King Wah Centre, Commercial building in Mong Kok, Hong Kong.
King Wah Centre is a 16-storey building at the northeast corner of Shantung Street and Nathan Road in Mong Kok. Its basement holds photo sticker machines, the ground floor is leased to Chow Sang Sang, the upper ground to third floors house the Sincere Department Store, and floors 5 to 16 contain Japanese, Korean and Western restaurants.
Tan Jienan, a Foshan-born dim sum restaurateur who had run Taotaoju in Guangzhou, opened King Wah Restaurant in 1955 in a five-storey building of about 40,000 square feet. The restaurant closed in 1989, and the site was leased to Wing On Department Stores until that store closed and the building was demolished in 1998. The current 16-storey King Wah Centre, built for HK$200 million, opened in 2002.
The name King Wah comes from the restaurant Tan Jienan opened here in 1955; the site was later nicknamed "Red Spot" for the red dot on the building's sign. On horse-racing days, gamblers bought homemade sachima at a 20–30% discount, since "ma zai" puns on "horse" in Cantonese. Each Mid-Autumn Festival a large mooncake advertisement hung outside.
The centre is located about 200 meters from Mong Kok MTR station and is easy to reach on foot. Numerous bus routes connect the location to other parts of Hong Kong.
On horse-racing days, King Wah Restaurant sold homemade sachima at 20 to 30 percent off; in Cantonese the snack's nickname 馬仔 puns on "horse", so gamblers believed eating it brought a win ("食完馬仔,贏馬仔"). Each Mid-Autumn Festival a large moon cake advertisement stood outside the five-storey building.
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