Public-Toilet Can, King of Cheap Eats, and Festival-Walk Can: The Nicknames and Collective Memories of CityU Canteens

# Public-Toilet Can, King of Cheap Eats, and Festival-Walk Can: The Nicknames and Collective Memories of CityU Canteens

A university’s canteen culture is seldom found in its official brochures; it lives in the nicknames students bestow upon it. CityU people call City Express the “King of Cheap Eats”, call the Festival Walk shopping centre the “White Zone”, and call its downstairs food court “Festival-Walk Can” (又一can). Behind these nicknames lies a grassroots campus history of affordability, overcrowding, nostalgia and the occasional dark humour. This piece collects these nicknames, urban legends and collective memories, serving as a human-interest companion to the institutional narratives in the System Overview and Contractor & Outsourcing chapters.

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# 1. “Public-Toilet Can”: An Indelicate but Honest Nickname

According to the “City University Terminology” entry archived on the Hong Kong Internet Encyclopedia (EVCHK), CityU students have long used a rather indelicate nickname for City Express (also known as CityU Dining Hall, or colloquially “AC1 Can”), located on the 5th floor of the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building (AC1): “Public-Toilet Can” (公廁can). The entry explains the logic behind the name by noting the canteen’s open-door policy and unrestricted footfall — anyone can freely enter and exit, much like the “open” nature of a public facility. The same entry also mentions that this nickname’s currency is tied to student dissatisfaction with the canteen’s hygiene at one time.

A necessary note on credibility: This nickname originates from EVCHK, a repository of internet slang and campus “terminology”. By nature, it is a compilation of colloquial usage. This article has not been able to obtain first-hand incident records to verify which specific complaint or time period the “hygiene dissatisfaction” refers to. Therefore, this article faithfully records the existence of the nickname “Public-Toilet Can” itself, but does not extrapolate from it that “CityU’s City Express has had a confirmed food safety incident” — that is an entirely different level of claim, which would require corroboration from Food and Environmental Hygiene Department inspection records, media investigations or university announcements (see the Food Safety Record piece in this module for details). Credibility rating: Unverified community lore.

Intriguingly, this unflattering nickname shares the same logical core as its other, more celebrated moniker — the “King of Cheap Eats”: openness, cheapness, and a total absence of barriers. One nickname stresses that “anyone can wander in and scrounge a meal”, the other that it’s “cheap enough to be addictive”. The two framings seem polarised — one a slur, one an accolade — yet they point to the same thing: a canteen with almost zero socio-economic threshold.

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# 2. “King of Cheap Eats” and a Ridiculously Reliable Campus Legend

According to a Hong Kong 01 report on CityU’s collective memories, AC1 (City Express) was dubbed the “King of Cheap Eats” by students, famed for its cart noodles priced under HK$20. The report records a widely circulated piece of campus “lore” — that after eating this bowl of noodles, “you can definitely clear your bowels immediately. Guaranteed, every time.” This is plainly an exaggerated, self-deprecating student quip, not any kind of scientifically grounded assertion. This article records it as a campus culinary urban legend, not a literal food safety judgement. It belongs more to the humour of “broke-student self-mockery culture”; rather than a genuine attack on the food’s taste or hygiene, it is more an exercise in embellishing an affordable canteen with a layer of collective memory through hyperbole.

The same report also notes that a relatively substantial set meal for under HK$30 was the lunch of choice for students living “below the poverty line” — another self-deprecating student joke, not serious economic analysis. It is recorded here because it captures the essence of AC1’s niche in CityU’s dining landscape with precision: it is not the “most delicious” canteen, but the canteen with “the least psychological burden”.

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# 2.5. “Time Tunnel”: The Footbridge That Stitches Campus and Mall Together

To understand the origins of the nicknames “White Zone” and “Festival-Walk Can”, one must first consider the pedestrian footbridge connecting CityU’s campus to the Festival Walk shopping centre. As recorded in the Campus Geography article on this site, this passage is known on campus as the “Time Tunnel” (時光隧道). The name itself is evocative: every day, students heading to classes, buying meals, come and go through this passage whose name is sci-fi but whose physical form is an ordinary link bridge, constantly switching between two identities — “academic building” and “shopping mall”.

The nickname “Time Tunnel” is, in a sense, the spatial point of origin for CityU’s dining culture — without this passage, there would be no term “Festival-Walk Can”, nor the “White Zone” phenomenon explored later in this article. A single footbridge, in the daily language of CityU students, welds two spaces that should belong to “on-campus” and “off-campus” into a single, seamless living sphere.

