My Neighborhood

So two things. First is I found my camera (it was under my couch) and second is that Lucky and I decided to move. We're planning on moving to Kowloon (one of the worlds, maybe the worlds, most densely populated places). Right now we live in Sheung Shui way out in the New Territories near the mainland border and about the closest thing to a small town Hong Kong has to offer. I'm excited to get to the bright lights and big city but I'm gonna miss Sheung Shui. I've become quite fond of this little town of cha chaan tengs and barber shops and I've grown especially attached to the snackies here. So, for this post I'm gonna give you a little photographic tour of my favorite (or at least most frequent) Sheung Shui snacks. These aren't always something special or michelin worthy but they are meals I eat almost every day and they all make me quite happy.

This is what I've just returned from eating and has been my go to late breakfast for the last week or so. I'm not quite sure the correct chinese for this dish but to order it I say something like min qi niu rou fan. Which means something like minced beef rice. The dish itself consists of a huge pile of white rice completely submerged in sweet tomato sauce with ground beef and a fried egg thrown on top for good measure. The sauce tastes super cheap in that bangin way. In fact it tastes almost exactly like the sauce in spaghettios. Delicious! When it is served you mix it all up so the egg yolk binds the sauce to the rice and the fried egg gets all shredded and mixed in. Often times this is served as part of a special set meal with a light broth soup and a milk tea or coffee for about $3.80US. I always spring for an iced milk tea which kicks the price up to a whopping $4.00US. All in all a hearty, delicious and affordable meal.

Now, I must take a moment to talk about the iced milk tea (冷奶茶). Basically they just brew the shit out some tea, pour it over crushed ice, then over-compensate for the over-brewing with way too much sweetened condensed milk. I cannot begin to explain how amazing this stuff is. And so addictive, I'm shocked the CIA hasn't already flooded America's inner-city streets with it. I drink this stuff everyday and it is making me kind of a fat ass but I figure if I really wanna be a food writer a little pudge gives me some credibility. Here's my boy Lucky enjoying his ice milk tea


This picture was actually taken at dinner a couple of days ago. I always go to cha chaan tengs for breakfast and lunch and Lucky said I was missing out on all of there dinner-fare so he took me out to one of his favorite neighborhood spots to try some. We ordered his two favorite dishes, Fish Fragranced Eggplant (鱼香茄) and Three Cup Chicken (台式三杯鸡). The fish fragrance eggplant is really a bad translation on my part. It is eggplant cooked in a thick sauce with salted fish and ground pork. This stuff is bangin, real filling comfort food with a really strong savory flavor.

This particular dish was especially strong. Cantonese cooking is all about the light flavors so strong flavors are usually a sign that the chef is covering up less than perfect ingredients. In this case that rule proved true as we found a maggot burrowed in one of the eggplant pieces had to stop enjoying this dish after a couple of bites. The other Lucky favorite was the Three Cup Chicken. Another heavily spiced dish of chicken chunks stewed with onions and a thick spice paste.


This dish was delicious. A perfect dish for a cold (50o) winter night, although I'm stil retraining my mouth to get used to the Chinese method of butchering chicken which somehow manages to leave at least a sliver of bone in every bite.

Probably my favorite type of eatery in the neighborhood (right next store in fact) is the roast meat or siu mei spot. The most common roast meats are duck, goose, bbq pork (cha siu) and roasted fatty port with crispy skin (check out the "pork map" in an earlier post). I'm sure you've seen these places in Chinatowns all over the place with the ducks hanging in the window but they are WAY better here. I absolutely love this stuff but its so rich and unhealthy (apparently especially frowned upon in Chinese medicine) that I can almost never get anyone to go with me. The other day I recieved the good news that I'd gotten the internship I was tring for so I decided to take myself out for a celebratory late lunch of fat meat and cold beer.



Check this plate out!!!

Thats crispy fatty roast pork, roasted chicken and BBQ pork. Yummy yummy. In order to get at least a little bit of vitamins I also copped a plate of garlic and broccoli greens. I kind of ordered the greens as an after thought but they were actually the star of the meal: Perfectly par boiled to a crisp and fresh iridescent green, lightly sauced and chopped full of whole roasted garlic cloves. Delicious.


Before we get away from the roast meats entirely I just wanted to share a pic of some of the Hong Shao Rou (红烧肉) we had the other night at the Shanghainese spot in the basement of the Sha Tin mall.

