bc magazine

Ruby Tuesday Tuen Mun Review

Ruby Tuesday are on a tear with the opening of a third new restaurant in less than a year. The success of the new style restaurant in K11 Art Mall saw the opening of a first Ruby Tuesday in what could be considered a very local market: Po Lam – Tseung Kwan O. The new outlet in Tuen Mun builds on those successes while incorporating new Covid protections and innovations to ensure the safety of customers and staff.

The Tuen Mun branch, located on the ground floor of Trend Plaza, is smaller than the other new outlets but incorporates the outdoor seating which has proven very popular among customers. While it may be a little hot (or wet), there are no fans, to sit outside in summer. The outdoor tables will surely be in high demand as the weather cools.

The feel of the new branch is a little darker than the bright openness of K11, the more notable difference though is Ruby Tuesday’s first open kitchen in Hong Kong. It’s not fully open, but offers diners the chance to see the kitchen crew in action and also a chance to see that Covid protocols are being observed in the kitchen and that the staff member tasked with keeping the broad swathes of stainless steel shining clean is on task.

As for the food, a new Express set lunch (available only at TKO, Po Lam and Tuen Mun) offers meals at prices similar to local chain outlets. And the staff were working hard to ensure that diners could enjoy their meal during a lunch hour.

It was steaming hot the day bc visited Ruby’s in Tuen Mun so we sampled Ruby’s range of (delicious) smoothies and iced drinks – the highlight being Ruby’s Passion a mango smoothie topped with passion fruit puree, the tartness of passion fruit reigning in the sweetness of the mango. The coffee frappuccino with ice cream was basically flavourless liquid and a disappointment compared to the rather nice one we enjoyed previously at K11.

https://bcmagazine.smugmug.com/Bcene-photos/2021/20210625-11pro-Ruby-Tuesday-Tuen-Mun-/i-7ZdJJw2

On a personal note, I don’t really see the point of trying to create ‘fake’ meat and have always found the results disappointing. Discussing this recently, a friend offered a suggestion, don’t think of Impossible as fake meat, think of it as something like tofu which can be prepared and enjoyed in many different ways. Seen and eaten in that way, it’s an enjoyable and textured alternative to meat. Ruby’s Impossible quesadilla was tasty and filling, while the newly added Butcher’s Steak offered a meaty and flavourful reminder that there really is nothing like meat.

bc hadn’t noticed it on the menus in previous visits, so we can’t say if it’s new, but several menu items had a Keto symbol to help those on that food plan.

One of the many small changes in recent years that have re-energised the brand locally and made it an enjoyable place for lunch and dinner where the food tastes as good as it looks.

https://bcmagazine.smugmug.com/Bcene-photos/2021/20210625-11pro-Ruby-Tuesday-Tuen-Mun-/i-7qGnSjF

https://bcmagazine.smugmug.com/Bcene-photos/2021/20210625-11pro-Ruby-Tuesday-Tuen-Mun-/i-JSJJ2cn

Ruby Tuesday Tuen Mun

Location: Shop 39-40, Level 1, North Wing, Trend Plaza, Tuen Mun
Tel: 3598 3098

InTaste a New Food Stand in Tuen Mun

Newly opened in Orchid Court, Tuen Mun is 燃味棧 InTaste a small takeaway food stand serving burritos, hotdogs and other tasty snacks.

This is the third iteration of InTaste for owner Kelvin Chui and features an expanded menu with the addition of hot dogs and assorted snacks to the menu. Portion sizes are good and served in as environmentally friendly packaging as possible.

Delivery is coming soon.

燃味棧 InTaste
Shop 5, Orchid Court, 14 Yan Oi Tong Circuit, Tuen Mun
Tel: 9303 6665
Open: 11:30am – 9:30pm

Ruby Tuesday Opens in Tuen Mun

Ruby Tuesday have a new outlet in Trend Plaza, Tuen Mun. It’s the chain’s seventh restaurant and the third new location opened in the last year.

Commenting about the new outlet Ruby Tuesday Managing Director Leslie Bailey said “We have taken every lesson that the COVID-19 Pandemic has taught us and incorporated it into our new restaurant design. In addition to the standard water and air-filters, we’ve also taken the extra precaution of adding a state-of-the-art Philips UV Disinfection System to filter and clean the air circulating in the restaurant.”

Ruby Tuesday Tuen Mun

Location: Shop 39-40, Level 1, North Wing, Trend Plaza, Tuen Mun
Tel: 3598 3098

We Will Be Back – When?

