Old Can, New Can, and the Red-brick Podium: Canteen Lore at PolyU

Red bricks, podium, Core — the architectural vocabulary of the PolyU campus carries an industrial undertone, and that sensibility has seeped into how students name their canteens. No one says "I'm going to the PolyU dining hall." What you hear is "going to Old Can," "heading down to New Can," "up to Z Can." This abbreviated shorthand is the most distinctive feature of PolyU canteen culture: not built around a single legendary dining hall that carries the whole show, but pieced together from a string of concrete location codes, assembling the collective memory of this red-brick campus.

# The Red-brick Podium: Architecture Came First, Then the "Cans"

The story of PolyU begins not in Hung Hom but in Wan Chai. According to a feature published in PolyU's official journal Excel@PolyU^※, the university traces its roots to the Government Trade School established in Wan Chai in the 1930s, renamed the Hong Kong Technical College in 1947, relocated to the present-day Hung Hom site in 1957, and formally constituted as the Hong Kong Polytechnic in 1972. What truly defined this "red-brick campus" was the red-brick design adopted by the architect James Kinoshita and his team at Palmer & Turner for the first-phase campus development plan — a design that drew explicitly on the red-brick architectural traditions of British and American universities and raised many of the buildings on a podium, creating multi-purpose covered open-air spaces. Kinoshita's core idea was to reserve the ground level for vehicular access and goods loading, while the podium would be entirely open for students to move between the core blocks.

This design produced an intriguing side effect: because the podium knits the teaching blocks together into a continuous plane, PolyU's canteens naturally settled into the interstices between podium and basement. Old Can sits on the ground floor of the Shaw Amenities Building (Block VA); New Can is on the 3rd floor of the Communal Building (Block S); Z Can occupies the 2nd floor of Block Z; and U Garden is tucked into the podium of the CD/DE Wing. Plot these points on a campus map and you can roughly trace a "food-hunting axis" cutting right across the main PolyU campus — an axis that is itself a vestige of Kinoshita's "vehicles below, pedestrians on the podium" design logic.

The red-brick teaching blocks and podiums have made the entire campus a visually unmistakable landmark cluster in Kowloon. More than four decades on, despite multiple rounds of expansion, red brick remains the defining visual emblem of the campus — a shade that students and alumni refer to, with proprietary affection, as "PolyU Red." This architectural style has even travelled beyond the campus gates: according to the same official feature, PolyU's red-brick cylindrical buildings were once named by the foreign-language outlet ZOLIMA CITYMAG as one of Hong Kong's "modern iconic buildings." For the students who scurry between these red-brick podiums daily in search of food, the architectural style is less an object of aesthetic contemplation and more the taken-for-granted backdrop to "sprinting from Core A to Core P to grab something to eat." Yet it is precisely this functionalist design, where utility trumps ornament, that gave rise to PolyU's highly distributed canteen culture and its peculiar practice of naming each outlet by its building code.

# "Old Can" and "New Can": A Pair of Nicknames Decades in the Making

According to the dining guide compiled by PolyU's orientation resource hub SYA Project^※, the "three big canteens" in student parlance are Old Can, New Can, and Z Can, plus U Garden. The morphology of these nicknames is strikingly straightforward — "Can" is plainly a clipping of English "Canteen," while "Old" and "New" most likely correspond to the sequence in which the two canteens opened: the canteen on the ground floor of Block VA came into operation earlier, hence "Old Can"; the Communal Building was completed later, so its canteen naturally acquired the name "New Can." No formal record has been found to verify the exact opening years, but the fact that generations of students have passed these names down without interruption makes it clear that they have become a firmly entrenched part of the PolyU campus lexicon. A fresher will likely first hear these two words during orientation activities or from senior students, and then use them for the rest of their university life.

The guide's description of the canteen experience is also vividly evocative: "mainly fast food, priced a notch cheaper than outside," but "at lunchtime (especially at Old and New Can) there are always long queues; as for food quality, best to approach it with equanimity." This sentence is practically the common denominator of PolyU students' canteen memories — cheap, filling, but queue-intensive, and whether the dishes turn out well depends on luck and on your mood that day. Such descriptions are first-hand records from student media; their reliability is fair, but they remain the subjective impressions of individual contributors and should not be taken as a definitive verdict on any canteen's culinary quality.

# The Communal Building: Besides "New Can," There's "Yu Yee"

The Communal Building — designated Block S in PolyU's alphabetical naming system — houses not only the New Can student canteen, but also two restaurants on the 4th floor with "Yu Yee" (如意, roughly "as you wish") in their names: the staff restaurant Ju Yin House and the student restaurant Ju Yin Court; on the 5th floor sits the staff club restaurant U. Green. The Chinese name "Yu Yee" carries the flavour of an auspicious blessing — a curious counterpoint to the blunt English abbreviation "New Can." Within a single building, the fast-food component retains a functional shorthand, while the slightly more formal eateries adopt a Chinese name freighted with good-luck associations. This duality arguably mirrors the two faces of PolyU canteen culture: pragmatic and efficient at podium level, with a trace of traditional propriety lingering in the floors deeper inside.