Jealous?

Some other neighborhood favorites of mine are the noodle soup places. I always order the extra spicy broth and the waitresses gather around to laugh as I choke and sweat my way through the bowl, my face covered with snot and chili oil. The way it usually works is you check off different ingredients on a list, pick your broth and kind of noodle then they go put it together for you. As of now my usual is beef brisket or duck meat, beef tendon, fish balls, fried fish balls, shrimp wantons, fried tofu and tofu skin in spicy broth with ramen style noodles. Sometimes I'll order sausage too but thats always a risk because sometimes they just throw a hot dog in (see below). I always order my soup with a side of fried fish skin. You dip the fish skin in the broth (it makes a nice popping crackling sound) until it is nice and soft then munch. So good. The fried tofu is especially good becasue it soaks up the soup like a sponge but the fried skin keeps it all inside in one juicy bite.




The last thing I wanna share about my neighborhood is the desert place.


I don't know if your familiar with chinese deserts or not but them shits is crazy. Chinese deserts are like what people on acid would think people on mars ate. They're mostly all neon colored and full of all kinds of wild textures. Want some chilled black gel cubes with condensed milk, how bout cold tofu with black sesame balls and suger water or highly sweetened corn stew with tiny neon orange cubes and a side of tapioca ice cream? I gotta give it to this place, there menu is huge. They must serve two hundred different deserts and the posters and chalk boards all over the walls advertise like a hundred more.



I wish I could say I've tried a lot of them but on my first day I got addicted to the black sesame ice with banana and mango. Now, I know that sounds basic but I can't even begin to explain how bizarre it is. The ice is oddly dry and almost powdery and is always either in stringy piles or odd gossamer ribbons. Basically its like eating a pile of frozen sesame flavored cob webs. To be honest the desert for some reason kind of reminds me of "The Secret of Nimh" and I LOVE it.


Alright I guess desert is a good place to end. I hope you've enjoyed the snackie tour of my neighborhood!

Take my broth away

My first week in Hong Kong found me in kind of a foodie haze. All the cheap and delicious snackies. All of the new flavors. I was overwhelmed! My senses numbed and everything sort of blurred together making it very difficult for me to be objective about whatever it was I was eating. By now, I think the madness has come to an end; all thanks to a noodle shop that cut through the bullshit.

Last week Lucky's friend Killer agreed to take me out for some drinks and show me around a little bit. We met at TST station and before going out both decided the time was ripe for a fortifying light lunch. Killer took me to the first noodle shop outside of the station and ordered me a fat bowl of beef noodle soup with everything in it and a plate of leafy greens with oyster sauce. I thought it was just some random noodle spot chosen for convenience but the first bite floored me. When I couldn't speak, a slurping killer confessed "Oh yeah. This is my favorite place. I used to live around here. I only come here for beef soup noodles; the family that runs it is really nice". It was then that I realized the degree to which I'd been f'ng around before.

All of the random neighborhood spots I'd been trying were great (some were excellent) but this place was exceptional. The noodles were thin, ramen style and cooked perfectly. They started with an almost crunchy bite then, as they sat in the soup, mellowed into a perfect al dente. The soup itself must have been stewing for days. Although the broth was not dark the taste was so rich and beefy it tasted like sucking on a marrow bone. Paper thin slices of beef floated in the soup their connective tissue having complelty melted away leaving little pools of unctuous lip-smacking goodness floating on the surface. In the soup were pork balls, fish balls, pork wantons, shrimp wantons and a big sheet of tofu skin. The best bite of the whole meal for me was the shrimp wanton. The wantons themselves were huge, just slightly smaller than my cell phone. The noodle was delicious: paper thin with a slight bite. Inside each wonton wrapper were curled whole, or barely chopped large shrimps. The shrimps were perfectly, barely cooked and unbelievably fresh. The wrinkles of the wonton skin held just enough rich beefy broth, the firm shrimp providing the perfect pleasant little crunch. A perfect bite.

Also, the place was cheaper than the other noodles I'd been eating. Thank god for those too few moments in life when the best is also the least expensive. So now I'm ratcheting up my networking skills and getting all of the local recommendations I can handle. Once you've tasted the level of what Hong Kong has to offer you never want to go back. This weekend Killer, Lucky and their boys Rainbow Rider and Piano are taking me out for some more local snackies and I cannot bare the waiting much longer. I'll keep you posted. Now I'm off for my morning egg tart and milk tea...

