best cha chaan teng

There is a type of restaurant that are common in Hong Kong named "cha chaan teng" (usually known as HK cafe) that offers a variety of Hong Kong style western food and other pearls at a very affordable price. The Hong Kong style milk tea is one of the staple drinks. The egg-sandwich with the milk tea is one affordable and excellent breakfast that it is offered.

There is a very famous restaurant in Hong Kong called "Australian Dairy Company" and it is famous for the superb smoothness of its eggs dishes: scrambled eggs, egg-sandwich, steam eggs.

There are probably many (a couple of thousands of them) that serves this type of food in Hong Kong (most of them probably pretty decent) but this restaurant is considered by many the best in Hong Kong. During peak hours, there is usually a line to get in.

Though the food is intensely good, the service is bad and sometimes rude. Though this is a typical characteristic of Hong Kong cha chaan tengs, this restaurant seems to have worse service overall.

The reason for such bad service is because its workers are very efficient and focused on getting work done. Since the lines are long, and environment is chaotic, all the workers (waiters and kitchen staff) are non-stop working to ensure food is made and served fast, and that people are eating (no idle waiting).  So they have no reason to provide good service. There is definitely an atmosphere of pressure to eat fast and order more food or leave right away before getting scolded haha. Despite this, people go eat there and it is a great experience.

In my small group, we have been studying the book of Nehemiah, one great book about Christian leadership! And recently we covered Nehemiah 5, where we see him dealing with some serious internal affairs. Many of the Israelites during that time were poor and had to mortgaged their property and even sell their children for food. It was pretty tough times, and to make it worse some rich Israelites were taking advantage of them by charging them interest in loans. Nehemiah was angry and had to rebuked them, and led by example by caring for the needy. This is on top of his main responsibility, which was to lead the task of rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem.

What I learned from that chapter is that Nehemiah truly a leader who cares for those under him, despite having to deal with many other issues (external enemies) and logistics (takes a lot of planning to coordinate effort to rebuild the walls, to put guards, etc). I am often in charge of planning activities because I like logistical work, and like being efficient at it. But one of the struggles I have is that when I am very submerged in my planning mode, I tend to not care about the people (who are part of the event I am planning) causing leadership to be planning-focused and not people-focused, very similar to the restaurant above.

Definitely, the book of Nehemiah challenges me to know that leadership involves impacting people to challenge them to move towards the direction of Christ.