Mother and Daughters (M&D Food, 魚初心)

by Kit, Vanessa, and Kay

Hong Kong is synonymous with street style food — from the fishballs to stinky tofu and fried chestnuts to egg waffles. As a little girl growing up in Hong Kong, this was Kit’s playground. Kit used to hang out at the local open-air market where her parents sold garments from a stall. She and the other children at the market would play and explore together while their parents were hard at work. She remembers the smell of freshly made fried foods, steaming hot buns, and curry soups that would fill the market air. Eating at these carts was special for Kit because during brief breaks, she would eat together with her parents as a family. Even as a young adult, Kit continued to eat cart noodles four days a week, when she would be able to see all the people she had known for years eating together as one big neighborhood.

In 2011, Kit came to California from Hong Kong with her kids in hopes to provide them a chance for a better future. When she moved to the US, worked in restaurants washing dishes and recycling cans. From there, she moved on to work in kitchens and grocery stores, took on with families with newborns to ensure their healing and development based on Chinese ancestral knowledge of food as medicine, and launched M&D Food with her daughters Vanessa and Kay. They get a lot of comments from Chinese immigrants saying that their cooking brings memories of home, and that is what M&D Food wants to keep doing.

M & D / Mother and Daughters offers a range of items, from healing foods informed by qigong, to unique Hong Kong comfort foods and sweets. They would love to continue to offer authentic HK street food to a wider audience

Follow and Support Kit, Vanessa, and Kay:

• Instagram: @mandd_food