錫記雲吞麵食 Shek Kee Wanton Noodles

尖沙咀宜昌街5號B舖

Tele:2317-4649

Near the C exit of TST station

Hong Kong Snackie Frenzy

I have arrived in Hong Kong! This place is straight up nuts. Especially in the food department it is insane. Everyone told me before I arrived that it is impossible to have a bad meal in Hong Kong and so far, including some questionable drunken 7-11 decisions, it seems that they were right. I'm staying on my boy Lucky's couch out in the new territories in Sheung Shui, which by the way seems to be a town entirely made up of restaurants and barber shops. The first night I arrived, deaf and valium-loopy from the flight, Lucky took me to eat at the local Da Pai Dong or outdoor food stall. Da Pai Dong's for the most part are basically low small tables surrounded by little plastic stools out on the side of the road serviced by a tiny kitchen. That first night they brought out a bucket of ice and cold beer and a metal divided pot with two types of broth which they put bubbling on a central burner. The idea is to order raw food items then cook them in the broth, dip them in some chillies and soy sauce then munch. I think, in our excitement we kind of over ordered because once the raw dishes started coming they didn't stop for like forty minutes. In to the broth and into our gullets went fish balls, pork balls, greens, gelatinous pigs blood, brisket, fatty beef, tofu, fried fish nuggets, two kinds of mushrooms, pork dumplings, chive dumplings, chicken dumplings, and big shiny slabs of beef liver. Each and every bite was spectacular, the cold beer, scalding broth and chillies blasting through my dopey travel weary haze. After all of that food and eighty eight ounces of beer the bill came to something like $15.00. I don't think I'm ever gonna leave.

I've been here for four days now and the meals have just kept getting better and better. They really take their eating seriously here. Take a look at the diagram (above) hanging in the window of the restaurant next store. That's right, that's a map of a piece pork! The second night we went out downtown for a spot of carousing and grabbed a bite at a roadside bo zai fan place. Bo zai fan is rice that is cooked in a ceramic pot until it sticks to the sides and even might start to burn a little. I ordered mine with chinese sausage and Lucky got his with greens and fatty pork. The way your supposed to eat it is remove the lid, pour on soy sauce, then replace the lid so all the goodies are steamed in the sauce then mix it all up. The end result is a melange of chewy rice, crispy rice, fatty meaty bits and caramelized bits of sauce. Bo zai fan is a famous Hong Kong winter food and it is now my comfort food of choice.

The next morning I was feeling a little worse for wear. Luckily Hong Kong has just the solution, the Cha Chaan Teng or Chinese diner. Basically Cha Chaan Tengs are some sort of crazy hybrid of a cheap Chinese eatery and an American greasy spoon diner. You can get noodles, fried rice with manhole cover sized pork chops and stewed tomatoes, pork rib soup or any other cheap Hong Kong staple along with toast, omelets, fried spam or sandwiches. Being HK this is all served with sweet milk tea, or iced coffee, bubble tea, frozen lemon coke or some other wildly refreshing bevie. This time I went for the Gong See sandwich, or company sandwich (I have no idea). My god... I honestly think if I wasn't hung over and in desperate need this sandwich would have killed me. Assembled like a typical club sandwich between three triangles of heavily buttered white toast, the gong see sandwich consists of alternating layers of tomato, ham, cheese,mayo, BBQ pork, omelette prepared with ground beef, pork liver paste and a thick slab of fried spam. It certainly fixed what ailed me but also sat in my stomach like a cinder block and left me basically immobile for the rest of the day.

Another great perk about the HK food scene is the omnipresence of cheap super-bangin examples of other types of Asian cuisine. The other day I poked my head into the neighborhood Sushi spot and was blown away by the variety and freshness of the sushi. Huge raw shrimps so sweet it seemed they were dipped in sugar, pink perfect slices of salmon, fried mackerel with lemon, salt and soy and raw scallops the size of fists. Again, we way over ordered but the bill was still about a quarter of what it would have been in the states. That night we headed downtown to Mong Kok and ended up eating at a random Korean joint. It was amazing! Lucky was feeling sick so he just had some chicken dumpling soup but I sprung for the fatty pork and kimchee. Two huge slabs of pork back fat arrived with a heaping bowl of fiery kimchee. You cook the pork on a slanted grill in the middle of the table putting the kimchee, along with cloves of raw garlic on the down hill side so that as the fat renders off the pork it passes through the garlic and fries the kimchee. Then you put the pork, garlic cloves and kimchee in a lettuce leaf with herbs and peppers, slather it with sauce, wrap it up, dip it in rice wine vinegar then chow down. Dear lord... I can't even begin to describe how bangin.

