The story
This street wasalways a kitchen.
Indian cooking did not arrive in Hong Kong recently. It has been here since the city was — and it arrived on this street.
From the earliest years of the colony
They came with the ships.
Indian merchants and sailors on East India Company vessels, soldiers, policemen, prison guards, clerks. They settled around what became Lascar Row — and they brought their cooking with them.
1849
A lease of 999 years.
Land on Shelley Street was leased to four trustees of the Muslim community — at a nominal rent, for 999 years. The mosque built there, rebuilt in 1915–16 with funds from the Bombay merchant Haji Mohamed Essack Elias, is the oldest in Hong Kong.
The name on the door
The street is named for them.
Mosque Street — 摩羅廟街 — takes its name from that mosque, in a colonial-era Cantonese word for South Asians that many consider derogatory today. Under whichever name: this address belongs to a street that has fed this community for 180 years.
1992
Papa starts cooking.
Monu Gomes begins his career in Hong Kong’s old-guard kitchens — La Trattoria, Jimmy’s Kitchen. A year later the Central–Mid-Levels Escalator opens, running right past the mosque and this street.
Today
The pot goes in sealed.
It comes out sealed. The lid comes off at your table — steam first, then the rice. His own room since 2019. The same hands since 1992.
$10 back on the pot
