How Hong Kong’s restaurant scene has transformed in 25 years: food and drinks editor Susan Jung reflects on her time at the Post as she bids farewell

Taking up her role on July 1, 1997, Susan Jung has watched Hong Kong go from a culinary desert to offering an incredible range of Asian and Western food

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Susan Jung, as food and drinks editor of the South China Morning Post, has been a witness to the growth of the Hong Kong culinary scene. Photo: Amanda Kho

Published: 4:15pm, 13 Mar 2022

“Would you like to be the new food editor?” These unexpected words came from the mouths of Charles Anderson and Hedley Thomas, who were, at the time, the features editor and deputy features editor of the South China Morning Post. (Anderson died in 2008, and Thomas is now an award-winning investigative journalist with The Australian.)

The year was 1997, and when Anderson and Thomas took me out for lunch that day, I had been working at the Post for six months as an office assistant: the person who answers calls (we had landlines at the time), distributes faxes and runs errands for others in the office.

It was a huge contrast to what I had been doing for the previous four years, where I had been the one in charge: a pastry chef.

During that time, I helped open two restaurants and a production bakery for the likes of Group 97 and Elite Concepts, which brought me to Hong Kong from New York, where I had been working as a pastry chef at The Peninsula.

Jung in 1994 when she was pastry chef at American Pie in Hong Kong, showing how to make chocolate truffles as part of classes scheduled by the Lan Kwai Fong Association in conjunction with the Hong Kong Food Festival. Photo: SCMP

But I wanted to get back into newspaper writing, something I had done in high school in California, and then at the University of California, Berkeley. My boyfriend at the time had met Thomas at a party, and he had agreed to meet me to give advice on getting back into journalism.