the HKUST entries: a veggie-tale

Hello, everyone! This might seem hyperbolic but I definitely lead the most exciting life in HKUST. Nope, I’m not on the verge of proving Einstein wrong nor do I practise bungee jumping from the Academic Building. I do something more trivial yet more daunting. Yeah, I’m a vegetarian.

Living off rice, vegetables and fruits was a cakewalk for the first seventeen years of my life in India and Singapore. When you add HKUST to the equation, that’s when things go haywire. UST has ten regular restaurants(Bistro is way expensive!), yet there is hardly a dozen decent vegetarian options. The only things Seafront can offer your starved taste buds is Cheese Sandwich(which is good!) and canned drinks. Take two lifts to LG7, and looking at the flashy screens and gigantic menus, your optimism begins to climb. However, the APC menu will only bring tears to your eyes. GRB is better, offering 4-5 dishes but only the Fried Rice and the Mushroom Noodles qualify as something worth your Octopus swipes. I survived LG7 my first few weeks hoping, one day Milano would open and solve all my problems but I was disappointed. Milano did open, and they could just add an overpriced pasta and much later, a delicious pizza to my threadbare menu.

Fingers crossed, you take the escalator up and the best McDonalds can do to quench your hunger pangs is offer you some Fries, an Apple Pie and a Large Coke. Your growling stomach pushes your lazy legs three floors up to LG1 and voila! you have the delicious option of having steamed rice with ONLY spinach. Initially, exposed to wonderful food back home, you sniff at it, but down the Sem, you start worshipping the queen of vegetables, the blessed spinach. Talk a small stroll and Chah Chaan Teng’s famed rice noodles are worth a try occasionally. Hungry for more, you take the escalator up to the posh-looking Chinese Restaurant and their awesome noodles can save your day(don’t fall for the soup; usually contains pork). Or if you are lucky, you might just be able to catch the last plate of “fandai sikh jai” or a Mushroom Toastie at the cafe. Warning from the experts: Don’t overuse this vital oasis. The Cafe hasn’t changed its menu in the last three months and frequent visits will only prepone the dreaded moment when the weekly Aloo Gobi becomes a taste-sore.

Surely, you don’t need to hold a PhD in Math to realize that with 2 meals a day over 100 days a Semester, the probability that one gets bored of the food is almost 1.  So how did I survive to spread the green tale? Lots of Indomein noodles, weekly visits to Sai Kung and TST and of course, wonderful friends with amazing moms who send food for me.  

Concluding remarks...

“Dear HKUST, you are awesome but please improve your veggie standards. Yours desperately, The Veggie Society”

P.S: I did try taking meat. The disastrous consequences inhibit future culinary innovations.