Definitions:
Peaceful – not involving violence or force
Radical – favouring drastic political, economic, or social reforms
Fanatical – filled with excessive and single-minded zeal.

The big question is, have Hong Kong’s protests become more radical? The simple answer, by looking at a photograph of September 28th is categorically NO.

We can see there is a significant proportion of people who are engaging in what some would describe as radical actions, or, putting pressure on the police to remove the political line they are holding and let the masses assemble outside their government to protest.

Behind them we can see a throng of so called peaceful protesters, or those, that wouldn’t dream of confronting the police, but wish to register their political discontent in a way that is absent of violence or force.

Here, the police line is described as fanatical, or overly excessive and single minded. This is an inarguable description of them. It was overly excessive of them to fire 87 rounds of tear gas and walk upon the streets of Hong Kong with automatic weapons. Their single mindedness to pursue a plan of intimidation without giving much thought to other possible outcomes, shows without doubt their fanaticism.

To this day, nothing much has really changed in the make-up of the groups. some radical protesters have behaved badly, mainly due to lack of leadership. Some police have behaved badly, mainly due to lack of leadership.

The only significant thing that has changed is that the peaceful protesters packed up and went home after the 79day Occupy and have not come back out again on a regular basis.

Why is this?
Maybe it’s for fear of being accused of being a radical or being scared of being abused by the fanaticals. Who can say?

But when the Occupy ended, everyone revelled in the new motto, “We’ll be back.”
Well, when is that?

If you truly want to create change you need to do it regularly, every week. Not every third Tuesday in a month when the moon is blue.

There isn’t going to be another Occupy, the fanaticals are now too violent to let you settle in anyone place ever again. But this doesn’t mean that every weekend you can’t peacefully show your discontent in huge numbers. Being too scared to protest for fear of being accused of being radical didn’t bother anyone on 28th September, so why should it now?

If the police are to be believed, they fired the first canisters of tear gas because of the radical actions on the frontline, the Umbrella Movement, is born from radical action and made powerful by peaceful protests.

The radicals are still out there!
The fanatics are still out there!
Where are peaceful protesters?

So, the Inevitable Finally Happened on Sunday

So, the inevitable finally happened on Sunday:

The protests quickly and effectively switched locations and completely wronged stepped the police and any blue ribbon surprises that were set for them in Sheung Shui.

Protesting in Hong Kong will never be the same again.

Tens of thousands of marchers carrying out meaningless walkathons along Hong Kong Island have yielded no results since the Article 23 March. The government is immune to the people’s voice, it only cares what directives it receives from Beijing. But in the space of two months about 500 people have managed to shake up HK politics right up to the very top. Not only have they yanked our aloof ruler’s balls, they are well on their way to achieving real results. For sure the protests can get a little ugly around the edges, but protests are supposed to shake society out of its stupor. Protests are not about showing your face and hoping some other faceless person might then be motivated to sort out the problem some other day. If leaders don’t pay attention to your protests, then they’re not to blame, it means your way of protesting is not effective and needs to be reassessed.

I have watched these protests for hours and have pointed out many times, when the police aren’t there in force, the protests carry on relatively peacefully. Of course, there are minor skirmishes on the peripheries, but this is symptom of the fractured nature of society, it’s certainly not indicative of the violent nature of the groups.

With this in mind, the protesters have flaunted with trying to lose the police, because without doubt, large amounts of police quickly lead to batons out and indiscriminate pepper spraying.

In the first Tuen Mun protest the crowd experimented with being highly mobile and ‘like water.’ On this occasion, protesters visited many smuggler shops where the police presence was minimal and nothing happened. It was only when the police finally caught up with the protesters that they caused a shit-show.

Again, in both Shatin and Yuen Long, the police had ample time to prepare and set their boundaries, which the protesters would inevitably cross, causing more needless violence.
By the time of the Sheung Shui protest, it was already on the cards that a switch could happen from the very get-go. The problem was,
a) There was no leader of the protest. Both Civic Passion and HK Indigenous were not attending the protests in any official capacity
b) It had never been tried before, so would people change?

There was no official command to switch to Tuen Mun, it was all via word of mouth and through small social media networks. As we jumped into a taxi to head to Tuen Mun, we had no clue whether we would find any protesters at all. When we arrived at the Tuen Mun MTR exit there were about 25 protesters milling about. This slowly grew to about 50. After being in Tuen Mun for about 30minutes a lone police car drove up to the station, obviously to check out if the rumours were true. They didn’t get out. By the time we left the MTR the protest was about 150 strong and growing quickly. As we made our way into the first of three shopping centres, the protest was well over 200 people and trailed by about seven highly stressed police. Other than a few shouting matches and the odd box knocked over the protests paraded all the way through Tuen Mun town unfettered by the police.

