Old Can, New Can and the Red-Brick Podiums: Tales from PolyU's Canteen Culture

Red brick, podiums, "Core" — the architectural vocabulary of PolyU's campus carries an unmistakable industrial edge, and that sensibility seeps into the way students name their canteens. Nobody says "I'm going to the PolyU cafeteria." What people actually say is "去旧 Can" (going to Old Can), "落新 Can" (heading down to New Can), or "上 Z Can" (up to Z Can). This shorthand is the most distinctive feature of PolyU's canteen culture: it doesn't rely on one legendary dining hall to carry the reputation, but rather on a string of concrete location codes that together piece together the collective memory of this red-brick campus. For a full directory of these location codes, the logic behind their naming, and the layout of hostel canteens, see The Canteen Network in a Red-Brick Campus: An Overview of PolyU's Dining System.

# Podiums before Canteens: The Architecture Came First

PolyU's story begins in Wan Chai. According to an official University publication, a feature in Excel@PolyU^※, the University's predecessor can be traced back to the Government Trade School established in Wan Chai in the 1930s, which was renamed the Hong Kong Technical College in 1947, moved to the current Hung Hom campus in 1957, and formally became the Hong Kong Polytechnic in 1972. What truly defined today's "red-brick campus," however, was the work of architect Kinoshita Hajime of Palmer & Turner, whose team adopted a red-brick design in the first phase of the campus development plan — a design that explicitly drew on the red-brick architecture of traditional English and American universities, and placed many of the buildings on podiums to create versatile, covered open spaces. Kinoshita's core concept was to reserve the ground floor for vehicular traffic and goods loading, while opening up the podium level entirely to students moving between the main buildings.

This design produced an interesting side effect: because the podium links all the academic buildings into a continuous whole, PolyU's canteens naturally grew into the interstitial spaces between podium and basement — Old Can on the ground floor of the Sir Sze-yuen Chung Amenities Building (Block VA), New Can on the 3rd floor of the Communal Building (Block S), Z Can on the 2nd floor of Block Z, and U Garden on the podium of the CD/DE Wing. Connect these points on a campus map and a rough "food-hunting route" emerges that cuts across the main campus — a route that is itself a trace of Kinoshita's design logic of "vehicles below, people on the podium."

The red-brick teaching blocks and podiums have made PolyU's campus a recognisable landmark cluster in Kowloon. More than four decades on, despite numerous expansions, the red brick remains the campus's visual signature — and among alumni and students, the lore goes that this is a "PolyU Red" (理大紅) belonging exclusively to the "PolyU person." The architectural style has even travelled beyond campus: according to the same official feature, PolyU's red-brick cylindrical buildings were once named among Hong Kong's "modern iconic buildings" by the foreign-language media outlet ZOLIMA CITYMAG. For students weaving between these red-brick podiums in search of a meal, the architecture is less an object of appreciation and more the everyday backdrop — "sprint from Core A to Core P to find food" — but it is precisely this functionalist design philosophy of "utility over looks" that shaped PolyU's highly decentralised, location-named canteen culture.

# Old Can and New Can: A Pair of Nicknames That Have Lasted Decades

According to the polyu dining guide on the SYA Project orientation resource site^※, the "three big canteens" in student parlance are Old Can, New Can, and Z Can, plus U Garden. The word formation is straightforward — "Can" is plainly short for "Canteen," while "Old" and "New" almost certainly map to the order in which the two canteens opened: the one in the basement of Block VA came first, hence "Old Can"; the Communal Building opened later, so its canteen logically became "New Can." No official record pins down the exact opening years behind this naming scheme, but the fact that students have passed it down generation after generation suggests it has become a firmly anchored part of PolyU's campus language — freshmen typically hear the terms for the first time during orientation or from senior students, and use them for the rest of their time at the University.

The guide's description of the canteen experience is also vividly evocative: "mainly fast food, prices noticeably cheaper than outside," but "lunchtime (especially at Old Can and New Can) always means a long queue; keep a level head about the food quality." That sentence is close to a common denominator of PolyU students' canteen memories — cheap, filling, but requiring patience, with dish quality varying by luck and the day's mood. This kind of description counts as first-hand documentation from student media, with reasonable reliability, but it remains one writer's subjective impression — not a verdict on any particular canteen's standard.

