This article is a summary of my findings from wandering around Hong Kong for a week.
The cuisines on offer
There is a wide variety of Asian cuisines on offer – Thai, Filipino, Vietnam, Sichuan, Tibetan etc. as well as the local food. And there are restaurants absolutely everywhere. I was expecting Hong Kong to top the rankings of density of restaurants per capita, but on googling, it seems that while Hong Kong is at 1 restaurant per 300 people, Paris has even more at 1 in 245, and Tōkyō is at an incredible 1 restaurant for every 140 people!
My experience, and where to eat
My experience of eating in Hong Kong was rather different from most visitors. Clichés abound when it comes to Hong Kong and food – “a Mecca for gourmets”, “the culinary capital of Asia”, “a food lover’s playground”, “a street food paradise”. There’s certainly a vibrant food scene, but most travellers will spend their time on the Westernised Island of Hong Kong, they will research the best rated restaurants and they will pay good money for their experiences. I spent my time on the mainland, I did no research and ate in cheap restaurants and diners for the locals. In hindsight I wouldn’t recommend this strategy! Firstly the quality of the cuts of meat was extremely poor (the dumplings and fat-covered slices of beef or chicken were sometimes inedible), and the attitude of the servers was far from welcoming. Of course I understand that they don’t speak English and that oftentimes there were no English menus – that was my problem – but without smiles or any attempt to understand me, the experience was generally unpleasant.
Even without English, you can get quite far – you sit down at your table, scan the QR code or study the laminated menu. You can either hover Google Translate over the menu or rely on the photos. And when the food comes, you reach out under the table for the drawer containing your chopsticks. You might be lucky enough to share a table with a local who has a smattering of English.
The lesson learnt is that if you want to keep to a budget and not spend time researching where to go, the best option is to eat at the shopping malls rather than trying your luck on the street.
Fresh seafood
Cantonese cuisine is reputed to be the queen of the Chinese regional cuisines. Everything has to be fresh, so the seafood will swim in tanks stacked up against the walls of restaurants for customers to choose. The food is then rapidly seared or steamed with little in the way of spices.
Noodle shops
From what i’ve seen, the main options are :
1/ Noodle soup
You choose the type of noodles (udon, ramen, e-fu noodles which are made of wheat flour and eggs, rice noodles etc), the type of flavour of the broth (fish, pork, chicken, spicy etc) and then you select what you want floating in it – could be some fried chicken, fried pork, shrimp ball, beef ball, chive dumpling, or “wonton” which is a very Hong Kong type of dumpling – a mix of pork and shrimp with ginger and garlic, all wrapped in thin dough.
2/ Noodles with meat
So here the main ingredient (fried chicken or pork, wontons, dumplings etc) is just served next to noodles on the plate. Again you can choose the type of noodles (including cheese e-fu noodles, which i didn’t try since it doesn’t sound nice), and it typically comes with a spicy sauce or soy sauce.
Rather than noodles, you might opt for rice. And rather than chicken, pork or the other usual options, you might plump for the Hong Kong favourite “abalone”, which is a chewy sea mollusk.
3/ Chow Mein
This is simply stir-fried noodles, tossed in with vegetables and meat and flavoured with the same sauces you’d throw into a fried rice dish – soy sauce, sesame oil and oyster sauce.
Street food
In some of the open air markets (like Temple Street) you will find street food of all kinds.
Dim Sum
This is the signature dish that draws people to Hong Kong. Dim sum are bite-sized dumplings, buns and rolls. Popular dishes like shrimp and pork dumplings and BBQ pork buns are steamed, and served in the iconic round bamboo baskets. But some dim sum like spring rolls are fried. These are consumed with sauces – the main options are soy sauce and chili sauce, but you can also find sweet plum sauce for roast duck. You can even find egg tarts on the menu! This “Cantonese brunch” is served from morning to afternoon.
Dim sum restaurants are everywhere, and the more refined ones are known as “tea houses” and play up the experience of “yum cha” (drinking tea), and the dim sum might be pushed around on carts between tables. In the more casual restaurants you fill out an order form to indicate what you’d like. There might be an extensive selection of teas available, but the most common “house tea” that would be offered free at your table would be Oolong, Puerh (a dark tea) or Jasmine.
Roasted goose and BBQs
Hong Kong chefs are adept at marinating and roasting. Street food BBQs can look healthy with their skewers of mushroom, aubergine, chicken etc, but they do tend to dab a lot of rich oily sauces before grilling them.
Drinks
It always takes time to get used to the style of tea and coffee in another country. I didn’t like expresso when I first came to Paris and had to add large quantities of sugar before I got accustomed to it. So I’m not surprised that during just one week I didn’t take to what was on offer – the milk tea, hot or cold lemon tea (strong black tea with a couple of slices of lemon in the bottom that you squeeze out with your spoon). And the expressos were extremely bitter. “Yuan yang” is a mix of tea and coffee! There are often other related hot drinks available – ovaltine, almond mix, horlicks, hot chocolate, as well as sodas – not only coke and sprite but also various fruit sodas like blueberry soda and mulberry soda. Wine doesn’t seem very popular. When a beer like Tsingtao is on the menu, it comes in huge bottles of 640ml!
Desserts
Traditional noodle shops don’t normally serve desserts, so it’s surprising I didn’t see more dedicated dessert shops around.
Breakfast
I didn’t have much success with breakfast. I never felt like noodles first thing, and Western breakfasts were hard to come by – at least on the mainland. The famous Hong Kong “French toast” is sickly sweet, and they put lots of cream in the scrambled eggs. Perhaps the best option is to forgo breakfast altogether and just grab a coffee, or otherwise go in for the full dim sum experience.