Everyone knows about the famous Kim Gary restaurants.

I just went for dinner at a branch in The Curve today. While the prices are a little expensive, you’ll always find Kim Gary Restaurants totally full; Apart from its nice and unique dishes, I think it’s also thanks to the uprising ‘yum cha‘ culture among youths in Malaysia.

I think there are 2 main types of ‘yum cha‘ places. The normal kopitiams – Where you sit by the road and drink teh tarik; and the ‘high class’ franchise restaurants – Brands like Kim Gary, Old Town Kopitiam, Wong Kok Char Chan Teng (Wong Kok Hong Kong Restaurant) etc.

Wierdly enough, apparently many of the second type restaurant owners are (or are pretending to be) from Hong Kong!

Just go around the city, and you’ll find ‘Hong Kong styled’ restaurants popping up everywhere! I don’t see a lot of ‘Singapore-styled restaurants’ or ‘Indonesia-styled restaurants’, why Hong Kong?

I also noticed that the so-called ‘high-class’ kopitiams are all adopting the same method for ordering food. Typically, you choose from the menu, mark your order on a piece of paper listed with the names of all the dishes, and a waiter comes to confirm everything and process your order.

I really wonder where are they copying it from! From my experience, they don’t do that in Hong Kong! Hmm…

Anyway, Kim Gary’s menu confirms that ARE Kim Gary branches in Hong Kong, so the boss is obviously not some fat local Ah Beng, whew! Here’s a photo of the menu page:

According to the information in the menu, A few Kim Gary restaurant branches in Hong Kong are called ‘Gary Cafe’, ‘Gary Restaurant’, and ‘Kam Gary Restaurant’. There is also a cute branch name called ‘Apple Restaurant‘, I wonder why…?

• Note: the following story is fictional. (In Case Kim Gary sues me! =)

Maybe the evolution went like this: At first the boss, named Gary, opened his own ‘Gary cafe’. Later, he thought that the word ‘cafe’ was not attractive enough, so he changed the name to ‘Gary Restaurant’.

A couple of years later, he found out that there were too many guys named ‘Gary’ in Hong Kong, so he added his surname into the restaurant’s name, and it became ‘Kam Gary Restaurant’. The Cantonese translation of “金” is “Kam”, after all.

Then, business was booming and Kam Gary Restaurant was expanding globally! Some investors told the boss that perhaps they should change it to ‘Kim Gary Restaurant’ since it would sound more like an international brand… And so ‘Kim Gary Restaurant’ it became.

— end of fictional story —

If the story was true, what do you think the next evolution would be?

I had no idea until I went back to Ipoh last month and saw this banner when I was driving:

I really thought that Kim Gary has finally opened a branch in Ipoh but something was wrong!

No! It’s SIM Gary!

I couldn’t believe it so I drove around looking for it, and I found the shop in a nearby area:

OMG… It seems that they even imitated the Chinese word design of Kim Gary… Copycats!

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