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# 3. White Zone and Festival-Walk Can: When a Mall Gets Eaten as an “Annex Canteen”

The Canteen System Overview chapter has already noted that CityU students jokingly call the adjacent Festival Walk mall the “White Zone” (because of the mall’s predominantly white decor). The Hong Kong 01 collective-memory report adds another layer to this moniker: because the formal restaurants inside Festival Walk are generally pricey, while CityU’s City Express has “security that might as well not exist” and zero access controls, many office workers from Festival Walk and nearby buildings instead make a point of walking onto the CityU campus to “scrounge” a cheap lunch at the canteen. This is another source of the “Public-Toilet Can” nickname: so open that even non-CityU people freely patronise it.

A complementary nickname is “Festival-Walk Can” (又一can) — a portmanteau blending “Festival Walk” (又一城) and “canteen”, used to refer to the food court in the mall’s basement. This bidirectional naming relationship is rather intriguing: the campus canteen is treated as a “cheap canteen” by outsiders, while the shopping-mall food court is called an “annex canteen” by students. In CityU students’ linguistic habits, the campus canteen and the shopping mall have long been dismantled and reassembled into two parts of a single dining map, not a rigidly distinct “inside” and “outside” campus.

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# 4. Six Collective Memories: The Last Stock-Take Before AC1 and AC2 Closed

Around the time that the AC1 and AC2 canteens ceased operations in 2019, Hong Kong 01 compiled six details circulating among students under the banner of “CityU Collective Memories”. This article reproduces them verbatim:

1. The culture of cheap “scran” — As described above, AC1’s cart noodles, at under HK$20, were the lunch of choice for students living “below the poverty line”.
2. White Zone and the working diners — Festival Walk, dubbed the “White Zone” for its white decor, and CityU Dining Hall, with its complete lack of access control, became a cheap lunch option for nearby office workers.
3. AC2’s hidden gems — Hainanese chicken rice, fish-fillet burgers, Thai-style pork-neck rice with fragrant oil, and Sichuan-style mala hotpot formed a list of “must-eats” passed by word of mouth among students.
4. The Valentine’s Day set menu — AC2 once offered a dinner set for two, priced at HK$158 and including starters and dessert, a fixture in the “broke-student date” memory bank for many CityU couples.
5. The cheese craze — Lava cheese tarts and cheese-topped oolong tea were phenomena in their day; the lava cheese tarts were so often sold out that nabbing one became an achievement.
6. AC3 Bistro as the fallback — Whenever AC1 and AC2 were packed to bursting, students would decamp to AC3 Bistro, which specialised in Western fare, baked rice and pizza.

Taken together, these six recollections sketch a remarkably concrete map of the everyday CityU student’s dining psychology: cheapness is the baseline; hidden menus rely on word of mouth; festival specials create a sense of ritual; trending items rely on engineered scarcity; and when one place is slammed, there’s a backup plan. What earns a university canteen a place in “collective memory” is never a Michelin-starred product but this granular sense of detail meshing tightly with the rhythms of daily life.

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# 5. “The Farewell AC Canteen Big Meal Gathering”: A Last Supper Initiated by Student Media

On 24 June 2019, the official last day of AC1 and AC2, UPower reported that CityU Broadcasting (城市廣播) — one of the statutory media bodies under the CityU Students’ Union — organised an event called “The Farewell AC Canteen Big Meal Gathering” (告別AC CAN大茶飯聚), inviting all students and staff to return to campus on the canteens’ final day and share one last meal together.

The identity of the organisers is noteworthy: CityU Broadcasting is not an ordinary interest club, but one of the two statutory media oversight bodies within the “five-power separation” structure described in this site’s article on CityU Student Union and Student Organisation Ecology. That a media body from within the student union apparatus would step in to organise a canteen “last supper” underlines that in the minds of CityU students, this canteen had long transcended being a “place to eat” — it had been invested with a quasi-ritualistic significance as a “carrier of collective memory”.