The Communal Building thus becomes the most functionally dense single building in PolyU's dining landscape: on the 3rd floor, the fast-food station where students clock in daily; on the 4th, relatively more refined staff and student restaurants; on the 5th, the semi-private space of the staff club. A single building accommodating three dining tempos — fast, medium, and slow — distils, in microcosm, the "stratified yet coexisting" character of PolyU's entire canteen network. Students have no need to envy the staff club, and staff have no need to jostle with students for seats at New Can; each cohort maintains its own dining rhythm on a different floor of the same building.

# Hall Canteens: Hung Hom and Homantin, Two Varieties of Late-night Memory

If the keyword for the main campus canteens is "queuing," the keywords for the hall canteens are "late night" and "belonging."

The hall canteen at the Hung Hom student residences is called "The Forest," officially listed as open until 9 p.m. (last order 8:30 p.m.). For Hung Hom residents, this closing time is pitched just right — not too early, not too late, sufficient to cover the post-dinner needs of those emerging from evening classes or activities, though it does mean that once the late-night snack window closes, residents have to fall back on the downstairs convenience store or food delivery. The Homantin student residences have their hall canteen on the ground floor, serving the six colour-coded halls — Red Hall, Orange Hall, Blue Hall, and so on — as well as residents of the two special programmes, CURI College and STARS College. For Homantin residents, situated a little further from the main campus, this is practically the only hot-food option "within carefree walking distance."

Hall canteens carry more than just the function of sustenance. During the first days after moving in, floormates and blockmates often strike up their first conversations while queuing at the canteen; the post-Hall O-Camp feast, the takeaways and snacks during late-night revision sessions, the ad hoc gatherings before and after residential association events — all gravitate habitually towards the canteen, treating it as a semi-public living room. Such details mostly come from the collective experience of students and from fragmentary descriptions in orientation materials. This site applies a tiered reliability classification: publicly verifiable information such as opening hours and locations is treated as confirmed or multiply attested; specific anecdotes about a particular cohort or a particular evening belong more to the realm of campus lore passed along by word of mouth — worth a listen, but not presented as factual record.

The organisational logic of the Homantin student residences themselves is also worth noting: six halls named after colours — Red Hall, Orange Hall, Blue Hall, etc. — plus two special programmes, CURI College and STARS College, each designed for students on particular interest-based or academic tracks. For a fresher who has not yet fully internalised PolyU's "identify-everything-by-letter" logic, colour-coded halls are, paradoxically, the easiest identity label to remember: rather than memorising which block they live in at Homantin, students are far more accustomed to simply saying "I'm in Orange Hall" or "I'm in Blue Hall." Unwittingly, this naming logic extends to residents' sense of ownership of the canteen: while residents of different colour halls share the same physical hall canteen, they may well develop subtly different meal timings and gathering habits, shaped by their distinct hall activities, orientation camps, and residential association schedules.

# From Subway to Tao Bin: The "Global Smorgasbord" of a University Canteen Network

Another intriguing detail of the PolyU dining landscape is the presence of international chain brands on the official directory. The kiosk on the Block VA podium is operated by Subway, the café in Block X is a Pacific Coffee, the kiosk in Block W is a PizzaExpress; inside the Mr and Mrs Wong Hon-chung Global Student Hub (GSH) sits a Korean-style Tao Bin self-service coffee machine. These international brands coexist with the deeply localised canteens like Old Can and New Can, creating a peculiar mix — a student might polish off a two-dish rice at Old Can for one meal, then grab a Subway sandwich for afternoon tea between the next classes, washing it down with a Korean-style coffee brewed by a Tao Bin machine. This "global smorgasbord" dining landscape, in a sense, reflects PolyU's positioning as an international metropolitan university: it must cater to local students' habitual expectations of cha chaan teng-style fast food, while also accommodating the desire of exchange students, non-local students, and staff for familiar brands from home.

Z Café is specifically labelled as "Halal by The Forest," signalling that halal-certified options are provided by The Forest team — a small detail, but one of the few pieces of publicly available information in the PolyU dining landscape that explicitly acknowledges religious dietary requirements. For non-local students from Southeast Asia, South Asia, and beyond, a café bearing a halal label means they don't have to double-check every ingredient's compliance each time they eat; such quiet arrangements often do more to demonstrate a campus's practical care for a diverse student body than any grandiose "internationalisation" publicity.

