Hong Kong Food for the Traveler

Food’s central role in Chinese culture is both subtle (e.g. ‘how are you’ in Cantonese translates to ‘have you eaten yet’) and blinding (e.g. Hong Kong has enough restaurant seats for all 6.9 million residents to simultaneously eat out). Whatever the budget, time or location eating is a central activity.

For those with adventurous, steel-lined stomachs, restaurants offer everything. And I mean everything. If it crawls, flies, swims or slithers, rest assured it’s on the menu somewhere. Snake soup, duck tongue, fish eyes, pig feet and cow stomach are some of the safer options – for the simple reason that they can be explained. Searching out the unique culinary dish isn’t too difficult but it does require venturing beyond the safety of malls and into the local noodle shops and seafood restaurants.

Street food is plentiful, cheap and generally safe. On wooden push carts, chestnuts roast in drum sized black containers next to yams and quail eggs. If these pasty-tasting snacks do not satiate, more filling options are available at open air, fluorescent light flooded stands that sell sausages, ‘Chiu Chao’ style dumplings and fish balls. it helps if you don’t ask what type of fish is used. In the local ‘wet’ markets, salesmen-cum-restaurateurs pull fish, pork, chicken, beef and vegetables from the tubs and tables and dishes on sidewalk tables.

For (slightly) more upscale dining options – and air conditioning – pop into a local restaurant and slurp simple, tasty noodles or congee. Lining many of the business and shopping districts, the endless rows of noodle, congee and rice shops cater to the ‘deal-conscious’ customers by quickly serving ‘lunch specials’. Since each restaurant is ‘famous’ for at least one dish, a bit of reconnaissance with the locals can help find (or avoid) the restaurant with the best sheep lung.

When eating during peak lunch and dinner hours, be prepared to join others since owners shepherd customers to every available plastic stool. However, bring something to read because only menus (in Chinese) decorate the white walls. Ambiance costs money.

On Sunday mornings, families routinely gather for ‘yum-cha’ meals of sweet, sour, spicy and strange dim-sum dishes. Dim sum literally means ‘touch the heart’ and translates to small snack. In reality it means three generation of family members plowing through small steamer baskets of dumplings while talking over each other from behind newspapers. Dim sum restaurants with frail women pushing carts around tables have virtually vanished as establishments realized they could add more tables (i.e. make more money) if they didn’t have to leave space for table-side service.

English menus exist in most dim sum restaurants but some dishes are clearly lost in the translation as the English menus often contain 40-50 choices while Chinese menus are thicker than six day old coffee.

For the non Chinese food-mood, western and pan-Asian restaurants cluster on Hong Kong Island. Since most non-Chinese food, except Thai and Vietnamese, falls into the exotic class, prices often unjustifiably skyrocket in western friendly zones like Soho and Lan Kwai Fong.

As in many places around the world, it’s best to stick to the golden food rule of not eating food with foreign place names in the title. Chicago hot dogs just aren’t supposed to look or taste like boiled toes. And forget about cheap wine. An 80% duty on wine imports pushes ordinary bottles to the price of one week’s worth of noodle dishes.

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