Public Toilet Can," King of Slump Dining, and "Yau Yat Can": Nicknames and Collective Memories of CityU's Canteens

A university's canteen culture is rarely written into official brochures; it lives in the nicknames students give it. CityU students call City Express the "King of Slump Dining," call Festival Walk "the White Zone," and call the food court downstairs "Yau Yat Can" — behind these monikers lies an unofficial campus history of cheap eats, crowding, nostalgia, and the occasional dark joke. This chapter collects these nicknames, urban legends, and collective memories, as a human-interest complement to the two institutional narratives in 〈System Overview〉 and 〈Contractors and Outsourcing〉.

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# 1. "Public Toilet Can": An Unflattering but Honest Nickname

According to the "City University Terminology" entry collected in the Hong Kong Online Encyclopedia (EVCHK), CityU students have long attached a rather unflattering nickname to City Express (i.e., the CityU Food Bazaar, commonly called "AC1 can") on the 5th floor of the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building (AC1) — "Public Toilet Can" (公厕can). The entry explains the logic of the name roughly as follows: this canteen is completely open, with unrestricted foot traffic — anyone can walk in and out freely, much like the "open-access character" of public facilities; the same entry also mentions that the nickname's circulation is tied to student dissatisfaction at one point over the canteen's hygiene.

This chapter must state its confidence level clearly on this entry: the nickname comes from an encyclopedia-style wiki that specialises in collecting internet slang and campus "terminology" — in nature, it is a compilation of colloquial usage, and this chapter was unable to obtain case-by-case primary records to verify which specific complaint or point in time the "hygiene dissatisfaction" referred to. This chapter therefore faithfully records the existence of the "Public Toilet Can" nickname itself, but does not extend it into a claim that "CityU's City Express was ever the subject of a confirmed food-safety incident" — that is a completely different level of statement requiring supporting evidence from Food and Environmental Hygiene Department inspection records, media investigations, or official University announcements (see the 〈Food Safety Review〉 chapter of this module). Confidence note: unverified folk usage.

Interestingly, this unflattering nickname shares the same logical core with another of the canteen's more widely circulated accolades — "King of Slump Dining" (颓食之王) — namely: openness, cheapness, no barriers to entry. One nickname stresses that "anyone can wander in and freeload," the other that "it's so cheap it's addictive" — the two labels, one seemingly a dig and the other a compliment, point at the same thing: this is a canteen with virtually no socioeconomic threshold at all.

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# 2. "King of Slump Dining" and a Legend That Never Fails

According to a "CityU Collective Memories" feature compiled by HK01, AC1 (City Express) is known among students as the "King of Slump Dining", its signature being a cart noodle bowl for under HK$20; the report records a widely circulated piece of campus "street wisdom" — supposedly, after eating this bowl of cart noodles, "you are guaranteed to clear your bowels immediately; it has never failed" (一定可以立刻清肠胃，万试万灵). This is clearly an exaggerated, self-deprecating student joke rather than any kind of scientifically grounded claim, and this chapter records it as a campus food urban legend, not as a literal food-safety judgement — it is closer to a humorous product of "poor-student self-mockery culture," less a complaint that the food tastes bad or is unhygienic than an act of hyperbolic rhetoric that lends a layer of collective-memory gloss to a budget canteen.

The same report also notes that a relatively hearty combo meal could be had for under HK$30, making it the lunch choice of choice for students "below the poverty line" — again a self-deprecating student quip rather than a serious economic statistic, included here because it precisely captures AC1's position in the CityU food landscape: it is not the "best-tasting" canteen, but the one with "the fewest psychological barriers."

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# 2.5. The "Time Tunnel": A Footbridge Linking Campus and Mall

To understand where the nicknames "White Zone" and "Yau Yat Can" come from, one must first look at the pedestrian footbridge that connects the CityU campus to the Festival Walk mall — according to this site's 〈Campus Geography〉 chapter, this passageway is known on campus as the "Time Tunnel" (时光隧道). The name itself paints a vivid picture: students cross this passage — with its science-fiction name but utterly ordinary covered-bridge reality — every day on their way to class, to buy meals, to eat, shuttling between the identities of "academic building" and "shopping mall."

