Hong Kong: Failed attempt to get Poon Choi

So I feel inclined to describe what poon choi is here but we live in the digital age so instead I will give you the link to the wikipedia page which I would be copy pasting otherwise. If you don't want to click the link, you are lazy... but I will cave and just tell you that poon choi is essentially a big bowl full of delicious food that is commonly served at holidays. Think of it like the entire thanksgiving feast in one big bowl. Well, So-Han and I tried to order this feast in a bowl at Tai Hing, the waiter looked at us like we were crazy, as did the family we were sharing a very small table with, but we insisted. nodding vigorously. The waiter left, came back, and told us that we could not order it. Defeat.

Our new year was poon choi-less.

Thats not to say we didn't eat some delicious food at Tai Hing anyway!

We tried to keep in the poon choi spirit by ordering a plate full of different things.

The BBQ Pork here is delicious

I think the way they roast pork is so beautiful. The crisp skin is so delicious.

We missed the lunar new year fireworks because it took us so long to order this meal.

Hong Kong: Hakka Cuisine Again!

So we have totally destroyed the no repeats rule a few times over... Maybe next time I would switch hotels every week... But honestly, it really seems a shame to only try a handful of the menu offerings at these restaurants. With this in mind, and the determination to at least not order the same dish twice, we returned to Chuen Cheurng Kui, the aforementioned Hakka Restaurant. This was to be our Lunar New Years meal and we had high hopes for eating squid-balls, dried oysters, hair fungus, wontons and suckling pig. We succeeded at finding and consuming most of these items over the 14th and 15th.

Haaka Eight Treasure - 8 Treasure Duck - 八寶鴨 - Bat Bao Ya - Bat Bao Aap

Eight Treasure Duck was absolutely phenomenal and I'm not sure that the pictures do it justice. I can't recount the eight treasures for you but I can relate that this dish included Sea Cucumber, Pork, Duck, Goose Intestine, Gai lan, Green Onions and Ginger. That's only seven and we really aren't sure which of those really count as treasures. Regardless, this dish has now defined for us a very high standard to which we can now hold all sea cucumber dishes, included the best goose intestine I've ever eaten (I eat a lot of intestine) and every other element was phenomenal as well. We didn't leave even a bite.

Deep Fried Pork Intestine - zhà zhū dà cháng - 炸豬大腸

Didn't I tell you that I eat a lot of intestine? This menu item really ordered itself, I just knew it had to be on our table. I'm not sure if it is normally associated with the Lunar New Year but it certainly seems like an auspicious dish. Red is a particularly auspicious color and is as associated with the Chinese New Year as it is associated with Christmas, if not more so. One element of the Chinese New Year is that people should buy new red underwear and wear it on the first of the new Lunar Year (presuming that the local Cantonese people telling us these things aren't just playing games on the gullible Americans.) I've never worn red underwear on Christmas despite red being a Christmas color. Anyways, this dish was masterful. The intestine was perfectly crisp and airy. Often times pork intestine is fried into an extremely dense form, seemingly collapsing the interior lining of the intestine into the crisp outside so that the dish eats more like a normal meat. The interior of this intestine almost felt like a soft crouton or Chicharrón, something firm but airy that crunches and then dissolves with a buttery - rich - fat sensation that is oh so satisfying and delicious.

Suckling Pig - 燒乳豬 - shāo rǔ zhū - Siu Yu Jü

Having been awed by suckling pig and by this restaurant on two separate occasions, we decided to see what would happen if we combined the two. This was an amazing idea and netted us a delicious dish that also happened to be an auspicious way to bring in the new lunar year. Suckling pig seems to be uniformly so tender and tasty. Every bite of this dish literally melted in your mouth. If you haven't tried suckling pig, you need to. Now.

Big Eel and Roast Pork Hot Pot - 大鳗烤猪肉锅 - dà mán kǎo zhū ròu guō

You might have read my commentary about clay pots in the Sham Shui Po post, well it goes triple for this dish. I don't understand how food can taste this good. It is mind boggling. I have eaten like a king in the US. I have eaten gourmet in some of the best rated restaurants in the US and I make a hobby out of finding the best food I can find anywhere I go. Every bite of this dish was a food-gasm. The pork was some of the most tender and delicious of my life. The eel was crispy while maintaining it's unique texture and taste. Even the chunks of ginger and garlic in this dish were edible and delicious. This is definitely the best clay pot of my life and the pork and eel will live on in my memory as some of the most delicious meats that have ever graced my tongue with their glorious presence.