According to the report, students described this canteen as “one of the finest canteens in higher education”, offering siu mei rice, cheese tarts, Hainanese chicken, fish-fillet buns, cheese-topped drinks, and a range of popular items. Online reactions conveyed a pronounced sense of reluctance: alumni said they wanted to “返嚟食” (come back and eat), students specifically mentioned “我個海南雞飯同早餐呀” (My Hainanese chicken rice and breakfast!), and others, on learning the news, exclaimed in surprise, “唔係掛……咁高質都轉” (You’re kidding… it’s so good and they’re still changing it?). The report explicitly contrasted this reaction with the student criticism prompted by a concurrent canteen incident at Hong Kong Baptist University, observing that what CityU students displayed towards this canteen was more emotion and reluctance than complaint. The contrast is instructive: faced with the same circumstance of a canteen contractor change, CityU students’ first instinct was nostalgia, not denunciation — a fact that obliquely corroborates the long-accumulated goodwill AC1/AC2 had built up in students’ minds.

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# 6. AC1 Reopens: “Two-Dish Rice” Takes Over; the Cheese Tart Is Temporarily AWOL

According to an on-the-ground Hong Kong 01 report on the day AC1 reopened, 1 August 2019, the new canteen resumed business under the name “City Express”, with a menu centred on two-dish rice (HK$23.50, with soup of the day), dace-fish-ball congee (HK$22.50), siu mei rice and rice noodles. The reporter, after a personal tasting, judged the two-dish rice to be “the best value for money”. However, the old canteen’s signature cheese tarts and bubble tea were temporarily unavailable on opening day because the ingredients had not arrived. For former students for whom the cheese tart was a “collective memory”, this was, to some extent, a transitional footnote tinged with regret: the absence of the signature item, in a way, signalled more concretely than the reopening itself that “the old canteen” was now irretrievably gone.

The good news was that at lunchtime on reopening day there was still a queue of twenty or thirty people — an indication that even with a farewell to the old branding and some of the signature dishes, students’ trust in this location and its “cheap and cheerful” positioning had not evaporated entirely with the change of contractor.

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# 7. The Legend of the “Face-Parsing” Siu Mei Master: An Urban Legend to Be Treated with Caution

According to a canteen-by-canteen review compiled by TutorCircle Blog, an urban legend circulates concerning the siu mei (roast meat) counter at AC1. The story goes that the master carver of roast meats, upon seeing a queue with a particularly good-looking female student, would “deliberately slice a superior cut of meat” for her. This type of tale is not uncommon in the canteen culture of Hong Kong universities — virtually every campus canteen celebrated for its siu mei has hosted a variant. In essence, it belongs to the category of campus humour and urban legend, not any verifiable specific allegation. It names no names, cites no specific time or place, and is closer to a collective piece of “canteen folklore” than a substantive grievance about gender or service fairness.

In accordance with BLP and credibility protocols, this article classifies this as a playful anecdote (戲説). It is included because it is indeed a part of the canteen culture lore that circulates at CityU, but readers are explicitly cautioned not to treat it as an allegation against any specific staff member or a statement of fact.

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# 8. The Other Side of AC3: Date-Night Destination and Hipster Corner

In contrast to the mass-market positioning of AC1 and AC2, AC3 Bistro and its adjoining Garden Cafe are more often described in student word-of-mouth as the canteen location with the most “style” — sofa seating, floor-to-ceiling windows, a rooftop view, paired with a slightly elevated price point for its Western dishes, pizzas and baked rice, making it a relatively “luxurious” exception on CityU’s largely “cheap and cheerful” dining map. According to the TutorCircle Blog introduction, many students make a point of coming here for group project discussions, dates, or simply to “zone out looking at the floor-to-ceiling window view”, rather than purely to fill their stomachs. This stands in precise counterpoint to the “cheap eats” culture of AC1, demonstrating that CityU students do have a nuanced distinction in how and where they eat, depending on occasion and mood.

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# 9. Taste Memory Across Languages: 5380 Cafe and the International Student Canteen

As a highly internationalised campus, CityU’s culinary memories are not written solely in Cantonese nicknames. 5380 Cafe (Kebab Station), on the 5th floor of the Bank of China Complex, serves Middle Eastern-style shawarma and pita under the Ebeneezer’s Kebabs & Pizzeria brand, making it one of the few halal-friendly options on campus for many exchange students, international students, and Muslim staff and students. Although public reporting on this small outlet is sparse, its very existence illustrates that the “cultural anecdotes” of CityU canteens cannot be written exclusively through the Cantonese nicknames of local students. A university’s culinary map is always a collage of local memories and imported tastes.