Tuen Mun belonged to the protesters, there were no police in any number to control them. What did they choose to do with this freedom? They roamed around and shouted a bit, getting lots of attention but there was no out right violence.

Of, course, then the police arrived. We can only guess that they had been transported from Sheung Shui. This seems a reasonable guess, because when they piled out of the vans they all ran pell-mell into Trend Plaza, the scene of the confrontation during the first Tuen Mun protests. The problem was, there were no protesters in Trend Plaza, they were all in VCity. The police then realising that there was no one to contain filed out of the mall and congregated on the street. They had no clue where the protesters were. I can guess this, because neither did we. There were now about 100 police officers outside Trend Plaza. They looked pissed off and I tweeted that they would want to take out their frustration on the protesters if given the chance. They’d been effectively humiliated. So much for police intelligence!

We went off to find the protesters and left the police on the street. By the time we found them they were making their away along the footbridge to Trend Plaza from VCity. This would mark the first time the bulk of the protesters would come up against the bulk of the police. By this time, the protesters had already adopted a fairly new tactic, where wherever the police showed force, they moved away and kept moving. This meant that the police were always playing catch-up and were never able to formulate some kind of containment plan which invariably leads to a hyping up of tensions.

This went on for an hour or so, and I truly believe that the protesters were getting bored and were actually considering finishing as they were just 100m from the MTR station when they were abused multiple times by several blue ribbons. This gave the police enough reason to attack the crowd and you can see from the video I posted on my timeline, the police literally had to run after the protesters to make their presence felt and make some random arrests. This gave the media enough footage to make the protests look dangerous and out of control.

At this stage in the day, I think, if those needless arrests hadn’t happened, people may have been willing to call it a night and go home. But suddenly everyone was motivated again not to be intimidated and the call out to relocate to TST suddenly seemed like a good idea. So, the long journey from Tuen Mun to TST began.
Just like in Tuen Mun, when we arrived, we had no clue if people there were tourists or protesters. The police by this point had picked up on the switch to TST. Not because their intelligence is particularly good, but because it was plastered all over Facebook. The police had had time to make a plan of sorts, which failed at almost every turn and their ultimate goal of not letting the protesters leave the Star Ferry area collapsed quickly.

As the people found a gap in the police net and streamed through, there were about 200 protesters free roaming around TST with the 60 or so officers left at Star Ferry quickly having to come up with something better. We walked all around TST before the officers caught us up and true to form, they created a kettle that congested up the one side of Nathan Road. About 30 random people were caught in the kettle including passersby. Once again the police had succeeded in creating tension where none was needed. A key factor that was happening though was the crowd that surrounded the kettle was now made up by about 20% people from Chung King Mansions. I commented to those around me, if the police increase the tension in this crowd they’ll get more than they bargained for. Unlike regular HK protesters, those in the crowd now would stand their ground and fight and would not be pushed around by highly strung, ill-trained coppers. I think the senior police realised this too, as they began to let everyone in the kettle go, they didn’t even ID them. So what was the point of the kettle?

As people got released from the kettle, the protesters fell back to right outside Chung King Mansions’ door. We were now a mix of protesters and international refugees, and all the police who had created the kettle just five minutes earlier just disappeared. Only a couple of black coats remained on the outer periphery of the group. What was the reason for their disappearance? I can’t say for sure, but I bet it’s because they knew if a jumpy officer sparked an incident it would spiral well out of their control very quickly. Certainly, the HKPF know a good thing when they see one and hog-tying young kids is easy sport compared to dealing with the growing crowd of people the who hang outside Chung King Mansions.

So, that was the day.

The take out is, the days of big police plans are out the window, the police are going to have to think up other ways to stifle protests outside of big containment plans utilising lots of angry officers.

For the protesters, they know first hand the benefits of mobility and as the protest numbers grow their Wild Cat nature will increase too. All of Hong Kong is now a protest site and why have one protest when you can have three or four!

Trust

In revolutionary times like these, the biggest danger to your own personal freedom is surrounding yourself with people who may not be safe or have duplicitous, veiled intentions.

Trust is a very precious thing. The currency of the Communist Party of China (CCP) is distrust. They break bonds and relationships in order to create an atmosphere of distrust. In this warped World of their making, the CCP thrives within the fractures of society and human relationships. When no-one trusts each other it is very hard to get anything organised. This is how the CCP destroys any notion of civil society in China and ensures that no one defies it.

