The smoke hit us first, about twenty metres before we reached the corner. Not the acrid, petroleum-heavy exhaust of the minibuses that stack three lanes deep on Nathan Road, but something older—woodsmoke cut with the sharp, sweet sting of roasting sugar. It was a smell that didn’t belong to this block of Kowloon anymore. Most of the street-level shops here sell phone cases, massage chairs, or the kind of dried seafood that glows under fluorescent tubes like it’s been lacquered. But there, wedged between a gold-buying parlour and a shuttered noodle house that had been a Hui Lau Shan mango dessert shop three years ago, was a single metal drum with a chimney pipe bolted through the top.
The cart itself was unremarkable. A wheeled steel cylinder, blackened by years of use, perched on a frame that had been repaired with wire in at least four places. A handwritten cardboard sign, laminated with sticky tape, listed the prices in Chinese and English: small bag, twenty dollars; large bag, thirty-two. The chestnuts sat in a shallow tray above the coals, a few of them split open from the heat, the flesh inside the colour of aged honey. The man running it was in his sixties, maybe older, wearing a quilted vest over a polo shirt and a pair of those black canvas slip-on shoes that every vegetable seller in the city seems to wear. He didn’t call out to passersby. He just stood there, turning the chestnuts with a small metal spatula, the same motion every ten or fifteen seconds, like a wind-up toy that hadn’t run down yet.
We had come to find him because of something a friend of a friend had mentioned over drinks in Sheung Wan a few weeks earlier. Not a tip, exactly—more of a lament. The Hong Kong government had been tightening regulations on street cooking for years, citing fire risks and air quality. Open flames on public streets were already banned in most districts, and the remaining exemptions were being phased out. By the end of the year, this particular cart would be gone, and with it, the last place in Kowloon where you could buy chestnuts roasted over actual charcoal, not the gas-fired ovens that had replaced every other cart we’d tried.
The crowd around the cart was not a crowd. Two women in their fifties, carrying shopping bags from a bakery, stood to one side, waiting. A security guard from a nearby building had wandered over and was leaning against a lamppost, not buying anything but watching the process with an expression that looked like respect. We joined the short queue. Nobody spoke much. The ritual of purchase was simple—point at the bag size, hand over the coins, receive a paper cone folded from an old newspaper page. The chestnuts were still hot enough to burn the fingertips through the paper, and we juggled them awkwardly as we stepped out of the flow of foot traffic.
The first one was worth the trip. The shell cracked easily between thumb and forefinger, and the nut inside came out in one piece, steaming. The difference between charcoal-roasted and gas-roasted chestnuts is not subtle. Gas heat is even and fast, but it dries the nut out, leaving a crumbly texture that turns to paste in your mouth. Charcoal, especially the kind of lump charcoal the cart uses—irregular chunks of what looked like mangrove wood—produces a more uneven heat, with hot spots and cooler zones, and the sugars inside the chestnut caramelise rather than just cooking through. The result is a nut that’s soft without being mushy, with a sweetness that has a faintly smoky finish. We ate four of them standing on the pavement, the warmth spreading across our palms, while the city flowed past us without a glance.
The cart’s location is not an accident. The building behind it is one of the older tenement blocks in this part of Mong Kok, dating from the late 1950s, with a facade that has been painted and repainted so many times that the original details have disappeared under layers of beige and institutional green. The ground floor houses a shop that sells theatrical costumes and wigs—the kind of place where you could rent a cheongsam or a Victorian-era military uniform or a full-body monkey suit. Above that, residential units with window-unit air conditioners that drip condensation into the street. The chestnut cart has been here, according to the laminated sign, for twenty-two years. The man running it now inherited it from his uncle, who started the business in the 1980s in a different spot, closer to the harbour, before the harbour-side redevelopment pushed him inland.
We asked him, in our imperfect Cantonese, how much longer he planned to keep going. He shrugged and said something we understood only partially—something about the licence, and about how the fire department had already come by twice this year. He didn’t seem angry about it. More resigned, like a man who had watched enough seasons change to know that this one was just the latest. The charcoal itself was getting harder to find, he added. The suppliers on the mainland had shifted to producing fuel for barbecue restaurants, not street carts, and the quality had dropped. The batch he was using today was from a small kiln in Guangxi, and it burned hotter than he liked, which meant he had to keep the chestnuts moving constantly to avoid scorching.
We stepped away and let the next customer approach—a young man in a delivery rider’s helmet, who bought a small bag without dismounting his scooter, balancing the paper cone on the handlebars as he pulled away. The chestnut cart, we realised, was not a tourist attraction. It was a service, embedded in the daily routines of people who lived and worked on this street: the security guard, the bakery shoppers, the delivery rider, the costume shop staff who emerged for a smoke break and bought a bag for the group. The tourists who did find it tended to come in pairs, cameras out, and take photos of the flames before buying a single small bag and walking away looking slightly disappointed that it wasn’t more photogenic.
