Wonton soup

Day 1: Unexpected Street Food Hit

First day in Hong Kong, and my friend Nick (a.k.a. nominated tour guide for the week) promised to meet me in the evening to take me for some food. We went to Causeway Bay intending to go for dumplings in Din Tai Fung (a famous Taiwanese chain), which sounded pretty good to me for a first shot at “local-ish” food. So after a Beer Hong Kong and a million peanuts in a local bar, we mosied on down to the place to find a queue of about 150 people hanging around outside. Hmm… hungry by this stage, so we sacked that off and headed to Plan B, which was a Korean BBQ place. Similar queue issue, so beginning to panic. Owing to a complete lack of a Plan C, we ended up on plastic chairs on the street outside some dodgy-as-hell wonton shack. Ended up being the perfect authentic Hong Kong meal I was hoping for!

I had something along the lines of shrimp wonton soup, and NIck had fish ball soup, which sounds horrible but is so good that I was eating it for breakfast by the end of the week. We also had a giant Tsing Tao each and some random vegetables, and the whole lot came to about a tenner.

Street food score = 1!

Day 2: Dim Sum and a hotel cheat

First day at work today and therefore got taken out for a lovely lunch by the team. We went to a dim sum place near the office in Quarry Bay which was a great opportunity to test out how good my Chinatown warm-ups have been recently!

We started off with some traditional chopstick and bowl rinsing in tea/water/whatever came out of the nearest pot. Acted like a complete tourist during this section. Now it’s going to be tricky to remember all the food that came out because I was in slightly open-mouthed tourist mode throughout to be honest. We had… some steamed dumplings with pork and prawn, and some more with something else in (could have been anything)… we had some of the char siu buns… we had some more deep-fried type ones that had meat in the middle and that we were splitting in two because everyone wanted some…. we had some turnip cake…. we had egg-fried rice and some soupy noodly thing… some bbq chicken and pork to go with something or other. It was very tasty; there were only a couple of things I hadn’t come across before, most of it was pretty similar to its Chinatown alternative, which must mean London’s Chinatown is doing a pretty good job I reckon.

I was given instructions to go up the Peak in the evening to watch the city lights come on. I hadn’t actually seen the harbour at all by this point because I’d come in underground and walked away from the water the day before! So that made for a Spectacular first view from right at the top of the viewing platform. Now THAT is a city! I timed it slightly wrong so ended up hanging out up the Peak with laptop in bag and work shoes on for about 2 hours! But totally worth it. Was an incredibly clear night (the only one while I was there) and all the lights coming on was a breath-taking experience.

My excuse for not eating a proper dinner

All of that is really poor justification for the rest of the evening, where I am afraid I cheated by eating in the hotel. There was a Thai place by the swimming pool that called to me when I arrived back feeling knackered at 8.30! Ate far too much of their laab and Pad Thai, was v tasty but I had the guilt for going anti-local that night.

Day 3: Brave street food experiences!

Busy working in Quarry Bay office until about 14:30 today, and then was heading over to the Citibank Tower. Gave me the perfect opportunity to stop in a very local-looking food place just outside in Quarry Bay.

Have to admit walking past it a couple of times plucking up the courage and trying to see what on earth to order. There were English translations but they were a bit vague and were heading towards descriptions like “cow bits” etc that I was probably not quite ready for at lunch time (willingness to try cow bits probably directly linked to number of alcoholic units drunk).

Eventually, I had a word with myself and got up there in the queue. Got to the front and in a slight panic shouted “noodle – vegetable” at the girl a couple of times. She replied in perfect English “Er, do you like mushrooms? and would you like rice noodles?” to which I sheepishly agreed, and ended up supping on basic rice noodle soup on a stone bench under an underpass next to a couple of old guys playing mah jong! Tasty tasty & healthy – all good.

Rice noodle lunch

Evening saw me heading across to Kowloon on the Star Ferry and I walked up through TST to the Temple St Night Market. The market wasn’t really my cup of tea and it was starting to rain. I was Hungry by this stage and nervously seeking out some sort of street food option. Walked past a number of basic restaurants with tanks of live fish outside. I’m going to have to get over this, but it really does put me off when I’m staring down at grubby buckets of depressed-looking seafood that are about to get eaten. Carried on a bit and was absolutely motivated that I wasn’t going to end up back in the hotel again.

Eventually, bingo! Whole crazy hawker tent section. Again, slightly gingerly stepping round the edge looking for a way in which didn’t commit me too heavily, then a guy outside one of the outer, more restauranty (although used in the loosest possible sense!) ones beckoned me in. Took a deep breath and went for it. Crazy dodgy looking place, pictures of the food all over the walls, a bucket in the middle for all the crap and some locals eating food.

Restaurant near Temple St

I was immediately presented with another giant Tsing Tao (phew!) and I ordered a safe-ish looking dish of noodles with beef and spring onions. At least… that’s what it looked like… and thankfully it’s what it was! Unbelievably good noodles and made even better by a toothless Chinese guy who kept coming up to me, giving me thumbs up and saying “Missy! – like!” Grand total of about a fiver for the lot and brilliant brave street food brownie points! Was slightly worried I may have poisoned myself but it turned out absolutely fine.

Fried noodles with beef

Streed food count = 3!

