‘Pantyhose Tea’ Has Leg Up in Hong Kong

The battered menu in the neighborhood eatery includes most classic cafe fare: coffee, sodas, buttered buns. But then there’s something truly strange for visitors: “pantyhose milk tea.”

The intriguingly named brew is prepared by repeatedly straining the drink through long, brown filters that look like pantyhose. Making the tea, a traditional and elaborate process, is revered almost as a work of art in this former British colony.

Pantyhose tea is regarded as the smoothest, silkiest version of Hong Kong’s favorite drink -- creamy milk tea, which is made with evaporated milk and a heavy dose of tea leaves. It’s nothing like weak, watered-down English tea.

Creamy tea is of obscure ancestry. Many say it’s an Anglo-Chinese child born of the colonialists’ national drink and the southern Chinese penchant for strong black tea.

The result, sipped hot or iced at every hour of the day, is so popular that even McDonald’s offers a version of it.

But owners of the old-fashioned Chinese cafe Lan Fong Yuen, the shrine for creamy tea fanatics, claim that no one does the traditional pantyhose way like they do.

The tiny eatery has sold pantyhose tea to regulars and curious tourists for more than 50 years, ever since owner Lam Muk-ho stole the method from a chef hailing from China’s tea-growing island of Hainan.

From there, Lam, now 80, fine-tuned the recipe with his sons until they found the perfect combination -- a “secret” blend of five different teas and evaporated milk.

But the painstaking straining process is the key to velvety tea, said Lam’s son, Chun-chung.

Five or six large kettles, each containing a big, finely knit filter stained burnt amber by tea leaves, brew away in a hut set up outside the shop.

At the first sign of boiling over, a kettle is lifted from the fire, the filter taken out and the steaming, ruby liquid is poured through the filter into a jug. The strained tea is then immediately poured back into the same filtered kettle and brewed again.

The beverage is ready after this process has been repeated seven to eight times, Lam Chun-chung said.

“This way, the color is evenly distributed and the tea feels smooth to your throat, like aged wine,” he said. Inferior creamy teas are bitter and astringent, and sometimes leave an unpleasant sour taste, he said.

Janet Tsang, 32, an office worker and occasional customer, testified to the difference.

“The tea here is much stronger and smoother. A lot of other places use tea bags now, and I really don’t like that,” she said.

Unlike its elegant British cousin, pantyhose tea is best enjoyed not with softly tinkling china and cucumber sandwiches but in clamoring, crowded local cafes famous for their cheap prices, speedy service and hybrid fast foods.

These cafes also are well known for creating other specialty drink concoctions.

A creamy coffee-tea combo, called “yin-yang,” is a popular refreshment. “Lemon coffee” -- literally a black coffee laced with several slices of lemon -- is hailed by some as the drink that can wake up the sleepiest head, but is considered bloodcurdlingly awful by most.

Squeezing into a table between five Taiwanese tourists and two students, I order a hot pantyhose tea and a lunch of noodles. Within 30 seconds, a plastic tumbler filled to the brim comes banging down, together with a plate of instant noodles messily tossed with fried chicken -- fast food of the highest order.

I gobble up the noodles, and empty a spoon or so of white sugar from the communal tin container into the tea. The liquid, hot but not unbearably so, glides thickly down the throat, leaving a robust, lingering flavor. Its texture is satisfyingly creamy, but to those used to English tea the thickness of the evaporated milk could be cloying.

Tiffany Wong, an avid creamy tea drinker from Australia who said she was in her 20s, gushed about her first experience of pantyhose tea.

“You can’t get this anywhere outside Hong Kong,” said Wong, who’s unemployed. “Every shop here brews from its own special recipe, and every time it tastes a bit different. That’s why it’s so special.”