In a sense, the "Time Tunnel" nickname is the spatial starting point of CityU's food culture — without this footbridge, there would be no "Yau Yat Can" and no "White Zone" phenomenon described below. One bridge has welded two spaces that should belong to "campus" and "off-campus" respectively into a single living sphere in the everyday language of CityU students.

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# 3. White Zone and Yau Yat Can: A Mall Eaten into an "Unofficial Canteen"

The 〈Canteen System Overview〉 chapter has already mentioned that CityU students jokingly call the adjacent Festival Walk mall the "White Zone" (because of the mall's predominantly white interior decor). The HK01 collective-memory feature adds another layer to the nickname: because regular restaurants inside Festival Walk are generally pricey, and CityU's City Express has "security that might as well not exist" and zero barriers to entry, many white-collar workers employed at Festival Walk and the surrounding area would deliberately walk into the CityU campus to take advantage of the cheap lunch at the canteen — this is also another source of the "Public Toilet Can" nickname: it is so open that even non-University people can freely patronise it.

The counterpart nickname is "Yau Yat Can" (又一can) — a pun merging "Yau Yat" (from Festival Walk's Chinese name, 又一城) with "canteen," used to refer to the food court in the mall's basement level. This two-way naming relationship is quite interesting: the University's own canteen is freeloaded upon by outsiders as a budget eatery, while the mall's food court is dubbed an "unofficial canteen" by students — in CityU students' linguistic habits, the campus canteens and the mall have long been dismantled and reassembled into two parts of a single dining map, rather than a clear-cut "on-campus" versus "off-campus."

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# 4. Six Collective Memories: A Final Inventory Before AC1 and AC2 Closed

Around the closure of the AC1 and AC2 canteens in 2019, HK01, under the title "CityU Collective Memories," compiled six details circulating among students. This chapter reproduces them as is:

1. The cheap "slump food" culture — as noted above, AC1's cart noodles for under HK$20 were the lunch of choice for students "below the poverty line."
2. The White Zone and employee diners — Festival Walk is nicknamed "White Zone" for its white decor, and the CityU Food Bazaar, having no entry barriers, became a budget lunch option for nearby office workers.
3. AC2's hidden gems — Hainanese chicken rice, fish-fillet burgers, Thai grilled pork collar with oily rice, and Sichuan-style mala tang were the "must-eat" list passed by word of mouth among students.
4. The Valentine's Day set menu — AC2 once offered a set for two at HK$158, including starters and dessert, a memory of "poor-student dates" for many CityU couples.
5. The cheese craze — half-baked cheese tarts and cheese-foam oolong tea became runaway hits; the tarts in particular frequently sold out, becoming famously hard to get.
6. AC3 Bistro as the fallback — whenever AC1 and AC2 were packed, students would head to AC3 Bistro, which specialised in Western fare, baked rice, and pizza.

Taken together, these six memories sketch a remarkably concrete portrait of the everyday dining psychology of CityU students: cheapness is the baseline, hidden menus travel by word of mouth, limited-time holiday specials create ritual, hit items use scarcity to generate hype, and there is always a backup when things are full — a university canteen earns a place in "collective memory" not through Michelin-grade output but through precisely this kind of fine-grained detail that interlocks with everyday life.

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# 5. "Farewell AC CAN Big Meal Gathering": A Breakup Feast Organised by Student Media

On 24 June 2019, the day AC1 and AC2 officially closed, according to UPower's report, CityU Radio (城市广播) — one of the statutory media bodies under the CityU Students' Union and an affiliate organisation — organised an event called the "Farewell AC CAN Big Meal Gathering" (告别AC CAN大茶饭聚), inviting all students and staff to return on the canteens' final day and share a "last meal" together.

The identity of the organisers is worth noting: CityU Radio is no ordinary interest society but one of the two statutory media watchdog bodies in the "five-branch separation of powers" structure described in this site's 〈CityU Students' Union and Student Organisation Ecology〉 chapter. The fact that a media body within the Union's system took the lead in organising a "breakup meal" for a canteen shows that this canteen's place in CityU students' hearts had long outgrown "a place to eat" — it had been invested with an almost ritual significance as a "vessel of collective memory."

