At @TheEightLondon, every detail whispers a deliberate act of cultural translation. From the crimson lanterns swaying like memories of Guangzhou’s night markets to the handwritten Chinese menu adorned with方言 (dialect) terms like “啫啫煲” (sizzling clay pot), the restaurant curates what anthropologist David Sutton calls “gustatory nostalgia”—a sensory bridge between diasporic identities and imagined homelands (Sutton, 2001).
This strategic material semiotics (Appadurai, 1996) extends beyond aesthetics. The menu’s linguistic choices—mixing Mandarin headings with Cantonese colloquialisms—act as “edible archives,” invoking what scholar Lok Siu terms the “taste of remembrance” (Siu, 2005). For Chinese patrons, deciphering phrases like “阿嬷秘方” (Grandma’s secret recipe) isn’t just ordering; it’s an act of cultural reterritorialization, reclaiming fragmented identities in a global city (Hage, 2005).
Crucially, this design goes beyond mere marketing tactics. As Sharon Zukin pointed out, restaurants in cities are increasingly playing the role of a "third space", and immigrants negotiate a sense of belonging through symbolic consumption (Zukin, 2010). In the "No. 8 Pavilion", there is exactly the same decoration as a Hong Kong-style tea restaurant, and even a design similar to that of a food stall, making people feel as if they have returned to the streets of Hong Kong/Guangzhou. Just as one interviewee described, this place has become "a corner of my home where my London accent is gradually disappearing".
The elaborate design of the eight-person store - the deep red lanterns remind one of the bustling night markets in Guangzhou, and the handwritten menu with dialects scrawled - is not merely a form of entertainment. It is like a "sensory scaffold" (Sutton, 2001), using material culture to activate the nostalgia of diaspora. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai believes that such Spaces have the function of "ethnic landscapes" (Appadurai, 1996), where immigrants reconstruct fragmented identities through elaborately planned symbols. This strategic semiotics transcends aesthetics: The Cantonese on handwritten menus (" ") is like "edible invitations" (Siu, 2005), inducing customers to participate in the performance of memory. Combining delicious food, Chinese people overseas have found their own sense of identity and belonging here.
Below, four voices reveal how this design alchemy turns a table contaminated with soy sauce into a place of belonging. Click here to add text.
Case 1: Luna’s "Dumpling Therapy"
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22, Guangzhou-born grad student battling homesickness
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“The moment I stepped into The Eight, the steam from bamboo baskets hit me—just like my childhood dim sum Sundays! 🥟 A waitress auntie grinned and said in Cantonese, ‘Mui ah, try the har gow while it’s hot!’ That shrimp filling…identical to my mum’s! Turns out the chef insists on 28 pleats per dumpling. Now I come weekly—it’s my ‘stomach embassy’!”
Case 2: Mr. Zhang’s "Char Siu Time Machine"
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45, jet-lagged consultant craving authenticity
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“In London, ‘General Tso’s chicken’ was my sad default. Then I found The Eight’s char siu—crispy amber crust, 60% lean to 40% fat…a dead ringer for Hong Kong’s Yung Kee! 🇭🇰 The ‘lai see* wall’ by the cashier slays me—red envelopes stamped with ‘dim gwo luk ze’ (Cantonese: ‘smoother than sugarcane’). My British client gasped, ‘This is a food museum!’”*
Case 3: Rosie’s "Rice Roll Parenting"
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33, Sino-British mum raising cross-cultural kids
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“My daughter once whined, ‘Why can’t I have sandwiches like everyone else?’ 👧🏻 Then she watched The Eight’s chefs pour rice milk into silk-thin sheets—‘It’s edible magic!’ Now she boasts about ‘cheung fun* Mondays’ at school: ‘It’s China’s crepe!’ The DIY workshops? She masters picking peanuts. Cultural pride, one rice roll at a time.”*
From crimson lanterns to hashtagged dumpling tutorials, The Eight Restaurant crafts a multisensory archive of diasporic memory—where every dish is a palimpsest of personal and collective histories. Our fieldwork reveals that food transcends mere sustenance: it operates as edible chronotechnology, bending time to stitch migrant identities across physical and digital realms (Sutton, 2001; Sheller, 2018).
Reference：
- Sutton, D. (2001) Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. 1st edition. Oxford: Oxford International Publishers Ltd.
- De Zoysa, D. A. (1998) Book Review: Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. International Migration Review 32 (4) p.1073–1074.
- Siu, L. C. D. & Ropp, S. M. (2007) Memories of a Future Home: Diasporic Citizenship of Chinese in Panama. Journal of Latin American studies 39 (2) p.434–436.
- 4.Hage, G. (1998) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. 1st edition. Oxford: Routledge.
- 5.Zukin, S. (2020) Naked city : the death and life of authentic urban places / Sharon Zukin. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Mladenovic, M. N. (2020) Mobility justice: the politics of movement in an age of extremes. Transport reviews 40 (1) p.117-.
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