Ok I have a lot more to share (spicy wonton soup with fried fish skin?) but I'm getting so hungry I can't handle it. Time to get dressed and head out. I still haven't tried any BBQ goose...

Himachi Tsukiji
G/F., Block A, No.10, Fu Hing Street,
Shek Wu Hui, Sheung Shui, N.T.

Shanghai, final snackies

I had planned on staying in Shanghai for a few days to visit friends, then take the sleeper train to Kowloon. Unfortunately, because of the spring festival, all of the train tickets for the entire month of July were sold out and the cheapest plane ticket available left the day after my job ended. That meant I had about twelve hours to eat all of the food and see all of the people I had planned to, so I winnowed my friend list down to one and my food list down to just two places.

One of my favorite food bloggers, Sandy Ley, writes a blog out of Shanghai and had recently discussed her "top five must eats in Shanghai" in an interview for chinatravel.net. The two things she listed that interested me the most were the Xiao Long Bao at fer her favorite xlb place, Ling Long Fang, and the complimentary nut mix at the famous expat watering hole el Coctel. I've been following her blog avidly for months and was excited to finally try some of her recommendations.

First off, Ling Long Fang was bangin. Just as Sandy describes it: sticky table tops, gruff service, delicious pork soup snackies. That said, I must admit I still prefer De Long Guan. Ling Long Fang was yummy but De Long Guan was even gruffer and stickier and served up some sort of crazy magic.

Next up on the list was el Coctel. I met up with my friend and Shanghai expat John and headed out for a bevie and some of those famous free nuts. This was my first time at el Coctel and it was really pretty awesome. The bar is based on trendy Tokyo style bars (I forget what they're called but I went to a really similar one in NYC a few years ago), dark, intimate, upstairs and a little jazzy. The cocktails we had were pricey but simple, impeccably made and delicious. And the nuts? Well the nuts were insane. I must admit that when I first read that the nuts were included on Sandy's top five eats in Shanghai I balked. The selection spanked of trying too hard to be hip, certainly some bar nuts couldn't be that great. But man oh man was I wrong. Most of the nuts weren't even nuts, I don't know what they were. It was like some non-sugary cracker jack or something. I couldn't stop eating them and after a few cocktails I wouldn't shut up about how good they would taste over milk. I'm telling you, next time I go to el Coctel I'm bringing some cold milk. Those nuts would make the best cereal in the world.

Well, goodbye Shanghai! Next blog post will be from Hong Kong, famous snackie paradise and my new home!

Ling Long Fan

10 Jian GuoDong Lu

Shanghai

Tel:86-21-6386-7021

el Coctel

2F, 47 Yongfu Lu at Fuxing Lu

On the Farm

For one of the days with the students we went out to a suburb of Shang Hai to, among other things, investigate organic farming. Our first visit was to Auntie Fu's. Auntie Fu is getting kind of famous I guess; from what I could tell she runs an organic farm in Jin Shan (outside of Shang Hai) and also a factory that makes things like her famous red bean paste peach buns. Auntie Fu herself is about four and a half feet tall and all energy. She smiles with so much enthusiasm you're scared she's gonna pull something and is always purple-faced, sweating, enveloped in steam and carrying an oversized plate of hot snacks. On the day we met her we were actually supposed to eat lunch somewhere else so Auntie Fu was told not to prepare any food and just answer some questions about organic farming. Thank god she couldn't help herself and ended up preparing a small feast of seasonal winter snacks. She brought out simple roasted root vegetables, steamed pumpkin, picked beets, small gluttonous rice flower snacks filled with brown sugar, boiled pork dumplings, mixed seasoned nuts and the piece de resistance, a towering platter of steaming whole water chestnuts. I had never seen water chestnuts like these. The were huge, all about the sie of a baby's fist and each chestnut was covered with a paper thin layer of ink black skin. The pepperiness of the skin mixed with the sweetness of the chestnut to create one truly incredible bite. Now, like I said, we only stayed a minute and didn't get to eat much but Auntie Fu kept saying her most famous dishes were fresh chicken with handpicked mushrooms and slow roasted duck. I personally met some of those chicken and ducks and they looked fat and happy (i.e. delicious) so I can't wait to get back and try some of her real dishes. I highly recommend if anyone is headed to the the Shang Hai area drop her an email. It'll be a trip.