According to the report, this canteen was described by students as "one of the finest canteens in the tertiary sector," offering roast-meat rice, cheese tarts, Hainanese chicken, fish-fillet burgers, cheese foam drinks, and other popular items. The online reaction showed a considerable depth of reluctance: one alumnus said they wanted to "come back to eat" (返嚟食), a student specifically mentioned "my Hainanese chicken rice and breakfast" (我个海南鸡饭同早餐呀), and another, on hearing the news, exclaimed in surprise "no way… something this good is being replaced too?" (唔系挂……咁高质都转). The report notably contrasts this reaction with student criticism over a contemporaneous canteen incident at Hong Kong Baptist University, pointing out that CityU students' response was more affection and reluctance than complaint — a telling comparison: faced with the same change of caterer, CityU students' first instinct was nostalgia rather than protest, which perhaps indirectly attests to the reputation AC1/AC2 had built up in students' minds over the years.

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# 6. AC1 Reopens: Two-Sides-Dish Rice Takes Over, Cheese Tarts Temporarily Absent

According to HK01's on-site report from 1 August 2019, the day AC1 reopened, the new canteen resumed business under the name "City Express," its menu led by two-sides-dish rice (HK$23.5, with soup), dace-fish-ball congee (HK$22.5), roast-meat rice, and rice noodles. The reporter, after trying it personally, described the two-sides-dish rice as offering the "best value for money." However, the old canteen's signature cheese tarts and pearl milk tea were suspended on opening day because the ingredients had not yet arrived — for older students who regarded the cheese tart as part of their "collective memory," this was a bittersweet transitional hiccup: the absence of the signature items was, in a sense, a more concrete reminder than the reopening itself that "the old canteen" was gone for good.

The good news: even on reopening day, the lunch rush still saw queues of twenty to thirty people — a sign that even without the old signboards and some signature dishes, students' trust in this location and its "cheap, good, and decent" positioning had not entirely evaporated with the change of caterer.

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# 7. The Chef's "Slicing by Looks" Legend: An Urban Legend to Treat with Caution

According to Tutor Circle's (尋補) review roundup of CityU's canteens, an urban legend circulates about AC1's roast-meat counter — allegedly, the chef responsible for chopping roast meats, upon seeing a good-looking young woman queueing, would "deliberately cut better cuts" for her. Legends of this kind are hardly uncommon across Hong Kong university canteen cultures (nearly every university canteen known for roast meats has a similar version in circulation), and they belong essentially to the realm of campus humour/urban legend, not any verifiable, specific allegation — no names are named, no specific time or place given; it is closer to a collective joke of the "canteen underworld" than a serious accusation of gender bias or unfair service.

In accordance with the site's BL P and credibility conventions, this chapter classifies it as folklore/disclaimered humour: it is recorded because it is genuinely part of CityU's canteen culture, but readers are explicitly cautioned not to treat it as an accusation against any specific staff member or as a statement of fact.

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# 8. AC3's Other Side: A Dating Spot and a "Hipster" Corner

Unlike the down-to-earth positioning of AC1 and AC2, AC3 Bistro and its adjoining Garden Cafe are more often described in student lore as the "most stylish corner" of CityU's canteens — sofa seating, floor-to-ceiling windows, rooftop views, paired with slightly higher prices for Western food, pizza, and baked rice, make it a relatively "luxurious" exception in CityU's "cheap, good, decent" dining landscape. According to Tutor Circle's introduction, many students deliberately choose this spot for group discussions, dates, or simply "staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows in a daze," rather than merely to fill their stomachs — a pointed contrast with AC1's "slump food" culture, showing that CityU students do, in fact, make fine-grained distinctions of occasion and mood when it comes to "eating."

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# 9. A Taste Memory Across Languages: 5380 Cafe and International Students' CityU Canteen

As a campus with a relatively high degree of internationalisation, CityU's food memories are not written only in Cantonese nicknames. The 5380 Cafe (Kebab Station) on the 5th floor of the Bank of China (Hong Kong) Complex offers Middle Eastern-style shawarma and pita from the Ebeneezer's Kebabs & Pizzeria brand, and is one of the few halal-friendly options for exchange students, international students, and Muslim staff and students on the CityU campus. Although public reporting has little to say about this small establishment, its existence alone shows that the "cultural anecdotes" of CityU's canteens cannot be written solely through the Cantonese nicknames of local students — a university's food map is always a collage of local memory and foreign tastes.

