My trip in Asia (Hong Kong, Macau, Danshui, Shanghai, and Yunnan province) was fulfilling and eye-opening, and my experiences may well be worth entries in travelogues yet unpublished; my mind is still fresh with reflections on the strangeness of ‘reverse’ culture shock, the precious rarities of family time, as well as the strangely natural familiarity I’ve felt with people and places quite unknown within my periphery of experience. It was was as if I am learning the meaning of “travel” for the first time in quite a while — something that strikes me as strange, refreshing and, dare I say, perhaps enlightening.
But here at Edible Couple I’d like to offer a special series on the foods I’ve been lucky enough to consume during the trip. From fast food laksa at the Macau Venetian, to slowly chosen food at a 2000m drop cliffside restaurant; from regional delicacies like yak meat in Yunnan to favorite local dishes like dim-sum in Hong Kong, I’ll try to recount some interesting highlights to whet appetites, both gustatory and intellectual. Here goes!
Chapter One. Hong Kong
Here I would have liked to have spent time trying out the restaurants, real retro chachantangs and private dining rooms reviewed from good ol’ openrice.com, but alas, there was little time to even do some serious “I’m in HK now so let’s go crazy” shopping.
We attempted to dine at this Chinese restaurant for lunch several times – yes, the one with the typical fish tanks at the storefront but containing your less-than-typical seafood (sharks, eels, conches, 60-lb sea groupers, and 8-ft crabs.) Finally one late morning we got a table and tasted some of my mom’s favorite Sau Baos (”Longevity Buns”). These rotund, voluptuous buns have a signature peach-butt shape and a notorious sprinkling of food coloring, and contain lotus seed fillings – like your regular Lian Rong Bao – but only bigger, tastier, and better.
Although I ordered a side of fresh-blanched romaine lettuce, we also cozied ourselves to a plate of turnip cake. There was a special guest to this dish, something called “Golden cake” which was porous, chewy, and slightly sweet. I likened its texture to the “White Sugar Cake” served in dim-sum restaurants and made on streetside stands back in the 1950s — a retro delicacy which is still served occasionally.
Taking a break from climbing the Central hills, we paused for a quick drink at the herbal/medicinal tea shop. Here, you can fill your prescriptions for serious Chinese remedies of all sorts, and get your touristy eyeful of reptilian, seahorse, or antelope body parts. A fridge full of prepared Guilinggao stands by. While sipping our 24-flower teas in paper cups adorned with 1970s orange flower print, I peeked over at the nearby daipaidongs – the famous ones that still survive in Central – where locals and the curious alike can enjoy fish head soups, tomato beef noodles, and everything in between.
A quick family dinner at Langham Place – the ultra-modern 30-story tower of shopping malls in Mong Kok – takes us to a fusion eatery with a tolerable wait-time, an interesting decor (counterfeit Yue Minjun paintings, anyone?) and perhaps a most direct request for customers: “Welcome to our restaurant. We kindly ask that you complete your dining experience with us within the timed period of 45 minutes.” There, we had (among other things) a Hong Kong style stone bowl bibimbab; a braised oxtail over poorly-executed risotto; and a shrimp marinara angel hair pasta. We had time to spare afterwards to browse through electronics and (what else) DVDs!
There were two meals remaining of note. The first one is an unsatisfying foray into mainstream Cantonese vegetarian cuisine. We perhaps picked a poor candidate for this particular indulgence – just a neighborhood eatery – to judge this frequently misunderstood but admittedly strange area of culinary interpretations of religious ideals. It is common to find these eateries in Hong Kong, in streetside shops as well as real restaurants, serving vegetarian versions of common meat dishes and proclaiming various Buddhist ethics on their side bookshelves and mantelpieces (”Relish life”; “Clear head leads to clear living”, etc.). Having this dinner led me to think again that this type of cuisine – especially poorly made interpretations of duck, chicken, or pork, with too much corn starch or sweet sauce slathered everywhere – severely betrays its pristine purpose of any sort of Zen ideals of clarity and chaste intake of food. I venture to say that it has developed into a vehicle to attract mere admirers of a Buddhist lifestyle who apparently loathe to change their eating habits. With that said, I realized that I’ve grown up liking certain Cantonese vegetarian food in a complete extraction from its original intent: I don’t like Suen Jai (”Sour veggie food” – fried gluten braised in tomato sauce) for its affinity to Sweet and Sour Pork, or anything close to it; nor do I enjoy Lo Hon Jai (Vegetarian medley of mushrooms, non-green vegetables, roots, and bamboo shoots) because I want to feel closer to god. I like to eat those thing simply because they taste good. Perhaps that is what these restaurants should aim for – making good food with much less artificial ingredients and procedures.
The restaurant Jong Chu (”Main Chef”) has many branches, but we visited a particularly popular one in Wanchai. As you may recall from a previous entry, this is where I had the best steamed fish in a long time. Indeed, the fish was as perfect as they come: sweet, juicy fillets that slide out from a clean, surprisingly unfishy skin with just a soft touch of the chopstick, with a tender mouth feel that was neither mushy nor meaty. Every part of the fish was cooked just right, nothing was under or overdone, and the broth was well-seasoned – there was the taste of broth, not salty store-bought soy sauce. Another highlight of this dinner was the Wooden Barreled Chicken in the broth that cooked it – as many of you know, kuai fei gai (”Empress Chicken”) is prepared in a strenuous 12+ hour process where the meat is actually braised “raw” with broth until the liquid marinates and “cooks” the chicken. That night’s example in the wooden barrel was exemplary – yet again, the chicken meat was tender with a bounce-back mouthfeel, and the broth was quite good with rice!
Another afternoon through the bowels of residential areas led us through the essential (now mostly indoor) produce markets. The smell of gray water, the sticky floors, the din of the market-goers all helped to bring me back to my childhood. Unfortunately, the dim, warm-tinted lighting is now partially replaced by sterile fluorescent bulbs; the butchers no longer wear “butcher cleats” (5-inch high wooden platform sandals where feet are secured by a thick, black strip of plastic nailed by steel rivets); and even the shopkeepers now shout at a lower volume. It seemed as if everything is dimmed in spirit, until I was consoled by the remaining shops that maintain their century-old facades, the old ladies with their 100 sq ft tofu counters (my favorite), and lastly, the comings and goings of grandmothers and aunties, forever in their colorfully patterned blouses, shopping everyday for the freshest vegetables for a stir-fry or selecting fresh poultry for soups or otherwise. They shall eventually go home to create home-cooked meals to be remembered and missed by someone for years to come.
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