Whenever the Wife goes into one of her occasional HK-is-a-nicer-place-to-live-in-than-Singapore spiels, I remind her of the shelf after shelf of different brands of bread available at the NTUC Fairprice and Cold Storage supermarkets back home.
They might not be the best bread in the world, but they are soft and good enough to eat on their own.
And they are widely available to the masses. Even the proletariat can afford that bread.
Not so in HK. Walk into any Wellcome or Park N Shop supermarket and you see the bread shelves dominated by this local brand, Garden.
This stuff cannot possibly be more different from Singapore's Gardenia. The loaves seem to go dry and hard the moment they leave the factory. Put some jam or butter on it, and you can actually see the spread repel in disgust and consolidate into clumps.
I buy Garden only when we've run out of the softer (but more expensive) bread from CitySuper, the high-end supermarket with four stores on HK Island and Kowloon.
Isn't this supposed to be Asia's World City ? Why is soft, decent bread considered a luxury item ?