To get to the very top of the CCP you need to be a master in exploiting mistrust. The success of the CCP relies on no-one trusting anyone, ever. This also goes for CCP members, who have the least trust in anyone or their organisation. The only real antidote to CCP tactics is to create trust. The CCP doesn’t know how to build real trust, it only knows how to break it.

Even as far back as the Yan’an days, starry-eyed, young wannabe communists would turn up at the border of the new Soviet, and the first thing the CCP establishment would do is get to work on destroying whatever trust the friends had in each other. Just like a Mahout breaking the will of a baby elephant, the CCP uses the threat or actual violence to break the natural tendencies that humans have to trust in one another.

Although the CCP, via United Front activities, has permeated all levels of Hong Kong society they have yet to have any major impact upon our civil society. HongKongers both know how to trust and be trusted. This sounds like a simple life skill, but many people on the Mainland are devoid of trust due to nearly 70years of CCP rule.

The Umbrella Revolution has shown that HongKongers are happy to put an enormous amount of trust in their fellow citizen-protestors. When the police were running rampage swinging batons and showing no discipline despite having so-called training, protestors stood their ground and calmly held their lines, showing maximum discipline and great trust in complete strangers who shared similar ideals and values.

The Umbrella Revolution was a fantastic display of a trusting civil society pulling together to express itself unconventionally. This scares the CCP. However going forward, the simple honest trust that HongKongers share with their fellow citizens will not be enough and will come under persistent attack by shady groups designed to break trust at every turn.

In order to take on the CCP and its lackey local government, HongKongers will need to create trust networks that will be very difficult for the CCP to infiltrate and disrupt using simple, well-used methods.

How to strengthen trust for the fight ahead?
The best way to protect and build trust is to create small, human-to-human trust networks. Or cells of 8-10 people you absolutely trust and know share the same values as you.

Why only 8-10 people?
Here’s a quick exercise.
Quickly list all the people you absolutely trust in your head.
It’s not that many right? Probably less than 10.
This is not because you live in an un-trusting world. It’s because trust begins to fray at the edges once the numbers get too big. Groups that are over ten people start to unravel on real trust.

Military Special Forces now favour small teams of 6 people over large battalions of men commanded by a few key generals. A small group becomes self-regulatory, everyone can manage each other and make sure they remain within the trust-circle and values parameters. If someone breaks trust the person can be removed quite simply and the group regenerates itself quickly without major disruption. In larger social groups, this simple task is harder because factions can form and identifying those who are not trustworthy becomes both time consuming and difficult.

Once you are part of a small trust network, you will see that this protects your own personal freedoms and liberty and it can then begin to interact with other people’s networks much easier. Large crowds of trust networks sharing similar ideas are much safer than large numbers of individuals who you ‘think’ have the same common goals.

When on a protest, you will know and trust the people standing next to you. You will know that the communications you’re receiving are authentic and that you will be surrounded by many others that share your values. You may not know everyone in all the groups, but you know you can trust them because they are built on the similar values as your network. In this environment agent provocateurs are stifled in their activities as they rarely operate as groups. They are quickly shown up to be lone wolfs with no immediate network to back up their direction which is trying to agitate the crowd and cause chaos. Agent provocateurs operate by acting as individuals, coming together to incite a larger crowd. If they can be identified quickly as being at a protest with no close networks then their intentions can quickly be seen as suspicious. Singular individuals with good intentions generally don’t try and rally people to do provocative things out of the blue.

The only weakness in creating tight, trust networks is choosing people to be in your network who are not trustworthy. I will discuss this in another post.

Will creating trust networks help reduced the factionalism that is present in the Umbrella Revolution?
Well, it wont eliminate it, that’s certain, but it will reduce it. You see, like attracts like. Trust networks will be created along the lines of the political spectrum you adhere to. In this way, the various democratic groups can interface with each other, knowing that they may not see eye-to-eye on method, but can identify and work with each other on greater causes. The classic example would be the breaking of the window at Legco. It wasn’t the actual breaking of the window that pissed most people of, it was more to do with, well, who the hell is this guy and that guy? In a revolution that is permeated with trust networks, people can quickly be validated as the real deal, even though you might totally reject the methods they are using.

