By Stephen Lawson
Anyone who’s visited Hong Kong knows that dining is one of the great pleasures of the territory. Here, fine food from all over China and everywhere else competes for attention with the local Cantonese cuisine, which -- thanks to millions of migrants from the Pearl River Delta over the past three centuries -- is what the Western world knows as Chinese food.
When it comes to food, this city doesn’t mess around, except in touristy areas where foreign concepts such as the theme restaurant, the view restaurant, and nouvelle cuisine have squeezed in. From street markets that sometimes look like something from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom to elegant eateries stacked in restaurant towers like bamboo steamers, eating is all about the food – except when it’s about the check, which can lead to another kind of life-and-death struggle.
The classic Hong Kong restaurant is a windowless expanse of round tables and white linen, a whole floor of a building. At the peak of business, it’s lit like an emergency room and just as noisy. Though there is no bar, no romantic lighting, and no privacy save for a few closed banquet rooms, it’s an intensely social place. Strong tea, shared dishes, and a bit of alcohol – though drinking is not very popular here – create a jovial atmosphere across tables of a dozen people or more.
For a large group, the dinner spread is big and usually includes meat dishes (pork is most beloved), sautéed vegetables, a fried or steamed whole fish, and specialty dishes -- such as crab or shark’s fin soup -- that command an impressive price. I recently ordered the cheapest crab on the menu at one such restaurant, and for $145 (US$18.59) got a scrawny brown thing that couldn’t have scared a goldfish. (Fortunately, I managed to grab the bill.)
The classic daytime meal is yum cha (literally, “drink tea”), which in the West is often called dim sum (“touch heart”) after the featured dishes: steamed dumplings, thick fried noodles, and balls of meat and fish, sometimes finished off with the sweet egg-custard tarts after which this column is named. The dishes are usually served from carts that slowly make the rounds of the tables, which is one reason yum cha can drift on blissfully for two hours or more. A co-worker told me her childhood friend’s mother holds court at a popular restaurant from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. every Saturday.
A territory of huge disparities in income, Hong Kong has few restaurants in the middle ground between plain and posh, but the streets are lined with simple diners that serve cheaper versions of the same cuisine. In these places it’s easy to fill up on fried rice or noodles for less than US$4.
Although eating out can be an eye-opener here, cooking is the real adventure. Any meal must begin at the street market, where vegetables are fresher and more plentiful than in supermarkets. The big chains seem to have ceded this business to the vendors on the street and in covered public markets, and with good reason. The greens are trucked in fresh every morning to efficient little stands that compete with four or five other vendors in the same area. It’s easy to comparison shop, and prices stay low.
Less tempting are the meat and fish stands. Sea creatures swim in Styrofoam boxes awaiting dissection on demand, or lie spread across beds of ice. Live crabs and frogs crawl around each other piled up in cages. Pig carcasses come in on unrefrigerated trucks to be slaughtered on the floor a few feet from the sidewalk. Their meat hangs from hooks in the open air. Surprisingly, there are few flies and no smell of rotting meat, although once a ripe durian (a large fruit with a thick, oddly shaped spiky skin and soft white meat inside) gets hacked open, only an experienced nose could tell the difference.
One day soon after I moved into my own flat, I bought a catty (about 1.3 pounds) of da dou mieu (large pea leaves) for less than a dollar. At the supermarket, I bought white rice and a chunk of the vaguely named “pork fillet” sold here, plus soy sauce and sweet Shaoxing rice wine for a marinade. It’s a dish I’d made dozens of times in San Francisco, usually with mediocre results.
But this da dou mieu, grown in the perennially humid delta, was so sweet and delicate I could have eaten it like a salad. On my countertop range, which emits a flame that would probably require a city permit in the States, the vegetables and pork cooked faster than a movie gangster can empty a crowded teahouse. Save for the fact I had no one to share it with, it was one of the best meals I’ve ever had.
Copyright © 2000 Stephen Lawson
Note: This column appeared in a slightly different form in PekoPeko: a zine about food, No. 1, Winter 2001. This is a great little magazine by my friend Karen Eng that comes out twice a year. For more information, check out www.zukazuka.com/pekopeko.