Auntie Fu's
Jin Shan (outside of Shang Hai)
email:FYNJL1067@126.com

I Burned My Face

Shang Hai

So. I finally arrived in China on New Years Day to begin my week helping to chaperone sixty high school junior girls around Shang Hai with the aim of investigating women’s rolls in China. The food on these trips is one of the job's greatest perks but to be honest it is kind of a mixed blessing. All of the meals are huge, lavish and free but most are in the banquet style, often in restaurants oriented towards tourists. Couple this with the natural inclinations of Shang Hainese cuisine (not my favorite of China’s food traditions) and you end up with a lot of fried and sticky sweet dishes, the vegetables very oily and sauces very thick. That said one of my favorite dishes of all time is one of the sweetest, and stickiest Shang Hai has to offer, Hong Shao Rou or red cooked pork. Large cubes of fatty pork are slow stewed in a broth of soy sauce which turns them a dark red. When prepared to perfection the meat should shred easily in the teeth and flake apart under even the lightest pressure. The fat, which is sometimes as much as half an inch thick, should take on the the color and texture of a whipped custard and immediately melt to coat the mouth in that way only pork fat can. I had a few different Hong Shao Rou experiences on this trip and although none were incredible, even mediocre Hong Shao Rou is a welcome treat and nearly impossible to find in the States.

I did manage to have a couple truly exceptional dining experiences with the kids in Shang Hai. The first was the Xiao Long Bao I had for my second meal in China. Xiao Long Bao (xlb) are Shang Hai’s most famous food item. They are soup dumplings made with pork and sometimes crab. The small thin rice flour wrappers contain a perfect mouthful of searingly hot, rich pork broth. Quickly dipped in vinegar and sometimes ginger, these little pleasure packets are some of the best cold weather comfort bites on the planet. A great xlb is transcendent and a bad one is about as bad as an overly thick cold noodle filled with hot pork grease can be. People in Shang Hai are incredibly loyal to their favorite xlb restaurant/ stall and xlbs in Shang Hai assume the roll that the burrito plays in the bay area. I had done my xlb research before leaving for Shang Hai , so I was surprised when the best xlb I had ever had came from a small place I had never heard of before.

On the first day we took the kids to Fudan University to meet their new college buddies who were then supposed to take them out to a typical college student lunch. The girls guiding our group led us into a cramped and noisy little street side restaurant just a few steps from the east gate of Fu Dan University called De Long Restaurant (德笼馆). We ordered normal pork xlb, crab roe xlb, Cha Siu xlb (which the girls described as filled with honey bbq pork) and spicy xlb, along with two bowls of spicy beef curry noodle soup. This was way off from my usual xlb order. I am usually a xlb purist sticking to the old favorites of crab roe and pork. I tend to regard spicy xlb the same way I regard spicy tuna roll, made for people who don’t know what they’re doing, the spiciness mostly used to cover up sub-par ingredients. I had never heard of Cha Siu xlb before and so was a little suspicious (although it is difficult to go wrong with bbq pork) and I don’t usually like East Asian curry dishes at all. Anyway, I was wrong on all counts. The spicy bao were scorchingly hot, the broth filled with chilies and a hefty portion of mouth numbing Sichuan peppercorns. Two dumplings in and I was covered in sweat and couldn’t feel my face. The normal pork xlb were absolutely flawless, the meat ground to perfection, the broth rich, bracing and hot. The Cha Siu dumplings had more firm dense pork slices providing a lot of nice tooth resistance, with a deep golden rich broth that filled your head with an almost overpowering scent of honey. Crab roe xlb are always good but these were amazing- filled with rich salty crab broth and the roe itself hit me like an ocean wave in the face almost like a bite of fresh Uni. Even the curry soup was great. Hot spicy broth, nice globs of fat, perfect noodles and tender slices of beef falling apart between your chopsticks. Bangin. Now I have not tried enough places to say this but I think I’ve found my Xiao Long Bao place. De Long Guan I’m all yours.

德笼馆, 复旦大学东门

De Long Restaurant,

Fu Dan University East Gate