Focus: Beef Tongue

Entire Beef Tongue in a Paris Supermarket

Beef Tongue with Curry in Hong Kong

Most of the times I have eaten tongue in my life it has been in the same shape as pictured in this Curry dish. I always wondered just what exactly the entire cow tongue looked like, whether all the tongue in the world came from veal cows and was just really small (because to me, the way the tongue is cut makes the slice of tongue still resemble what I thought an entire tongue would look like.) Luckily for me, I thoroughly explored all the meat sections of the supermarket in Paris and found a stack of entire cow tongues for sale! I really wanted to buy one to experiment with but I really wasn't staying in a place where I could sufficiently access the potential of an enormous cow tongue. Now that I have seen the entire cow tongue, however, I have come to the conclusion that the slices of tongue I had always thought were tongues unto themselves seem to be vertical slices of tongue.

My favorite tongue dish is still undoubtedly tongue tacos (tacos de lingua) in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. That being said, I am very young and with any luck there will be many tongues from many culinary traditions in my future.

Hong Kong: Shanghainese Food

So we have had a few experiences with Shangheinese food while in Hong Kong and we finally found a place worth blogging about! The following pictures were taken at a place called Delicious Kitchen located in Causeway Bay. Delicious Kitchen is right next to an outlet mall, a particularly tourist oriented row of restaurants and one of the major shopping streets in Hong Kong, but the restaurant hides itself at the end of a street, furthest from the busy commerce and does not post it's name in english. I happened to stroll by it on the last day of the pre-lunar year sales and was immediately stricken by both the amazingly strong and tantalizing aroma and that it had a line of people outside in the rain waiting to be seated. I made a mental note and went back to the hotel to see if So-Han had returned from re-uniting with his family. He had and we were both ready for food so out we went, luckily finding the lunch rush to be at its end.

Smoked Fish with Rice and Preserved Vegetables

So-Han had luckily been a bit more observant than I at our previous Shanghainese restaurant excursions and had noticed that the above dish had stood out to him on each menu. We correctly decided that this boded well and decided, to both of our delight, to try the dish. Shanghainese food uses more sugar than most other Chinese cuisine styles and this element is very striking both visibly and gustatorily. Smoking fish seems to be a generally extremely win idea, and when combined with this delicious marinade it made for an extremely tender dish with a deliciously crisp and full flavor.

Nian Gao with Assorted Meats

Nian Gao in this style is uniquely Shanghainese and is also associated with the Chinese New Year so we had a few reasons to try it and were very well rewarded by doing so. The Shanghainese style of Nian Gao is notable as it is made with non- glutinous rice and then sliced into the shape of a fat flat rice noodle and stir fried. The assorted meats were shrimp, chicken and Jinhua Ham which was definately the all star meat featured in this dish. All in all, this dish was fantastic.

Sliced Eel with Golden Mushrooms

Dishes like these are the reason I am constantly hunting out new restaurants and new cuisines. Who would have thought I could find a dish that was essentially eel swimming in a sea of delicious mushrooms. The Shanghainese evidently. Perfection. Eel is such a flavor rich fish and by pairing it with mushrooms the chef has guaranteed that all the juices and marinade lost from the eel while cooking would be absorbed by one of nature's most capable culinary absorbers.

