The connection between cute love affairs, eccentric females, and food establishments seems to be a re-occurring motif in his films. Anyone else noticed this?
Chungking Express and My Blueberry Nights are dominated by this. It might also be in one of his lesser known early films too.
Food is an essential part of culture.
Food is an even more essential part of Hong Kong culture. I guess he carried this over into his English-language debut.
"These are the bad days, the all or nothing days. They're back!"
Marv- Sin City
Hong Kong cinema is dominated by eating scenes. Combine a local tendency towards filming people eating with a writerly tendency towards using the kind of juxtapositions that public places where people from various backgrounds go habitually and spend a decent amount of time interacting create, and you'll see why so many of his films center around restaurants. And pretty much all of them, to greater or lesser extents, do.
But I do think that a lot of it would have to do with the fact that eating scenes are so common to Hong Kong cinema that one way to show yourself to be one of the better exponents of said cinema is to excel at eating scenes, and that can lead to an even higher number of them.