# The Communal Building: "Ju Yin" Next to New Can

The Communal Building — Block S under PolyU's letter-based naming system — houses more than the student canteen known as New Can. The 4th floor is home to two restaurants bearing the name "Ju Yin" (如意): the staff restaurant Ju Yin House and the student restaurant Ju Yin Court, while the 5th floor hosts the staff club restaurant, U. Green. The Chinese name "Ju Yin" carries an auspicious, fortune-blessing connotation — an interesting contrast to the blunt English abbreviation of "New Can." In the same building, the fast-food section keeps its functional shorthand while the more formal restaurants revert to a Chinese name steeped in good-luck symbolism. It is a small reflection of two sides of PolyU's canteen culture: pragmatic and efficient at podium level, but retaining a touch of traditional formality in the building's upper reaches.

The Communal Building has thus become the most functionally dense single structure on PolyU's dining map: the 3rd floor is the daily fast-food haunt for students, the 4th floor holds the comparatively more refined staff and student restaurants, and the 5th floor offers the private space of the staff club. One building accommodating three paces of dining — fast, mid-range, and slow — distils in miniature the "layered but coexisting" character of PolyU's entire canteen network. Students need not envy the staff club restaurant, and staff need not fight students for seats at New Can; each group, on a different floor of the same building, keeps its own dining rhythm.

# Hostel Canteens: Two Kinds of Late-Night Memory in Hung Hom and Ho Man Tin

If the keyword for main-campus canteen memories is "queuing" and "rushing between classes," for hostel canteens it is "late night" and "belonging."

The Hall Canteen at the Hung Hom Student Hostels goes by the name "The Forest," with official hours until 9 pm (last order 8:30 pm). For residents of the Hung Hom halls, the timing sits just right — late enough to cover most study sessions and post-activity meals, yet early enough that after the late-night snack window, residents must turn to the convenience store downstairs or takeout. The Hall Canteen at the Ho Man Tin Student Hostels, by contrast, sits in the hostel basement and serves the six colour-named halls — Red Hall, Orange Hall, Blue Hall, and so on — as well as residents of the CURI College and STARS College special programmes. For Ho Man Tin residents, who are a little further from the main campus, this is nearly the only hot-food option they can comfortably walk to.

Hostel canteens do more than feed people. When new students first move in, it is often in the canteen queue that they first strike up conversation with hallmates on the same floor. Post-O-Camp dinners, late-night takeout and snacks during study breaks, impromptu gatherings before and after hall association events — all of these habitually treat the canteen as a semi-public living room. Such details mostly come from students' collective experience and fragmented descriptions in orientation materials; this site classifies them by reliability: publicly verifiable information such as opening hours and locations counts as confirmed or multiply corroborated, while a specific cohort's specific late-night gathering scene is closer to campus folklore passed by word of mouth — worth hearing, but not to be stated as historical fact. For an examination of the food-safety regulatory framework governing PolyU's canteens and the limits of that oversight, see A Food-Safety Audit: The Regulatory Framework for PolyU Canteens.

The organisation of the Ho Man Tin Student Hostels is itself worth a note: the six halls are named by colour — Red Hall, Orange Hall, Blue Hall — alongside the two special programmes, CURI College and STARS College, each serving students with particular interests or study tracks. For freshmen still adjusting to PolyU's letter-based wayfinding, the colour-named halls are actually the easiest identity tags to grasp — instead of remembering which block of the Ho Man Tin hostels they live in, students simply say "I'm Orange Hall" or "I'm Blue Hall." This naming logic has quietly extended into residents' sense of attachment to the canteen: although students from different colour halls share the same physical Hall Canteen, their distinct hall activities, orientation camps, and hall association schedules can produce subtly different dining hours and gathering habits.

# From Subway to Tao Bin: A University Canteen Network as "Global Mix-and-Match"

Another curious detail in PolyU's dining landscape is the presence of international chain brands in the official directory. The snack kiosk on the Block VA podium is run by Subway, the Café in Block X is a Pacific Coffee, the Kiosk in Block W is a PizzaExpress, and the Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology's Global Student Hub (GSH) even houses a Korean-style Tao Bin self-serve coffee machine. These international brands sit alongside localised canteens like Old Can and New Can in an odd kind of mix — a student might eat a two-dish rice meal at Old Can for one meal, then grab a Subway sub as an afternoon snack between classes, and top up with a Tao Bin Korean coffee for a caffeine hit. This "global mix-and-match" dining map reflects, in its own way, PolyU's identity as an international city university: it must satisfy local students' ingrained expectations of cha chaan teng-style fast food, while also serving exchange students, non-local students, and staff who look for familiar brands.

Z Café is specifically marked "Halal by The Forest," meaning halal options are provided by The Forest's team — a small detail, but one of the few public pieces of information in PolyU's dining map that explicitly addresses religious dietary needs. For non-local students from Southeast Asia, South Asia, and elsewhere, a café bearing a halal sign means not having to double-check every time whether ingredients are compliant. Arrangements like this, small as they are, often do more to show the campus's practical care for a diverse student body than any grand "internationalisation" publicity.