To clue everybody in to just how high our standards have risen I will post pictures of the previous Shanghainese dishes as well:

Twice-Cooked Pork

Sliced Eel with Scallions

Xiao Long Bao

Hong Kong: Sham Shui Po - Post One

So I had probably 80+ amazing pictures of Sham Shui Po, a district in Kowloon known for having some of the cheapest electronics in the world, an extensive jade market and an extremely impressive array of food markets and restaurants. Unfortunately the SD card that came with my Canon decided that it had witnessed some of the most impressive looking sea food and open air markets that it ever would and that it had nothing else to live for. I fully intend to go back to Sham Shui Po for a third time but this time I should manage to have something substantial to share. Until then I do have the food we ate in Sham Shui Po the second time we went:

Street-side Skewer Restaurant in Sham Shui Po

Somehow this meat skewer stand stood out to us amidst the countless food stands and markets in Sham Shui Po. I would wager that it had something to do with the fact that we could smell the meat over the stinky tofu which makes certain parts of the district smell exactly like an open sewer. I haven't actually tried stinky tofu yet but I intend to try it while in Hong Kong so that I will be able to compare it with the Taiwanese variation.

Street Skewers, Squid and Cuttlefish

After selecting the skewers, the merchant dropped them into a deep-fryer for 40 seconds or so before marinating and serving them to us. The squid was my personal favorite of the four, having the best texture and most flavor. The increased surface area and lack of girth seemed to hold the marinade better than the cuttlefish after responding to the deep-fry better as well.

Street Skewers: Pork Intestine and Bacon-Wrapped Hot Dog

These skewers were a bit decadent, the raw-foodist in me is just strong enough to make it such that I don't usually jump for bacon-wrapped anything but So-Han was not similarly disinclined. The intestine was more delicious and again I believe this was due mostly to the shape of the skewer, compare how dark the intestine is here versus in the first picture and you can see just how significantly frying and marinating changed the nature of the skewer.

After eating the skewers we wandered around the market, So-Han purchased an amazing tea-pot from a Jade vendor... but really the agent in that transaction was the tea pot which somehow made itself known to So-Han despite being in a bundle amidst a ton of really cool antiques and tea-pots while we were walking past intent on finding food neither of us being particularly interested in looking for tea-pots in Hong Kong as we are each going to regions where tea and tea-ware are actually produced. We ended up finding a restaurant with communal tables and no english signage and sat down to have the following:

Slippery Egg Shrimp Stir-Fried Rice Noodles

This is a dish that is more commonly seen with rice as opposed to rice noodles. We try to order a dish with hor fun noodles such as these in the restaurants we go to because they are perhaps the best medium to convey wok hei. These noodles and the other noodle dish which got eaten by the death of my SD card were some of the most delicious rice noodles I have ever eaten and had an amazing wok hei. The wok hei was so strong that it tasted almost like a subtle burn but this functioned in the same way that charring meat or sugar can bring out new and amazing tastes and textures.

Ginger Scallion Pork Rib Clay Pot

This dish was extremely rich in flavor and the ribs were so tender that they literally fell right off of the bone. One can see the chunks of ginger and cloves of garlic in this dish that were so instrumental in imparting an intensity of flavor to the pork which I rarely see. The clay pot was instrumental in both the intensity of flavor and tenderness of meat. I love clay pots. You can still see the steam rising out of the clay pot if you enlarge this picture.

Other sights of Sham Shui Po taken after the death of my SD Card:

Veggie Stand just North of Sham Shui Po

Hong Kong Man on Bicycle

Corner Apartment on a block near Sham Shui Po

Development Near Sham Shui Po

Hong Kong: Eating Our Way To Wan Chai Ferry

We took the Wan Chai Ferry across to the Tsim Sha Tsui area in Kownloon last night. The last time we were in Wan Chai we walked past a restaurant and were presented with this scene:

We were meeting up with some friends and as such we were unable to stop to discover what these cute little birds were and what they tasted like. But we made a mental note to come back to this place. So come back we did.

We left our hotel last night, heading out for the ferry early so that we would have plenty of time to eat on the way. Our destination was the aforementioned restaurant, but we got a bit sidetracked along the way when we passed by a noodle shop which advertised itself as being recommended by both the michelin guide and openrice.com. We were pretty ready to eat and decided that we should try the place out, so in we went. They had a menu in cantonese and another in english/japanese. They also had a cohesive aesthetic throughout the restaurant, something we have never seen in a Hong Kong noodle shop before. Here is what we got:

Cuttlefish Ball Noodle Soup

Beef Tripe with Ground Dry Flatfish and Noodles

To prove to the world that I took science classes, I will engage in the scientific method and make a Hong Kong noodle shop hypothesis: guide recommendations and aesthetic appeal make noodles more expensive and less tasty. That is where my experiment ends however, I will assume that I am correct and go back to eating at hole-in-the-wall shops with communal tables and no english menus.

