In a Pickle in Hong Kong

“No pickles,” the waiter is saying. “We have pastrami. We don’t have pickles.”

I smile. I shake my head. Please, I say, no jokes. Pastrami without pickles is like a wedding without the bride.

“Cornball philosophy we got,” the waiter says. “What we don’t got are pickles.”

Which just goes to prove that deli waiters are the same the world over, even in Hong Kong. I am in Kowloon, which is the mainland part of Hong Kong across the harbor from Hong Kong island. Surrounding Kowloon is a chunk of land called the New Territories, and surrounding that is a rather large piece of geography called China.

The British took Hong Kong from China in 1841 because the British had bigger guns. In 1997, the Chinese will take Hong Kong back because now China has bigger guns.

This is called diplomacy.

Ninety-eight percent of the people who live in Hong Kong are Chinese, which gives them a good understanding of China, but a rather limited understanding of pastrami.

It is my belief, however, that pastrami will someday become a global constant like gold. There may even be precious food trading pits just like there are currently precious metal trading pits. Feverish men will jump up and down yelling, “I’ve got lean at 16 and a quarter! I’ve got fatty at 10 and an eighth!”

In any case, I have tried to find pastrami in every country I have reported from. This was easy in South Africa, a bit tricky in Beirut and a real challenge in Saudi Arabia. Hong Kong, however, I was not worried about. Hong Kong has everything.

I do not ignore local foods, of course. In Hong Kong, I ate not only the familiar Cantonese and Sichuan foods, but also Hakka and Shanghainese and Hunan and Chiu Chow foods.

And for days I had been eating my shark fins (better than them eating me) and eels and chili con carne. Yes, like pizza and spaghetti, the Chinese also invented chili. Mao Zedong (who used to be Mao Tse-tung until he woke up one day with a completely different name) was Hunanese and loved chiles and once said the more chiles you ate, the more revolutionary you were.

Funny, I always thought they just gave you gas.

Anyway, I woke up one morning with a craving for a good pastrami sandwich. And the concierge at the Regent Hotel in Kowloon assured me there was a restaurant not far away called the Beverly Hills Deli that served real pastrami.

“Chinese invented pastrami,” he said proudly. “And rye.”

And pickles? I asked.

“Them too,” he said.

Except for the smell of burning incense from a furniture store a few doors down, the Beverly Hills Deli could be like any deli in, say, Beverly Hills. Which was the problem.

Apparently, the Chinese think Beverly Hills is the deli capital of America, which is very far from the truth. As everyone knows, the Mecca, the Valhalla, the Mt. Everest of pastrami in America is the Carnegie Deli in New York City.

How good is it? Henny Youngman eats there. ‘Nuff said.

But as often happens, things gets slightly mistranslated as they travel across the globe. And so in Hong Kong they somehow think pastrami belongs in a Hollywood motif.

So the Beverly Hills Deli in Kowloon is decorated with big pictures of Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy and other dead movie stars. There are also bentwood chairs and red-checked tablecloths. And a sign saying: “Kosher meals on request.”

I was going to ask if the Chinese also invented kosher, but instead I just ordered a pastrami on rye with extra pickles.

“No pickles,” the waiter said.

My heart sank. Why no pickles? I asked.

The waiter shrugged. Nobody in the world can shrug like a Hong Kong waiter. It is like the weight of world is pressing down on his forehead.

“Not come in today,” he said.

This is the universal excuse in Hong Kong. Since the place is so tiny, almost everything is imported from elsewhere. Food comes from China and Japan and the Philippines and Hawaii and California.

So I had the pastrami without pickles. And I am trying to be fair. It was not bad. It was not as good as the pastrami in New York, of course, or even Baltimore or Los Angeles. But it was better than the pastrami in Las Vegas, Montreal and Washington, D.C.

But I was not in the best of moods when I left the Beverly Hills Deli. Technically, I was in Hong Kong to find out what is going to happen here when the Chinese government takes over in 1997. Most of the residents are very, very worried.

But I say let’s be open-minded.

I say let’s wait and see if they bring the pickles with them.