Day 4: Office lunch and take-two dinner

So by this stage I am loving working in Citibank Tower. My commute is a 10 minute stroll across the lovely Hong Kong Park and the view out of the 22nd floor window of the loitering typhoon is somewhat spectacular. I have also started to impress my local colleagues with talk of my street food experiences and also by the fact I am avoiding taxis whenever I can get the subway (LL’s Octopus card getting good use!).

I was looking for a Chinese lunch (of course) so one of the guys I was working with took me down to the basement cafe in our building where they did roast pork/duck/chicken rice with vegetables and a bit of (soy?) sauce. Very basic, but well good again. Good job I’m not working here permanently or these lunches would start sizing me up!

In the evening I met Nick again and take two on Din Tai Fung was a success! And well worth it – lovely Shanghainese dumplings (light fish and veg ones and chicken ones), cucumber chilli garlic stuff, noodles with sesame that were hilariously difficult to separate, wontons in spicy sauce which were the (garlic) hit of the night and possibly something else as well. Seemed like we ate a lot (again)! Great food, could get used to all this.

No pictures of that so here’s the view outside my hotel bedroom instead.

View from hotel; office where it says ICBC

Day 5: Very local

Not much to report on day 5. Second to last day in the office, and my colleague obviously now thinks I’m initiated enough to go for a proper basic local lunch meal. They took me to the High Court canteen for some cheap food in a tray! I treated them, which may well have been a total insult as it was probably about 50p, but I wanted to make a gesture to say thanks for dragging me around the place! The food itself wasn’t a total highlight; ordered pork and aubergine with rice and got something that contained nothing resembling either pork or aubergine. Was fine though, and nice to chat to my colleagues and see what they normally get up to.

Dinner total wash-out – many glasses of wine instead. Seems like the bad Thursday-night habit in London is one that exists here too.

Day 6: THE best lunch and a variation dinner

By this stage of the week, the food’s becoming more and more of a feature. It’s gone from attempting to be vaguely healthy for at least one meal of the day to full-on fat-girl stuffing my face. I can’t help it – there’s too much good food. Lunch today was the absolute best thing – my work-mates took me to Peking Garden for some royal cuisine. They’d obviously put a lot of thought into where to take me that would give me a different experience, and it was amazing. We had more of the Shanghainese dumplings to start; the best ones so far. Then an awesome Sichuan-style chicken dish which was blow-your-head-off spicy (as Sichuan tends to be)! We also had some Beijing-style noodles that were yummy, and some Chinese ham and braised lettuce of some kind. Chinese ham is nice – very salty but tasty. Then was the best bit – the Peking Duck. The accompaniments were the same as we’re used to in the UK (the pancakes, sauce, cucumber, spring onion) but the duck came as really tender slices rather than all crispy and hacked up like we normally see. It also came on cute china duck plates! The whole lot was accompanied by bucket-loads of jasmine tea and it was a wonderful meal.

Evening was a total variation in an Egyptian place (Felefel or some such) in LKF (wahay!). Went for chicken shawarma and it was good actually - the guy came over and said it was proper home-style Egyptian cooking. It was bread (at a million degrees!) in the bottom, rice, shredded chicken and all sorts of other stuff, plus garlic sauce and a special hot sauce. Another new experience, so won’t feel so bad about being nowhere-near-local.

Day 7 – food, food and food

Today was Saturday, and Nick and I went off in search of Chi Lin Nunnery up in Diamond Hill. Lovely place, oasis garden in the middle of a freeway and a bunch of high rises. First stop, vegetarian set lunch at a restaurant behind a waterfall in the garden.

Waterfall restaurant

Potentially something of a tourist feature, but a nice lunch all the same and a much needed respite from the heat! Being a vegetarian place, I do have to admit to being a little sick of bean curd by the end of it. They did try to make nice dishes out of it but it really doesn’t have a lot of flavour does it? Ah – the other notable thing here was congee, which came as an accompaniment. First time I’d had it, and good job really. I’m sure it would be better with “stuff” in it, but as it was it was like someone had forgotten to drain the rice after cooking so it was left swimming in starchy water. Grim.

Straight from lunch… to tea! A cup of tea. Which cost around £15. Each. You had to laugh, and we did – a lot! It was all some faffy tea ceremony thing, which of course is taken very seriously. Our main problem with it was the damn burnt fingers! Every time we poured tea at a million degrees from the leaf pot to the drinking cup, it was like some sort of hot water torture! Add that to a magic table with compartments only the waitress could work, a tap, a heat plate and some even more confused looking tourists at the next table, and the whole thing was a right laugh. We also squeezed in a couple of sweet dim sum bits here – steamed buns with red bean paste.

Tea Ceremony

Later on, and after a cheeky satay in a bar in Stanley, we headed up to the Midlevels in search of a Sichuanese place that Nick liked. That turned out to be full, so we went across the road to this pretty looking Manchurian place.

Manchurian restaurant

The food was awesome, and yet another brand new experience. It’s sort of a cross between Chinese and Russian, so we had dumplings that were definitely as Russian (or Siberian) as they were Chinese, and then some delicious dishes – crispy pork, chicken with chilli and peanuts, and mixed mountain mushrooms. The most interesting thing was that they came not with rice, but with sesame pockets, which were like light pittas covered in sesame seeds and that you were supposed to fill with whatever you were eating. Spectacularly good idea – more please! Just had a disappointment as it turns out the only Manchurian restaurant I could find in London is actually in London, Ontario.

Check out the sesame pockets!