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# 10. Why Canteen Memories Are Worth Collecting Seriously

Looking at the nicknames, legends, and collective memories collected in this chapter together, a common pattern emerges: CityU students' affection for their canteens almost never points at "Michelin-level gastronomic experiences" but at "this place carried a specific slice of my life at a certain stage" — the King of Slump Dining's bowl of cart noodles was the life-sustaining meal before a deadline; AC2's cheese tart was the backdrop to afternoon chats with friends; the Valentine's Day set was a ritual even poor students could afford; the last meal before AC1 closed was graduating students or alumni trying to grasp once more a concrete, taste-reproducible fragment of youth.

These details are trivial and unsystematic — yet they are precisely the most genuine texture of the abstract word "campus life." This chapter collects them not for curiosity's sake or for laughs, but because — the history of a university is never only about departmental reshuffles and ranking rises and falls; it also includes the offhand complaint, the passing wistfulness, uttered by countless students while queueing for food in the canteen.

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# 11. CMCAFE: A Corner With "No Story" — and Loved for It

Not every canteen location needs a catchy nickname to be remembered. According to Tutor Circle's campus review, the CMCAFE on the 3rd floor of the Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre has virtually no urban legends or dramatic incidents attached to it in student lore — the most said about it is simply that "the milk tea is really good" and "the place is new, clean, and less crowded." This coffee spot mainly serves staff and students of the School of Creative Media, the Department of Computer Science, the Department of English, and the Department of Media and Communication; geographically, because it lies outside the main teaching area, foot traffic is naturally far lower than at AC1 and AC2.

This chapter includes CMCAFE to remind readers of something easily overlooked: campus food culture is defined not only by the liveliest, most-nicknamed places. For students who prefer a quieter environment and no queueing in the crowd, a coffee corner "with no story" is itself the reason it is favoured — this, too, is a campus memory worth recording, albeit far more low-key in form than the "King of Slump Dining."

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# 12. A Map of Nicknames: Putting This Chapter's Terms Side by Side

For readers' quick reference, the CityU canteen nicknames and expressions mentioned in this chapter are summarised below (all subject to the credibility notes given in their respective sections above, not restated here):

This little "map of nicknames" records, in a sense, more honestly than any official brochure what CityU students really think of their canteen system — it contains self-mockery, nostalgia, and a love-hate ambivalence towards the very fact of being "open with no barriers."

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# 12.5. The Language of Colour-Coded Zones: Even Canteen Addresses Depend on a Wayfinding System

Another detail of CityU campus culture worth recording is its distinctive "colour-zone" wayfinding system. According to this site's 〈Campus Geography〉 chapter, CityU's core teaching building, the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building (formerly known as Academic 1 — the official new name behind "AC1"), has a floor area of approximately 63,000 square metres and houses 116 laboratories and 18 lecture theatres — given its sheer size, the University simply divided the entire building into five colour zones — purple (P), green (G), blue (B), yellow (Y), and red (R) — and everyday communication about "which floor to meet on" is done through coordinates like "red zone, 2nd floor" or "purple zone, 4th floor," rather than floor numbers alone.

This language has long since seeped into dining life — the Coffee Cart mentioned in this module's 〈System Overview〉 chapter carries the official address "Yeung Kin Man Academic Building, 4th Floor, Purple Zone." For new students, remembering "where the purple zone and green zone of AC1 are" is almost as important as remembering "which floor of AC1 has food"; this is also why many freshman guide articles (such as Knowdable's "CityU Freshman Guide Pack") present Halls, campus landmarks, and Canteen locations in a single article — at CityU, wayfinding ability and "knowing where to eat" are practically the same survival skill.

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# 12.6. Pineapple Buns and Alumni Nostalgia: A Small Fragment Circulating on Social Media

Canteen memories do not end at graduation. A CityU alumna's post once circulated on social media: a graduate, whose child happened to be taking part in a beach-cleaning activity nearby, stopped by the CityU canteen to buy lunch — only to find that as an alumna she could no longer use the self-service ordering kiosk and had to purchase at the manned counter instead; she noted especially that the CityU Food Bazaar's pineapple bun was "made to order and genuinely excellent," and that the HK$1.50 upcharge for a cold drink was "rare these days."

Such a post may not constitute any "news event," yet it captures precisely the place a university canteen holds in its graduates' minds — it is not just a place to eat, but a coordinate of nostalgia that one can "go back and check, at any time, whether it is still there." For alumni, the CityU canteen is, in a sense, a ritual of nostalgia that "can still be bought into": while the pineapple bun remains at the same price, made the same way, that alone is enough to set one's mind at ease.