# "Worth the Queue, Though": A Contradictory Yet Stable Mode of Assessment

A scan of public student assessments of PolyU canteens reveals an interesting commonality: virtually no one says the food is "delicious," but equally, few call for an outright boycott — most assessments settle at formulations like "long queues but fair prices" or "dishes are so-so but they do the job," statements laced with ambivalence yet remarkably stable. This mode of assessment in some measure reflects the real-world predicament of outsourced canteens on a high-density campus: the contractor must sustain operations within confined space and budget, the students must fill their stomachs within limited inter-class intervals, and neither side has much room to negotiate; thus "adequate, more or less" becomes the commonest and most durable collective verdict.

# Z Can's Japanese Serenity and the Theatre Restaurant's "Priciest but Finest"

Student food reviews and guides have also left behind some finer-grained character sketches of individual canteens, worth recording here. The Block Z canteen is frequently described as having "a serene environment, with a bright, fresh Japanese-style décor, offering a quiet and calming dining experience" — a contrast with the archetypal Hong Kong fast-food atmosphere of Old Can and New Can. To some extent, Z Can plays the role within PolyU's canteen map of "the place you go when you want a quiet meal." At the other end of the spectrum is the Theatre Restaurant in Block A, serving salads, pasta, Japanese bento boxes, set meals, burgers, and the like, described as "PolyU's most expensive restaurant, but also the best-tasting canteen." Within the same PolyU dining network, Old Can and New Can coexist at the "cheap and cheerful" end while the Theatre Restaurant occupies the "pricey but worth it" pole; students switch between the two ends according to budget and occasion, forming the widest price-spectrum segment of the PolyU dining experience. These descriptions come from experience-sharing pieces on student media and study-abroad advisory platforms; they reflect widespread word-of-mouth rather than an outlet-by-outlet rating, and their reliability is classified as multiply attested.

# Stepping Out the Gate: Hung Hom Gai Daan Zai and the "Grew Up Eating This" Memories of the Neighbourhood

PolyU's culinary memories naturally do not stop at the campus gate. Hung Hom itself is a transport hub dense with eateries, and these off-campus options have long been tangled up with generations of PolyU students' recollections. Among the most emblematic examples is "Hung Hom Gai Daan Zai" (紅磡雞蛋仔, Hung Hom Egg Waffles), a street-food stall on Bulkeley Street that has been open for over 40 years, serving classic Hong Kong snacks such as pancakes and egg waffles. Though tiny in size, the stall has been described by local food media as "a memory that generations of neighbourhood kids and students grew up eating," and in 2026 it earned its first listing in the Hong Kong & Macau Michelin Guide. Such venerable off-campus establishments, while not part of the PolyU canteen system proper, are indispensable pieces of the larger puzzle of "what do PolyU students eat?" — for a student living in Hung Hom and walking past this street every day, the egg waffle stall and Old Can and New Can together form a complete culinary memory map, merely located on opposite sides of the campus boundary.

# Even the "Student Press" Is Called the "Redbrick Society"

Such is the depth of PolyU's red-brick culture that it colours the very name of the student media. The student press editorial committee under the PolyU Students' Union is officially named the "Redbrick Society PressCom" (紅磚社學生報編輯委員會) — a name that itself signals that "red brick" has long transcended its literal meaning as a construction material within PolyU students' self-identification, becoming a badge of identity: the Redbrick Society writes about the lives of "red-brick people," which naturally includes their daily ritual of queuing for meals at Old Can, New Can, and Z Can. Should the Redbrick Society or other student media bodies one day compile investigative reports or oral histories on the canteens, that would be the ideal primary-source material to round out this inventory of cultural anecdotes; but as of this round of research, no canteen-themed report from this editorial committee has been found in the public domain. This section is left blank for now, pending future verification and supplementation.

# A Little Left Unfilled: Gaps Waiting for More Student Memories

What this piece has collected are mostly details that already have a paper trail of open records behind them — architectural designs, official directories, stray remarks in orientation guides. The truly rich cultural memory of PolyU's canteens is most likely still scattered across graduates' WeChat Moments, nostalgic Instagram posts, old LIHKG threads, or the casual chatter of alumni gatherings: the name of a food stall that has since closed, the year a certain canteen suddenly changed hands, the quiet thrill of grabbing the last lunchbox after queuing late into the night — these details have so far yielded no identifiable, attributable records in open searches, and by this site's standards they are not yet ready to be written up as formal text. Should alumni or student media bodies one day compile such oral histories, they would merit inclusion as a standalone subsection or dedicated article, allowing the cultural memory of PolyU's canteens to grow beyond the skeleton of "architecture plus official directories" and acquire the warm flesh and blood of lived experience.