The light was changing. In Kowloon, the afternoon sun comes through a haze of suspended particles—dust from construction sites, exhaust from the cross-harbour tunnel, sea salt from the harbour—and by four o’clock, the shadows have a kind of softness that makes everything look like a film shot on slightly expired stock. The chestnut seller had his routine down to an automatic rhythm. He added a fresh scoop of raw chestnuts to the tray, stirred them, adjusted the airflow by sliding a metal plate across the bottom vent, and returned to the small stool he kept behind the cart. On the stool was a thermos and a cup with no handle. He poured himself tea—oolong, judging by the colour—and drank it slowly, watching the street.
The ban on open flames in public spaces in Hong Kong is not a new thing. It has been coming for years, piece by piece, ordinance by ordinance. The official reasoning is sensible enough: in a city where residential buildings rise directly above street-level shops, a cooking fire in a metal drum on the pavement is a genuine hazard. The 2011 Fa Yuen Street fire, which destroyed dozens of stalls and left nine people injured, is still cited by the authorities as a cautionary tale. But the logic of safety does not always account for what is lost. A gas-fired chestnut roaster, the kind that the health department recommends, costs several thousand dollars and requires a permanent electrical connection. It cannot be wheeled into a storage unit at night and rolled out again at dawn. It cannot be operated by a single man on a pension, working without a permit, using charcoal bought with cash from a supplier three provinces away.
We walked a loop around the block to let the chestnuts settle. The neighbourhood felt different at street level than it did from the elevated walkways that most visitors use. The air was denser, the sounds more immediate—a metal grille being rolled up, a woman calling after a child, the hiss of a pressure cooker from an open kitchen door. A few doors down from the chestnut cart, a man was repairing a bamboo scaffolding with the kind of casual expertise that only comes from decades of practice, tying the joints with nylon strips while balancing on a single pole. We watched him for a while, and then we watched the chestnut seller from a distance, trying to see the cart the way a regular might see it: not as a piece of vanishing street culture, not as a photograph waiting to be taken, but as a place to stop on the way home, a warm paper cone that made the rest of the evening feel a little less rushed.
The second bag of chestnuts we bought was for the woman who ran the costume shop. She had come out to stretch her legs and was standing in the doorway, and we offered her a handful. She took them with a nod, cracked one open immediately, and said something in Cantonese that we caught only part of. The word for “good” was in there, and the word for “finish,” and the word for “sad.” She meant the chestnuts were good, but that when they finished, it would be sad. We agreed, in English, and then in Cantonese, and then we just stood there, the three of us, eating chestnuts in the late afternoon light—the last fire in Kowloon burning beside us.
The ban, we later read, had been delayed by six months after a petition from the hawkers’ association. But nobody we spoke to believed it would be delayed again. The chestnut seller did not mention the petition. He mentioned the price of charcoal and the fact that his knees hurt when it rained and that his daughter had told him to stop working. He didn’t talk about legacy or tradition or the soul of the city. He talked about the chestnuts, which were from Hebei this year, smaller than last year’s but sweeter, and about how the paper cones were getting harder to find because the newspaper he used had stopped printing a daily edition. The details of disappearance, it turned out, were not dramatic. They were practical. The last fire did not go out in a blaze of defiance. It would simply be removed one evening, the cart wheeled into a storage space and never brought back out, the charred drum sold for scrap, the stool left by the kerb for someone else to take.
We stayed until the chestnuts ran out, around half past six, when the street lights flickered on and the evening crowd began to thicken. The seller poured the last of the coals into a metal bucket, doused them with water from a plastic bottle, and stacked the tray on top of the drum. The whole operation broke down in less than five minutes, each piece fitting into a pre-arranged space on the cart’s frame. He wrapped the leftover tea cup in a plastic bag, tucked the thermos under his arm, and began pushing the cart toward the alley behind the costume shop, where it would sit overnight behind a locked gate. He did not look back. We did not call out. The smell of woodsmoke lingered in the air for another fifteen or twenty minutes before the street’s normal odours—fried garlic, bus exhaust, the faint perfume of the detergent used to wash the pavement—reasserted themselves. Then it was just another evening in Kowloon. The last fire was gone.
The chestnuts we saved from the second bag had gone cold by the time we reached the hotel. We ate them anyway, sitting on the edge of the bed, the shells piling up on a napkin. They were still good—denser now, the sweetness concentrated, the smoke flavour more pronounced. Cold roasted chestnuts are not the same as hot ones. But they are not worse.
📷 Photos: hey emmby (Unsplash), Steve (Unsplash)
