Healthy Summer Dining Experience: MANA! Fast Slow Food

For the next nine days, we're highlighting our Healthy Summer Dining Experience partners, the TFT dishes they are featuring for the month of August, and the prizes YOU can win by entering our HSDE (contest)! Don't forget to EAT (a delicious TFT HDSE meal/drink), TAKE (a picture of the item and upload it to our Facebook page), and SHARE (the photo with friends and ask them to "like" it), so you can WIN (one of nine incredible prizes, one for the most "liked" photo taken at each HDSE partner restaurant)!

MANA! Organic Mezze Platter

MANA! Fast Slow Food, located at 92 Wellington in Central, specializes in "flats" (organic flat breads baked on the premises and topped with zataar and other goodies of your choosing), salads, soups, smoothies, and juices. The proprietors of this all-day cafe take individual and planetary healthy seriously, and operate MANA! with those values in mind: they've implemented various energy-saving strategies (no AC blasting, energy-efficient lighting), offer free filtered drinking water to all, use biodegradable to-go packaging, decorate their space with reclaimed and upcycled materials, and collect leftover food to be composted.

During the HDSE, MANA! is offering the Organic Mezze Platter as its TFT dish. This platter is "a medley of tantalizing tastes of MANA! served in one box: hummus, babaganoush, black & green olives, green salad & MANA!'s famous flatbread topped with zaatar." The price is $97, and 5% of the proceeds from this dish help TFT provide nutritious school lunches to children in Qinghai, China; Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia, and South Africa.

If you take the most "liked" photo of the MANA! Organic Mezze Platter, you'll receive dinner for two at MANA!, so get those pictures up and ask your friends to vote! Thank you to the team at MANA! for their support and generosity!

Food Hero Tuesday: Time Out Hong Kong's Dorothy So

Steamed crab at The Chairman

Note from the Editor: Every Tuesday, TFT HK will bring you a post or article from/about one of our local or global food heroes. These are people who inspire us, and whose visions align with the values that TFT espouses and promotes. This week's post is an interview with Dorothy So, serious eater and food editor for Time Out Hong Kong. Dorothy, who has also written for HK Magazine, South China Morning Post, and Fodor's Travel Guide, was generous enough to share her thoughts about the recent evolution she's witnessed in the Hong Kong dining scene . Dorothy, we at TFT HK salute you!

Being a food writer has its obvious perks. You get to eat (a lot) and, more importantly, you get to meet great people who are talented and inspiringly passionate about what they do. And in just the few short years since I’ve moved back to my home city, it’s been exciting to see how the community of food artisans has grown. I’m not saying that this is a completely new thing for Hong Kong, but when I was a weedy highschooler, there definitely weren’t as many organic farmers, eco-conscious restaurateurs or indie chefs.

Local Buzz: AmCham's "Moving Hong Kong's Growing Mountains of Food Waste" Seminar

Last week, we were lucky enough to attend the American Chamber of Commerce's seminar on food waste, titled "Moving Hong Kong's Growing Mountains of Food Waste".  Speakers Anne Gillman (associate at Hamilton Advisors), Gabrielle Kirstein (Executive Director of Feeding Hong Kong), and Bobsy Gaia (sustainable lifestyle advocate and owner of Mana! Fast Slow Food and Life Cafe) each commented on the state of Hong Kong's food waste problem, and the actions being taken, on a variety of fronts, to address this very serious issue.