Reports on Hong Kong dining

[rarerollingobject]

1 minute ago, dcarch said:

Those  high rise apartment buildings look scary. Hong Kong is typhoon country.

 

Thank you for posting your delicious trip.

 

dcarch

 

That's the view from my hotel room - I love it, far more interesting to me than the cliched harbour skyline.

I know HK typhoons well - I was a tiny kid, terrified out of my mind, during Typhoon Ellen in 1983. We lived on the Peak, right next to the Peak Tower on one of the highest points of the hills, in a massive apartment lined with floor-to-ceiling plate glass French doors. I still remember every single one of them blowing in as my family cowered in the hallways, where we'd dragged our mattresses, and the mattresses moving up and down the polished floor hallways as the building swayed. And the building had been taken over by the Japanese to use as their headquarters during the war, so it had been fortified - and was still swaying! I also remember being sheltered in a human pile by my mother and father and our maids when the air conditioner units that had been built into the windows started exploding inwards, glass flying and rain sheeting into our apartment horizontally.

 

And back onto food lest the mods get me - this is a happier trip. Today I plan to do nothing but eat roast goose, wontons, and then buy some takeaway egg tarts and eat them while riding the Star Ferry a couple of hundred times.

 

 

[Dejah]

I left HK 1958 - lived there from age 2 - 10 when I immigrated to Canada.

Won't make it there in the spring when we head to mainland China and to my family home in Toisan.

Will spend a few days in Guangzhou after our "set tour"

I am very much looking forward to visiting HK vicariously through you. Thank you!

[rarerollingobject]

Roast goose and char siu (sooooo fatty, my favourite) at Yat Lok, then a rummage through the kitchenware shops of Shanghai St in Kowloon: 

[Wayne]

 

Great photos!

What is the dish with the razor clams? I only know of one place to purchase them fresh and their availability is sporadic.

 

 

[Smithy]

Great photos, indeed!  Are those circular chopping blocks stacked in the picture with the Shek Lung Street sign?  I'd be goggling all day in a place like that, amusing the locals no end as I tried to work out what things were for.

[liuzhou]

1 hour ago, Smithy said:

Great photos, indeed!  Are those circular chopping blocks stacked in the picture with the Shek Lung Street sign?  I'd be goggling all day in a place like that, amusing the locals no end as I tried to work out what things were for.

 

They are indeed chopping boards. Just like mine!

 

[Smithy]

My luggage would be a fright on the way home...overloaded with gadgets for which I'd need homes....

[rarerollingobject]

3 hours ago, Wayne said:

 

Great photos!

What is the dish with the razor clams? I only know of one place to purchase them fresh and their availability is sporadic.

 

 

 

It's clams steamed with garlic, chilli and vermicelli. They're delicious. I intentionally booked a hotel with kitchenettes so I could buy things from the wet markets and bring them back to cook (as between-meal snacks, don't you know!) so might do something with some garlic/black bean/razor clams.

[rarerollingobject]

Which I really feel like doing right now but I'm very drunk tbh from a very fun night drinking with strangers so probably should not try to flambé anything. #rulestoliveby

[liuzhou]

1 hour ago, rarerollingobject said:

 

It's clams steamed with garlic, chilli and vermicelli. They're delicious. I intentionally booked a hotel with kitchenettes so I could buy things from the wet markets and bring them back to cook (as between-meal snacks, don't you know!) so might do something with some garlic/black bean/razor clams.

 

That is something that drives me nuts. Every night market or restaurant in southern China serves sea food in exactly the same way. Clams with chili and vermicelli, oysters with chili and vermicelli, scallops with chili and vermicelli etc. I've surprised many Chinese friends by cooking them differently (or eating them raw). They have no idea that there are alternatives.

 

In fact, it is the same with many foods. Buy a fish and if you are not careful, before you know it they will have prepared it for the only dish they know how to cook. One vendor got annoyed with me when I refused the squid she had rapidly hacked to pieces while I was counting the money to pay for them. I was planning on stuffing them. I've got them trained better now.

That said, the seafood with chili and vermin (as my daughter dubbed it) isn't so bad. Just not all the time. Black bean razor clams are great.

 

Edited November 14, 2016 by liuzhou (log)

[Toliver]

18 hours ago, rarerollingobject said:

 

 

I found these two photos interesting, Regarding dim sum, I always heard you never get a 4-count of any item since the word for "Four" sounds too much like the word for "Death" in the Chinese language yet here you are with a couple dishes of four items. Is it just an old wives tale, perhaps?

[dcarch]

6 hours ago, Toliver said:

I found these two photos interesting, Regarding dim sum, I always heard you never get a 4-count of any item since the word for "Four" sounds too much like the word for "Death" in the Chinese language yet here you are with a couple dishes of four items. Is it just an old wives tale, perhaps?

 

There were five in each before the photos were taken. 

 

dcarch

[rarerollingobject]

No dinner as such to report from last night; it was all liquid. But after spending most of the evening  fending off strange men trying to buy me drinks and then letting them buy me drinks and then fending them off again, I woke up this morning with a raging hunger; so ate THESE pretty good dan tarts while sitting on the hotel room couch in my underwear contemplating the view, and then dragged myself to an old standby, Fu Sing in Causeway Bay.

