Hong Kong's vegetarian and healthy eating restaurants are slowly winning fans

Hong Kong Vegetarian Society founder Dr Simon Chau is the impossibly youthful, 66-year-old poster child for the city's raw food movement. Among the claimed benefits of his diet are looking even younger every year, a brain that works at turbo speed and an overall feeling of total contentment. The move to a raw food diet is recent, after two decades of vegetarianism. He is very open about the considerable sacrifice it involves. He estimates that there are only nine other raw food fans in Hong Kong, putting them at the extreme end of healthy eating. In an attempt to convince others of the benefits he has just opened the GreenWoods Raw Café in Tsim Sha Tsui. Typical dishes might be a pumpkin soup (raw food can be heated to 46 degrees Celsius), a green salad with melon and mango, a main of sprouts with seaweed, then a light and fluffy cheesecake with rosella tea.