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# 10. Why Canteen Memories Deserve to Be Collected Seriously

Viewed together, the nicknames, legends and collective memories collected in this article reveal a common thread: CityU students’ affection for their canteens almost never points to a “Michelin-starred culinary experience”, but rather to “this place has carried a specific phase of my actual life.” The King of Cheap Eats’ bowl of cart noodles was the life-support meal before a deadline; the AC2 cheese tart was the backdrop to afternoon chats with friends; the Valentine’s Day set menu was a ritual affordable even for broke students; the final meal before AC1 closed was something people about to graduate, or who had already graduated, wanted to grasp at — a tangible fragment of youth that could be reproduced on the tongue.

These details are trivial, unsystematic — yet they are precisely the most authentic texture of that abstract term “campus life”. This article collects them not for sensationalism or laughs, but because the history of a university is never just about departmental restructurings and ranking fluctuations — it also includes the complaints and yearnings uttered offhandedly by countless students while queuing at the canteen.

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# 11. CMCAFE: A Corner That Is “Unexceptional”, and Therefore Beloved

Not every canteen point needs a flashy nickname to be remembered. According to the TutorCircle Blog’s campus review, CMCAFE on the 3rd floor of the Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre has almost no urban legends or dramatic incidents attached to it in student word-of-mouth. The most commonly mentioned things are simply that its “milk tea is especially good” and “the place is new, clean, and less crowded.” This coffee spot primarily serves staff and students from the School of Creative Media, the Department of Computer Science, the Department of English, and the Department of Media and Communication; geographically removed from the main teaching hub, its footfall is naturally much lower than AC1 or AC2.

Including CMCAFE in this collection is a deliberate reminder of something easily overlooked: campus dining culture is not defined solely by the loudest, most nicknamed locations. For a segment of students who prefer a quieter environment and want to avoid the crush, a coffee corner “with no story” is its own reason for being cherished. That, too, is a kind of campus memory worth recording — just far more low-key than the “King of Cheap Eats”.

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# 12. Nickname Map: A Consolidated View of the Terms in This Article

For the reader’s quick reference, the CityU canteen nicknames and terms mentioned in this article are summarised below (all treated with the credibility ratings noted in their respective sections above, not re-argued here):

In a sense, this small “nickname map” offers a more honest record of CityU students’ true feelings about their canteen system than any official brochure. It contains self-deprecation, nostalgia, and a complex mix of love and exasperation towards the very “barrier-free” openness of the place.

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# 12.5. The Language of Colour Zones: When Even a Canteen Address Requires the Wayfinding System

Another notable detail of CityU’s campus culture is its distinctive “colour zone” wayfinding system. As collated in this site’s Campus Geography article, the main academic building, the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building (formerly known as Academic 1, the source of the “AC1” designation for its new official name), has a floor area of roughly 63,000 square metres and contains 116 laboratories and 18 lecture theatres. Confronted with this sheer bulk, the university has long since divided the entire building into five colour zones: Purple (P), Green (G), Blue (B), Yellow (Y) and Red (R). In daily communication, staff and students arrange meeting points using coordinates like “Red Zone, 2/F” or “Purple Zone, 4/F”, not just floor numbers.

This language has long permeated dining life — the Coffee Cart mentioned in the System Overview chapter in this module has as its official address “Purple Zone, 4/F, Yeung Kin Man Academic Building.” For new students, memorising “where the AC1 Purple Zone is, where the Green Zone is” is almost as crucial as remembering “which floor in AC1 has food.” This is why many freshman guides (such as Knowdable’s “CityU Freshman Ultimate Guide”) present halls, campus landmarks, and canteen locations in the same article. At CityU, wayfinding and knowing where to eat are practically the same survival skill.

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# 12.6. The Pineapple Bun and Alumni Homesickness: A Small Fragment Circulating on Social Media

Canteen memory does not end at graduation. A piece shared by a CityU alumna once circulated on social media: having graduated, she was in the area because her child was participating in a nearby beach clean-up and stopped by a CityU canteen to buy lunch, only to discover that as an alumna she could no longer use the self-service kiosks and had to queue at the staffed counter. She made a point of mentioning that the CityU Dining Hall’s pineapple bun, “即叫即整又真係好正” (made to order and genuinely so good), and that a cold drink surcharge of just HK$1.50 was “好難得” (hard to come by).

