by Stephen Jack
At noon, we met up with some friends of Jeffrey's for lunch. We walked down the road to the London Restaurant, a dim sum place that one friend, Mr. Ye, has been going to for twenty years. The place was crowded. All the waitresses were busy ferrying tiny dishes around on trolleys, or rushing thermoses of water to tables to replenish empty teapots. Eating in a Chinese restaurant is never a sombre affair. Big Chinese restaurants can be very noisy. But even by Chinese standards, Hong Kongers are particularly boisterous eaters, and I suspect that prolonged dining in restaurants such as this, may lead to minor hearing loss. But there are different kinds of noise, and what I was hearing was a happy, rollicking kind of commotion.
Much of stuff we had was familiar dim sum fare. What I enjoyed the most was the chicken feet, and the mango pancake. The chicken feet were the best I have ever eaten - the skin was very tender and came off the bones easily. I had never eaten anything like the mango pancake in a Chinese restaurant before – mango and whipped cream wrapped in a beautiful thin yellow pancake shaped into a square bun. So fresh … Of course we drank loads of tea. On the way to the toilet I noticed the restaurant had large stocks of four kinds of tea leaves. I guessed they also had other, more expensive teas stashed away for those who request them. We had Tie Guanyin or Iron Boddhisatva tea, one of the best-known Wulong teas from Fujian.
A couple of my dining companions had lived in Taiwan for several years, so I took the opportunity during lunch to ask them to compare the food of Taiwan and Hong Kong. According to a Mr. Tam, the two cuisines are stylistically similar, but there is some divergence in taste and of course, ingredients. Jeffery, a Taiwanese who has lived in Hong Kong for years, said local meals are a cut above Taiwan's, but Taiwan has better snacks and appetisers, and a far greater variety of them.
I was inspired enough by the meal to later buy a great little illustrated book called Dim Sum: A Pocket Guide.
You don't have to worry about sea sickness at The Star Seafood Floating Restaurant. It isn't really floating. It sits on a massive concrete base that I am sure is driven deep into the river bed. It is a huge place, festooned with thousands of light bulbs. It is located in Sha Tin, and that is where we drove for dinner.
The highlight of our eight course was roast pigeon chicks. This was my first experience of any kind with pigeon, and I can report unequivocally that it does NOT taste like chicken. It tastes like … pigeon. We also had Australian lobster served on noodles with a cheese sauce, a type of sea snail braised in a spicy sauce, stir-fried cuttlefish, a braised chicken dish, shrimp with broccoli, and the largest shrimp I have ever seen, the only dud of the meal - six inches long, two inches wide, fished out of the Philippines, someone said. It was deep fried and cut into five sections. We all ate one. The flesh was membranous and chewy - about as succulent as polystyrene. Shark's fin soup followed, before the fruit platter. Not a bad way to finish a fine full day of dining.
But we were not finished. Back in the car, after driving for half an hour, I was informed that we were heading to Saigon to drink beer. “But I don't have a visa for Vietnam,” I said. No, no, Saigon is by the beach in the New Territories. What, they moved it? Saigon turned out to be a popular weekend getaway actually spelled Sai Kung, that featured a bunch of open-air restaurants. With an electrical storm brewing and a typhoon on the way, it seemed a strange time to be going to the beach. But that was a thought that was lost by the time I was half way through my first beer. Of course no one was hungry, but snacks were ordered and eaten.
It was nearly midnight as we approached my hotel in Yau Ma Tei. There were lightening flashes high in the sky and distant thunder, but apart from a few drops, the rain had yet to arrive. We drove through the same produce market we had visited in the morning. Dozens of shirtless, sweaty men, were now unloading boxes of fruit and vegetables from trucks before delivering them on trolleys to small roadside store sheds ready for the next day's trade that would begin in a just a few hours. In the morning Hong Kong would awake hungry, as usual. But not me. I was tired and still very full when I went to bed, and I had absolutely no intention of eating anything until I boarded my noon flight to China.
Comments