Notes from Hong Kong, food edition
Breakfast is porridge and crullers and cheong fan (the rice-noodle cannelloni things you get at dim sum, a sheet of rice noodle wrapped around shrimp or roast pork and then doused with a light soy sauce) at a hole in the wall, which, we later discover, is a quite famous hole in the wall (approx. 65 Wan Chai Road, near Triangle St). The locals seem to relish eating porridge (goopy, diluted rice) together with plain cheong fan (meltingly soft, diluted rice), which I find puzzling, but what do I know? I'm dipping my crullers in porridge.
There are some things which are just better in Hong Kong - like, you pick the most random, unremarkable, sanitized looking place, and the wonton mee will blow any Singaporean version out of the water. Ditto dim sum, ditto roast meat, ditto Chinese biscuits, ditto cheong fan - I can think of one place in Singapore that makes their own, and they're famous for doing so. 90% of the places in Hong Kong that serve cheong fan make it a la minute. We stopped for lunch in a random greasy spoon roast meat joint in Yau Ma Tei - second best char siew I've ever had (the best being the one in the famous restaurant the night before). This in a place that's not in any guide book, not in the local Yelp-equivalent, picked at random, and so dirty everyone but us was "cleaning" their chopsticks in hot tea before eating. I don't think this dynamic is present in many other places. Most of the pizza in New York is pretty poor stuff. Ditto hot dogs in Chicago, chicken rice in Singapore, anything you can name in France, etc.etc.etc. Plausible exceptions to the rule - Italy. Sushi in Japan. That's about it.
Wonton noodles were also a revelation - we sampled three of the most well regarded ones with our hosts - our favorite was at 89 Hennessey Road (approx.). Superb noodles, very good on all other counts. The other two were both on Cochrane Street in Central, near Wellington Street - one had giant, painfully fresh wontons but soup that was, as our host put it, a zen meditation on the subject of MSG. The other had good soup, but unremarkable wontons and noodles that were too alkaline.
My favorite thing about Hong Kong eating is the subtlety of the differences - skins a fraction thinner here. Noodles just a hair closer to perfect there. Shrimp taste sweeter here but pop better there. You get beyond "OMG AMAZING" so quickly you practically develop new senses used solely for evaluating the freshness of seafood.
I won't go into detail about the dim sum. Flavors are cleaner and more delicate. Skins are thinner, better textured, and folded better. No one uses steamer carts - you fill in an order form, and they steam your stuff to order. Recommendations abound online - and really, throw a brick. Any proper looking restaurant will have dim sum that knocks your socks off - until you have dim sum at an ever so slightly better place.
One of the more remarkable eating experiences I had was at this tong shui place on Percival Street (approx. no. 86) in Causeway Bay. Tong Shui is a subgenre of Cantonese cooking which consists entirely of sweet soups, both hot and cold, eaten for dessert or a snack - they should never be dessert-sweet - to an American palate, in fact, they might taste unsweetened - but the flavors should be clear and, for want of a better word, gentle, in a way that's in keeping with the level of sweetness and the smoothness of their texture. What I particularly liked about eating at this one, run by a klatch of little middle-aged ladies, was the utter certainty of the realization that I would never be able to find a better version of the stuff.
At the opposite end of the dessert spectrum from tong shui, you get pineapple buns (ideally at Kam Fung on Spring Garden Lane)- which I'm not sure have any actual pineapple in them, but are mysteriously scrumptious when eaten warm from the oven with butter. Okay. On reading that again, I realize that most things are scrumptious warm from the oven with butter, but the synergy created in this case is truly amazing. Butter transforms them from nondescript bits of warm and slightly sweet dough to utter and indescribably custardy bliss, with an eggy, sugary crust. Also very good egg tarts and milk tea, which is a weird colonial phenomenon - take black and red tea, brew until strong enough to use as disinfectant, remove the tannins by some quasi-secret method, crushed eggshells being common, then add evaporated milk till thick enough to stand a spoon in. Drink with sugar. No, I don't understand it either.
And Chinese biscuits (and apparently also egg tarts) from this mini chain are just stunning. Chinese bakeries in America sometimes produce decent fillings, but when their crusts commit suicide out of shame and go to purgatory, they are cleansed and reborn as crusts here.
Incidentally, I just discovered that you can send direct links to Street Views on Google. Welcome to the future.
Also, the picture quality on Street View HK is bloody amazing.