This sort of sharing may not constitute a “news event”, but it captures precisely the position a university canteen occupies in a graduate’s mental landscape: it is not merely a place to eat, but a nostalgic landmark one can return to at any time and “check if it’s still there”. For CityU alumni, the canteen is a kind of “still purchasable” ritual of nostalgia: as long as the pineapple bun is still that price, made that way, it is enough to reassure.

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# 13. Final Thought: Canteen Nicknames as an Expression of Campus Self-Governance

One last thing: these nicknames were mostly born and circulated on forums, social media, and by word of mouth, not any official channel. To some degree, this is students using their own language to produce a kind of “folk rating” of the canteen system. When students call AC1 “Public-Toilet Can”, it is less pure mockery than a form of supervision tinged with dark humour: an indelicate nickname that serves as a constant reminder of the perceived hygiene issues that once lurked behind this canteen’s “openness”. When students spontaneously organised the “Farewell AC Canteen Big Meal Gathering”, the collective action itself was an informal way for students to “pass final judgement” on a canteen’s history.

This suggests that observing a university’s canteen culture cannot rely solely on official announcements and contractor hoardings; one must also look at what students privately call the place, how they remember it, and how they use humour to digest their dissatisfactions with it. These linguistic traces are the closest primary-source material we have to real campus life.

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# 14. The Unique Temperament of CityU Canteen Culture Compared with the Other “Big Eight”

When placed within the coordinate system of Hong Kong’s eight UGC-funded universities, CityU’s canteen culture exhibits a temperament distinct from the others. At the collegiate universities built into hillsides, canteen culture is often deeply bound up with “college identity” — what students nostalgically recall is often “our college’s canteen”, charged with a strong sense of belonging. CityU has no collegiate system, and the objects of canteen nostalgia instead cohere around specific spatial coordinates themselves (AC1, AC2) and specific dishes (cheese tart, Hainanese chicken rice), rather than any abstract symbol of collective belonging.

This might be understood as a kind of “decentralised” canteen affect: what CityU students miss is not “the canteen that belonged to me” but “the place I once went to and ate at with my friends.” This emotional pattern echoes CityU’s broader campus culture, which has “no college system, with academic departments and halls as the core of belonging” (see this site’s article on CityU Student Union and Student Organisation Ecology for more): at CityU, a sense of belonging relies more on concrete, repeatable everyday scenes than on institutional identity labels. The canteen nicknames and collective memories happen to be the most vivid vehicles for this “scene-based belonging”.

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

The nicknames and recollections collected in this article are mostly concentrated in the period from 2009 to 2019, with the most recent thread being a cross-institutional price survey in 2024. This does not mean CityU’s canteen culture has stopped evolving since then. Quite the contrary: as long as AC1, AC2, and AC3 are still operating, new nicknames, new hidden-menu items, and new urban legends should rightfully continue to be passed from ear to ear among students.

The inclusion criterion for this article is “documentable” (news reports, student media, EVCHK entries), not “the editors of this site thought it was fun, so it goes in.” This means there must be a large volume of CityU canteen memes — circulating on LIHKG, Threads, or Instagram campus groups — that this article has not yet captured. For instance, with the opening of the Whitehead (Ma On Shan) residence village, will its Hall Canteen spawn its own nicknames and legends? With a dual-location hall setup now in place, will it generate a new round of comparison and banter between “Kowloon Tong students” and “Ma On Shan students” over the canteen experience? These are blanks left for future readers to fill in. As the first-edition “nickname map”, this article welcomes and expects to be revised, supplemented, and overturned by subsequent, finer-grained field observation and student-media investigation.

It is also worth noting that this article deliberately excludes any “rumour-style” food safety exposés for which no reliable source could be found — for example, the kind of “once upon a time in a canteen…” claims that occasionally drift across the internet but lack any specific date or provenance. Had this article uncritically accepted such material wholesale, it would risk turning “cultural anecdote” into a “rumour clearing house”, thereby diluting what it genuinely aims to record: those campus memories that are indeed traceable and yet specific and vivid enough. This is why the article’s allocation of space would rather focus on six well-sourced “collective memories”, one “farewell meal gathering” with a specific organiser and date, and a handful of credibility-annotated nicknames, than pursue content that merely looks “denser and buzzier”.

Further reading: Academic Building Upstairs, Festival Walk Downstairs: A System Overview of CityU Canteens, Contractors, Outsourcing and Price-Hike Disputes, A Food Safety Record: No Major Uncovered Cases, but Regulatory Mechanisms Are Real.

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