# "Worth the Queue": A Contradictory Yet Remarkably Stable Way of Judging

A survey of PolyU students' public reviews of the canteens turns up an interesting commonality: almost nobody says the food is "good," but very few say it should be boycotted outright. Most reviews settle into variations of "long queue but fair prices" and "dishes are average but they'll keep you going" — contradictory-sounding yet strikingly consistent. This way of judging reflects, to some extent, the reality of outsourced canteens on a high-density campus: the contractor must keep operations running within limited space and budget, the student must get fed within a limited class break, and neither side has much room to bargain. Hence "good enough" becomes the most common and most enduring collective verdict. For the workings of the outsourcing system and its controversies over the years, see Contractor Rotation and Price Hikes: PolyU's Outsourced Canteen System.

# Z Can's Serene Japanese Vibe and Block A's Theatre Restaurant, "Priciest and Best"

Student food reviews have left behind finer-grained portraits of individual canteens worth recording. The Block Z canteen is often described as "tranquil, with a bright, fresh Japanese-style decor that offers a quiet and refined dining experience" — a contrast to the typical Hong Kong-style fast-food atmosphere of Old Can and New Can. In that sense, Z Can plays the role of the place to go "when you want to eat in peace." At the other end of the spectrum sits the theatre restaurant in Block A, serving salads, pasta, Japanese bento boxes, set meals, and burgers, and described as "PolyU's most expensive restaurant — but also the best-tasting canteen." Within the same dining network, the "cheap, good, and plentiful" Old Can and New Can coexist with the "pricey but worth it" theatre restaurant, and students switch between the two poles depending on budget and occasion — the widest price spectrum in the PolyU dining experience. These descriptions come from student media and study-abroad advisory platforms; they reflect general word-of-mouth rather than outlet-by-outlet ratings, and are classified as multiply corroborated.

# Beyond the Campus Gates: Hung Hom's Eggettes and a Neighbourhood Memory of "Eating These Since Childhood"

PolyU dining memories naturally extend beyond the campus gates. Hung Hom is a transport hub dense with eateries, and these off-campus options have long been entwined with the memories of generations of PolyU students. The most emblematic example is the Hung Hom Eggettes (紅磡雞蛋仔) shop, open for more than 40 years at its spot on Bulkeley Street and serving classic Hong Kong street snacks such as pancakes and eggettes. The shop is tiny, yet local food media describe it as "a memory that residents and students alike have grown up eating since childhood," and in 2026 it received its first mention in the Michelin Guide Hong Kong and Macau. Such neighbourhood institutions are not part of PolyU's canteen system per se, but they are indispensable to understanding the larger question of "what PolyU students eat" — for students who live in Hung Hom and pass this street daily, the eggette stall and Old Can and New Can together form a complete map of dining memories, just on opposite sides of the campus gate.

# Even the Student Newspaper Is Called "Redbrick Society"

The red-brick culture runs so deep that even the name of a student press carries the imprint. The student newspaper editorial board under the PolyU Students' Union is officially named the Redbrick Society PressCom (紅磚社學生報編輯委員會). The name alone says that "red brick," in PolyU students' self-identification, has long exceeded its meaning as a building material and become an identity tag: the Redbrick Society writes the stories of "red-brick people," naturally including their daily rituals of queuing for meals at Old Can, New Can, and Z Can. Should the Redbrick Society or other student media one day publish investigative reports or oral histories on the canteens, they would be the ideal primary source for completing this inventory of cultural anecdotes; but as of this round of research, no canteen-specific reports published by the editorial board could be found. That portion remains a blank space, to be verified and supplemented at a later date.

# A Deliberate Gap: Waiting for More Student Memories

What this article gathers is mostly detail backed by public records — architectural design, official directories, fragments in orientation guides. The truly rich cultural memory of PolyU's canteens most likely lies scattered in graduates' Moments posts, Instagram nostalgia threads, LIHKG threads, or alumni-reunion small talk: the name of a stall that has since closed, the year a canteen suddenly changed hands, the quiet thrill of getting the last takeaway box on a late-night queue — none of these currently have named, verifiable records that public searches can confirm, and by this site's standards they are not yet fit to be written up as articles. Should alumni or student media one day compile such oral histories, they would deserve inclusion as a standalone section or dedicated article — letting the cultural memory of PolyU's canteens grow from a skeleton of "architecture plus official directory" into something with flesh and warmth.