We finished our plates. Kids are starving in Africa after all, how could we justify wasting food? I turned to So-Han, "I still want to eat the baby birds." He agreed. So off we went to eat our second dinner!

Paddy Birds

What about the bones? You may wonder, as we did. You don't taste or feel them at all! The entire bird eats with a perfectly uniform consistency. Imagine the most beautiful tasty dark poultry meat you have ever eaten. Not Turkey or Chicken, I am talking about delicious duck or goose, the best bite of the bird. Thats what this little Paddy Bird tasted like as we bit off their heads before devouring them whole. I love Hong Kong.

Roast Suckling Pig

In the spirit of eating baby animals to while away our sorrows (So-Han accidentally deleted his blog before we ventured out on this excursion) we also ordered this Suckling Pig. My first experience with suckling pig, and I promise you that it will not be my last. Every bite of this meat was the most phenomenally tender pork I have eaten. If Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations Hong Kong is to be believed (which I definitely think it is), they roast the suckling pig with a blow torch in order to get the skin to be the consistency which it is, crispy sweet and delicious, rendered just perfectly to contrast texturally with the smooth tender pork and then to melt away to nothing along with the meat, leaving the eater in a state of culinary nirvana.

I forgot to take a picture of our third dish, Roast goose, and perhaps the best poultry I have ever eaten in my life. I hang my head in shame for this mistake, never again will I deem a dish "just another less than photogenic plate of poultry." I didn't know that birds could taste this decadent. Goose fat is the most delicious lipid in existence.

Once on the Ferry we got to behold Hong Kong Island at night

And we saw some of the decorations and preparations for Chinese New Year

As beautiful as Hong Kong is, Roasted Baby Animals will live on in my memory far longer than the skyline.

Hong Kong: Tai Woo Restaurant

We went back to Tai Woo for dinner tonight, I haven't told you about the first time yet actually... I will get around to it, I promise. This was our first time to go back to a restaurant for a second time. We had a tentative no repeats policy which is still the guideline, just not the rule. We went back because we know the restaurant is both very good and open late. Which is important because I keep falling asleep after eating lunch and not waking up until 10:30-11:30 pm. All I do is eat, nap, eat, sleep, repeat. Its great. Usually there are a few hours worth of walking per day all told, so its not as if I am lacking in exercise. Particularly since we keep hiking up into the mountains. I love how quickly one can go from being in one of the most densely populated cities in the world to being alone in a rain forest. This city is awesome.

So Dinner:

Eggplant with Crab Meat and Shrimp Roe

This dish was really phenomenal. Some of the best eggplant I've ever eaten. The Crab and Roe provided a rich salty element to the sweet tender eggplant.

Squid with Spicy Salt

Squid, deep fried and battered. Timeless. I need to know what this batter is made of because it doesn't seem to trigger anything gluten - pain related within me. The battered frog we had during our first visit didn't bother me either.

Roast Eel with Jellyfish and Chinese Cucumber

This eel was definitely the starlet of the night. So-Han and I are much more familiar with eel prepared in the Japanese style... which is delicious... but totally different than this dish. The eel here is so crisp, the skin on the underside has a deep fried crispy quality that had the perfect combination of crunching and then melting in your mouth. The eel meat itself redefined my idea of how eel can taste and feel by being perfectly tender all the way through while maintaining a crisp edge. Each bite of eel was a crisp neat little packet of delicious. The jellyfish and cucumber both provided a salty - cured compliment to the sweetness of the eel.

Tai Woo is a great place to get a late night meal in Causeway Bay.

...or a normally timed meal as well... one can only assume...

P.S. I didn't take my camera to Tai Woo the first time, here is a video of the meal. The dishes brought were somewhat of a surprise as we were unable to read the menu and they didn't bring us an english one, unlike the second time we went where they brought us only the English menu (significantly more limited a selection than the 6+ menus in Cantonese, the squid above was the only dish shown which was actually on the English menu)