 

Thither, my friend and I gave the old dim sum hangover-helper a fair suck of the sauce bottle (as we [sometimes, hardly ever] say in Australia):

 

Then I stopped at Muji and bought myself a pack of these, because I'm wild and I cannot be tamed (or so I was informed last night.)

 

 

 

 

 

Edited November 15, 2016 by rarerollingobject (log)

[liuzhou]

12 hours ago, Toliver said:

I found these two photos interesting, Regarding dim sum, I always heard you never get a 4-count of any item since the word for "Four" sounds too much like the word for "Death" in the Chinese language yet here you are with a couple dishes of four items. Is it just an old wives tale, perhaps?

 

It's no old wives' tale. I am surprised to see four, too.

 

In Mandarin,  4 is 四 sì while "die" is 死 sǐ, differing only in tone. In Cantonese, as spoken in Hong Kong, they are both "sei2", so the same tone.

Most Chinese people I know, and especially Hong Kongers take this quite seriously and avoid "four" in all situations from choosing a cell phone number to the number of items in your dim sum steamer..

[rarerollingobject]

Fu Sing also had four to a steamer/serve of nearly everything, eg the har gow you see there.

 

Maybe prawns > superstition.

[rarerollingobject]

Amazing dinner at The Chairman in Central last night, the star of the meal being a heart-stoppingly delicious steamed flowery crab with aged Shaohsing wine and chicken oil and fresh flat rice noodles..would drink sauce with spoon, and did (the waiters nodded approvingly.)

 

Other things; crispy crab meat and mushroom dumplings:

 

 

Crispy Sichuan lamb belly with zucchini ribbons and coriander:

 

 

THAT CRAB:

 

 

Long-braised and then deep-fried and glazed spareribs with preserved plum and caramelised Chinkiang black vinegar:

 

 

Ginger gailan:

 

 

Fried rice with fresh prawns, dried prawns and prawn paste (SO UMAMI):

 

 

Wolfberry ice cream and hot sweet almond milk tea:

 

 

Thought all that was very good value for AUD$100 (US$80).

 

Then on the way home I swung by City Super to clear out their stocks of Lu biscuits (my friend's kid is obsessed with them, you can't get them in Australia, so I buy them for her whenever I travel):

 

 

And gawk at their mind-boggling oyster selection: 

 

[Smithy]

That is an awe-inspiring meal, rro.  I'd love to have access to food like that - and oysters like that.

[rarerollingobject]

 

Today's comestibles included a first lunch at Ho Hung Kee wonton noodle in Causeway Bay, where I had the shrimp roe noodles:

 

 

And the wonton/shrimp dumpling soup:

 

 

And then moved onto a second lunch at Social Place, with truffle mushroom buns:

 

 

Cream soup dumplings:

 

 

Zucchini salad with Sichuan hot and numbing dressing (pre the dressing):

 

 

And sweet rose buns:

Then a wee snack of Bee Cheng Hiang bak kwa, or Chinese honeyed pork jerky. 

 

 

And lup cheong on a stick:

 

 

Then I decided that I'd buy myself a gift, because I've been doing it so tough on this holiday so far, so bought this beautiful platter at Shanghai Tang.

 

 

Two HK street scenes as bonus.

 

 

Anyone still reading btw, or are we over it?

[sartoric]

Love to travel and eat vicariously, keep going please

[Anna N]

Still reading. 

[IowaDee]

Still reading and very much enjoying this.

[Wayne]

 

Still on board. Recognize everything except 'cream soup dumplings'. What are they?

 

 

[Smithy]

Oh, I'm reading and marveling. I echo Wayne's question about the cream soup dumplings.  I'd also like to know about that zucchini salad.  It looks like one long, beautifully tangled ribbon.  How do you eat it? Final question for now: does the sweet rose bun look so creamy because it's steamed?  It looks much more like a creamy dessert than a bready substance.  What did it look like inside?

 

That platter is gorgeous. I hope it makes appearances in your later posts from home.

[rarerollingobject]

1 hour ago, Wayne said:

 

Still on board. Recognize everything except 'cream soup dumplings'. What are they?

 

 

 

It was some kind of bisque-y thing I couldn't identify. Chicken, maybe? I asked, but they just kept saying, "CREAM SOUP" in ever-increasing volumes. 

 

OK THEN!

[rarerollingobject]

20 minutes ago, Smithy said:

Oh, I'm reading and marveling. I echo Wayne's question about the cream soup dumplings.  I'd also like to know about that zucchini salad.  It looks like one long, beautifully tangled ribbon.  How do you eat it? Final question for now: does the sweet rose bun look so creamy because it's steamed?  It looks much more like a creamy dessert than a bready substance.  What did it look like inside?

 

That platter is gorgeous. I hope it makes appearances in your later posts from home.

 

The zucchini I ate like I eat noodles; slurpingly and not at all ladylike.

 

The rose bun was a standard bao dough, like you use for barbecue pork buns. A little smoother maybe, so it might've been a lower gluten starch. Filled with a faintly vomitous rose/sweet bean paste that reminded me clearly why I don't love Chinese sweets...would've rather have had another piece of pork jerky instead, tbh #porkosexual