Conversely the CCP wants to riddle the revolution with no trust. In this climate, groups fight one another and are at the mercy of manipulative agent provocateurs at every turn. Giving in to distrust will assuredly bring about a CCP victory within HK. Or as Ben Franklin once stated, “If we don’t all hang together we shall surely hang separately!” Or in order to guarantee our independence and freedom from the most tyrannical entity that has ever existed, the CCP, we will have to fight for it together and defend each others’ rights when attacked, even if we don’t fully agree with the actions or methods of all those involved. Trust networks go a long way in mitigating against the CCP carving up the Umbrella Revolution into bite sized chunks. It doesn’t matter where you are on the democratic spectrum, anything is better than the CCP spreading the disease of distrust throughout Hong Kong’s society.

Trust is the glue that bonds the revolution together. Distrust is the cancer that will eat away at the weak joint in between groups.

Fantastic things were achieved during the opening phase of the Umbrella Revolution. But during those times, the crowds that came together were just clusters of strangers sharing the same dreams and aspirations. In the next phase of the Revolution, we need to return with more trust and more organisation. The CCP will be working tirelessly to make sure that doesn’t happen. It is their number one enemy, they hate trust above all things. Yet, for HongKongers it’s our greatest weapon, so don’t squander it!

Goldentime Property Agency CEO Offers Thugs $5000 to Beat Up Yellow Ribbons in Yuen Long

In recent months the police have been arresting and charging yellow ribbons for allegedly using the internet for ‘organising an illegal assembly. In screen shots of a facebook chat Wong Sau Yin CEO of Goldmine Properties in Yuen Long is seen offering $5000 cash for beating up ‘yellow ribbons’ heads until they bleed. Where is the police announcement that he has been arrested and charged?

The LoveTuenMun facebook page shared the screen shots of Wong Sau Yin, CEO of Goldentime Property Agency Ltd, private chat. The leaked chat is full of threatening content. Wong also admits to cooperating with some organizations in Guangzhou and to have hired thugs ready to beat the protesters’ brains out in any upcoming Yuen Long protest (probably on 1 March, 2015).

In a conversation with the admin from LoveTuenMun page, Wong requested to have these prints screens of his conversations deleted. The page admin demanded a public apology be made, but Mr Wong said he is ‘protected’ and rejected the idea. He confessed to be working with communists, being sent to do the brainwashing in Hong Kong.

The CCP must be loving this… using money (greed) to turn Hongkonger against Hongkonger while they suck the life and profits from our home.

So, What’s the Big Deal About Hawkers Anyway?

http://bcmagazine.smugmug.com/Bcene-photos/2015/Street-Eats-Mong-Kok-20/47615540_5N7f9J#!i=3889376520&k=Xn2PSdn

The only thing bigger than street hawkers this Lunar New Year has been Regina Ip being knocked for a six by a Kirin. Given this, we all have high hopes for the year of the goat and its new, feisty attitude of butting things it doesn’t like out of the way.

In regards to the hawkers, it doesn’t matter whether you agree with HK Indigenous’ actions to help relieve the impact of hawkers or not. That is not why they spent four nights cleaning the streets, Their goal was to get you talking about local issues. Or, how do local people solve local problems? Or Hong Kong people making decisions about Hong Kong’s future, just like the Basic Law once promised us, so long ago. This is their ultimate purpose. Media and online forums have been alight with the pros and cons of hawkers in the districts. Hundreds of people have come out to defend them and the Government has wasted vast quantities of money mobilising the FEHD and police to generally do nothing other than look like wannabe Mainland Chengguan and Gong An. (An ominous sign for the future.)

Regardless, of what the solution to hawkers is, the HK Indigenous operation, just like its smuggler campaign, was a huge media success. A handful of motivated young people entirely dictated what the media should be talking about this Lunar New Year, no easy feat. They don’t presuppose for a minute that they have the solutions, their goal is to empower local people to take their communities back. In order to do this they need to tackle problems that are both contentious and difficult to solve. In their choice of operations, they’re not looking for consensus and praise, rather debate and ultimately local empowerment.

They are the beginning of a grassroots revolution within Hong Kong, concentrating on local identity and local empowerment of civil society. It’s a direct push back from the top-down style government so favoured on the Mainland and now being rammed down our throats by CY’s oppressive and clumsy administration. It’s a backlash against the idea that, Hong Kong is part of the Mainland, therefore we need to start acting like Mainlanders. Instead, HK Indigenous and groups like them are directly tackling difficult issues to highlight that geographically, it may be correct, that we are part of Mainland China, but culturally we are very different and the qualities that distinguish this are worth retaining, defending and even fighting for.

The hawker issue will rumble on. The smugglers issue hasn’t gone away, and will be back very soon. No doubt these groups will propel other issues to the forefront very soon. The cumulative effect is that daily Hong Kong’s identity becomes more pronounced as its people get more courage to stand up for what they believe to be right.