Cantonese cuisine both ensured their economic survival and became the gateway to the strong interest in regional Chinese food we see today.
This phase of Chinatown is already finished. The Chinatowns of today are fuelled less by economic migration and more by China itself. The ‘Chinatowns’ of Bloomsbury and Spitalfields have been formed by an alliance of Chinese-owned property development and mainland Chinese students. The ‘Chinatown’ of the Docklands is no longer the shadowy one of Fu Manchu but of vast expenses of ready-to-develop real estate and dim sum restaurants in the shadow of the huge exam room that is the ExCel Centre, frequented by affluent, middle-class families and bankers living on the Isle of Dogs. Recent openings in the Soho Chinatown – Hai Di Lao and Five Friends for instance – have seen China importing its own chains, loss leaders that have the prestige of a central London address. At the centre of it all is TikTok, a Chinese app, strongly aligned with (but distinct from) the Chinese State.
TikTok is not exactly the new East India Company (that hot take has already been used by the Wall Street Journal for Huawei) but it is an important facilitator that connects the burgeoning soft power of East Asia with a young, savvy audience. At Bunsik you can take a TikTok of yourself with a cardboard cutout of one of the members of Korean giga-boyband BTS; TikToks of Taiwanese fried chicken, Japanese pancakes and Korean corndogs are being soundtracked by K Pop, anime themes, trap music and endless versions of Justin Bieber’s Peaches (a banger) with no regard for their suitability. Culture is being mixed up and swapped without any trade agreements. The obsession with boba tea is nothing less than the year 1660 reborn, when the British desire for tea and porcelain had the virality of a new Blackpink track. TikTok is locking in this new, resilient version of Chinatown, one where the interests of Chinese students, tourists, halal food bloggers and 15-year-old girls from the Home Counties on a day out in London are all remarkably aligned.
Only one question mark remains: what about Hong Kong? Last July, TikTok exited the Hong Kong market following a new security law imposed by Beijing. Currently there are plans to have an IPO of Douyin – TikTok’s domestic, more censored sister entity – in Hong Kong itself, a subtle change but symbolic of something larger. The UK has received 34,000 requests from Hong Kongers on British National Overseas passports in the last two months, which may end up being the largest planned immigration into the UK since Windrush and certainly the most significant wave of East Asian immigration into the UK in the last 100 years. Perhaps our old ideas about Chinatown will be resurrected, this time by political rather than economic migrants. Perhaps Chinatown will bifurcate: one a global Chinatown of chains, brands and snacks, shaped by China itself; the other, a reborn Chinatown of Cantonese food in opposition to the Mainland, this time the real thing, unwatered down, and made for an audience that is now ready for it. Or perhaps they will co-exist in the same space, and the Hong Kong caffs on Wardour St will find a new lease of life, suddenly supported by landlords who realise the spending power of a new demographic. Perhaps they’ll add another storey to Wong Kei.
Whatever happens, only one thing is certain: it’s all gonna look great on TikTok.
TikTok Famous Restaurants in Chinatown
Mamasons 32 Newport Court
Bunsik 62 Charing Cross Road
Hefaure 108 Shaftesbury Avenue
Bun House 26-27 Lisle Street
Xin Fu Tang 29 Frith Street
Yi Fang 104 Shafesbury Avenue
Wing Stop 138 Shaftesbury Avenue
Taiyakiya 20 Newport Court
Bubblewrap Waffle 24 Wardour Street
Kova Patisserie 20A Newport Court
Happy Lemon 24A Newport Court
Good Friend Chicken 14 Little Newport Street