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# 13. In Closing: Canteen Nicknames as a Form of Campus Self-Governance

One more point worth making: most of these nicknames were born and circulated on discussion forums, social media, and by word of mouth — not through any official channel — and in a way this also constitutes a "folk rating" students give the canteen system in their own language. When students call AC1 the "Public Toilet Can," it is less pure mockery than a piece of oversight laced with dark humour: through an unflattering nickname, it keeps reminding the canteen of the perceived issues that once lurked behind its "openness"; and when students spontaneously organise a "Farewell AC CAN Big Meal Gathering," that collective act is itself a way of "writing the obituary" of a canteen's history through informal means.

This suggests that to observe a university's canteen culture, one cannot look only at official announcements and caterer signboards; one must also look at what students privately call it, how they remember it, and how they digest their dissatisfactions with humour. These linguistic traces are the closest first-hand material to real campus life.

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# 14. Compared with the Other Seven UGC-Funded Universities, CityU's Canteen Culture Has a Distinct Temper

Placing CityU within the coordinates of Hong Kong's eight UGC-funded universities, its canteen culture carries a temperament somewhat different from the others. At the college-based universities built into the hillsides, canteen culture tends to be deeply tied to "college identity" — what students long for is usually "our college's canteen," with a strong sense of belonging attached. CityU has no college system, and the objects of canteen nostalgia are instead concentrated more on specific spatial coordinates themselves (AC1, AC2) and specific dishes (cheese tarts, Hainanese chicken rice), rather than any abstract symbol of collective affiliation.

This could be understood as a "decentred" canteen emotion — CityU students are not nostalgic for "a canteen that belongs to me" but for "that place where I once went with friends and ate together." This emotional pattern echoes the overall character of CityU's campus culture — "no college system, with departments and student hostels as the core of belonging" (see this site's 〈CityU Students' Union and Student Organisation Ecology〉 chapter): at CityU, a sense of belonging depends more on concrete, repeatable daily scenes than on institutional identity labels. Canteen nicknames and collective memories are precisely the most vivid vehicle of this "scene-based belonging."

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# 15. An Invitation Still Open: These Memories Will Keep Growing

The nicknames and memories collected in this chapter are mostly concentrated in the period from 2009 to 2019, with the most recent item being a cross-university price survey from 2024. This does not mean CityU's canteen culture stopped growing after that — quite the opposite: as long as AC1, AC2, and AC3 remain in operation, new nicknames, new hidden menu items, and new urban legends should continue to circulate among students by word of mouth.

This chapter's inclusion criteria are "verifiable by traceable sources" (news reports, student media, Wiki entries) rather than "the site's editors thought it was interesting, so in." This means there must be a great many CityU canteen memes circulating on LIHKG, Threads, and Instagram campus groups that this chapter has not yet captured — for example, after the Ma On Shan Pak Shek Hostel Village comes into use, will its Hall Canteen spawn its own nicknames and legends? Will the two-site hostel arrangement give rise to a new round of comparison and banter between "Kowloon Tong students" and "Ma On Shan students" over canteen experiences? These are blanks left for future readers to fill. As a first-edition "map of nicknames," this chapter welcomes — and expects — to be revised, supplemented, and overturned by more detailed fieldwork and student-media investigations to come.

It is worth adding that this chapter has deliberately excluded any "rumour-style" food-safety exposé for which no reliable source could be found — for example, the kind of "this canteen once did such-and-such" claims that occasionally surface online without any specific date or provenance. Were this chapter to accept such material indiscriminately, it would easily turn "cultural anecdotes" into a "rumour depot," diluting what it actually means to record: those campus memories that are both genuinely traceable and sufficiently concrete and vivid. This is also why the chapter's structure prefers to devote its weight to six "collective memories" with clear sources, a "farewell meal gathering" with a named organiser and date, and a handful of nicknames with credibility notes — rather than pursuing an appearance of "more content, more lively."

Related reading: Academic Building Above, Festival Walk Below: An Overview of CityU's Canteen System, Contractors, Outsourcing, and Price-Hike Controversies, Food Safety Review: No Major Cases Found, but the Regulatory Machinery Is Real.

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