INTERVIEWEE - MANAGER | Thais In Hong Kong

Interview with Chinese Shop Manager at a family-run Thai restaurant

Kowloon City is a great place to observe the Thai community, and also for Thai food! You could have guessed that we went to one of the family-run Thai restaurant and enjoyed our lunch! While enjoying the yummy Thai food, we have made observations of how Thai waitresses interact with the customers, who are predominantly Hong Kong people. We then approached the shop manager and asked her a few questions. It is interesting to see the dynamics happening between the Thai waitresses and local customers, also between the Chinese shop manager and the Thais.

Menu at this shop are bilingual in Chinese and English with photos at the end of the page. The shop manager commented that menus were only avaliable in Chinese for more than 20 years. But with the increase of tourist visiting Kowloon City and their shop, they have modified their menu to be bilingual 2 years ago for tourists to order.

You may ask - what about the Thais? Do they have a different set of menu? There actually aremenus only written in Thai, and usually will offer that to Thais when they visit.

Photos are there not only to assist people in ordering, also allowed Thai waitresses who can read limited Chinese to identify the food.

As what we could observe, all 3 Thai waitresses are able to take orders from local customers in Cantonese. The shop manager replied us that it is essential for the waitresses to remember the Chinese names of all the foods and drinks in order to communicate with the customers.

We also tried to ask what is in a traditional Thai drink while ordering, the waitress is also able to answer us in short and simple sentences indicating that there are jelly of 3 different colours in it. She also refereed us to look at the photo for a clearer answer and replied "gum6 yeung6 lor1, je1 lei3 yau6 sam1 jek1 sik7" (It is like this, jelly has 3 colours)

You may also wonder whether the HK shop manager knows any Thai to help communicating with the waitresses. The answer is, yes she did! She said that Thai is similar to Cantonese and Mandarin which makes it easy to learn, it only took her a month to learn simple phrases such as: "Take this", "You can leave now", "Be careful".

She felt the need to learn these practical Thai phrases as it really help fostering a closer relationship between her and her waitresses, rather than really helping her to give orders to the waitresses as she said "The waitresses have no problem communicating in Cantonese with me!"

Thai waitress communicating with customers

You may wonder, do the waitresses know Cantonese before they come to Hong Kong? As according to the shop manager, most of their waitresses have worked at Hong Kong for more than 10 years and therefore have no problem communicating in Cantonese. Moreover, before they arrived HK, they had received language training at Thailand so as to cater the need to serve customers.

Shop manager