Spring is in My Hair

Life is getting really good right about now. Hong Kong is trying to do its own version of Restaurant Week this year called Springalicious and I'm getting invited to try all of these wild restaurants' special tasting menus. Holla.

The first tasting I was invited to was at 1/5 nuevo, a Spanish place that I've been hearing about. To be honest, I have read enough and heard enough from my friends to be a little wary of Spanish places here. Hong Kong is in the throws of a tapas frenzy and there are little mediocre tapas places popping up everywhere. So, my expectations were not high when I made my way to the restaurant. Thankfully I was really wrong about this place. The food was top-notch, the wine was just right and the price was really impressive. A four course meal with a wine pairing during Springalicous is just HK$228 which is kind of amazing but even the normal price of HK$286 seems low to me...

Also, you might notice that my pictures look awfully professional. That's because they are and I want to thank Henry Kao for photographing our meal. And no that doesn't mean I'm getting paid to write this.

Anyway, snackies!



We started with this little trio of cold tapas: a shot of gazpacho, a slice of Iberico ham and a plump marinated anchovy on toast. This was yummy. Iberico ham is always welcome but to be honest the stars of this dish were the other two. I love me some anchovies and this pudgy oily little nugget did not disappoint. The gazpacho was actually extremely good. I wanted a pint instead of a shot. It was so refreshing especially in collusion with the anchovy.

Next up was the hot tapas, which for some for some reason there are no pictures of. Braised ox tail and grilled sardines. This was an exact opposite of the cold tapas. Where they woke me up, these put me in a rich comfy stupor. I feel like a traitor liking ox tail because my father hates it so much (once in a restaurant when the waiter said that day's special was ox tail soup my dad uncontrollably gagged so loudly that they thought he was choking), but I really do love it. It's one of the great, slow, lip smacky meats that always makes me feel like I'm snowed in somewhere. This oxtail was really meaty and cooked very well; it fell apart on the fork and left me feeling full for almost fourteen hours. The sardines were, of course, great. For some reason everyone at the table ate theirs so I ended up eating a whole school of them. Not that I'm complaining.

The main dish, of which I also have no picture was certainly no respite from the richness of the hot tapas. Duck confit with garlic potato and port wine sauce. I've had a long sting of bad western duck experiences in Hong Kong, although I've had an equal number of great Cantonese duck experiences and straight up life changing moments with some geese, but this broke the losing streak. This confit was intense but delicious with crackly skin covered in big flakes of sea salt and fatty tender meat. The port sauce was light and cut the grease of the bird nicely and not at all like the cloyingly sweet versions of this sauce I've had elsewhere. Also, the portion was surprisingly huge. This duck must have been SERIOUS.

To be honest I don't remember the potatoes. Whatever that means.



BA-BLOW!! Desert dropped like it knows what's up! Creme caramel, apple tart and caramel ice cream. The creme caramel was well done. Lovely, no surprises no disappointments. The caramel ice cream was ice cream that had the flavor of caramel. See what I'm sayin? And the tart was deceptively thin for the fat flavour it was hiding. Flaky, delicate, light and gone too soon. Put them all together and you got my eyes rolling around in public.

Also, there was wine! Two reds, a Cava (Spanish sparkling) and a desert wine. That's about as wine savvy as you'll see this blog get. But they were just enough to get me in the right head space to get back to work. Thanks nuevo!

I hope there are more tastings coming up...

Sunday Snackies

I’m starting to feel real guilty about this blog. I was so excited about it, still am in fact, but I’ve started working (gasp) and this has seriously cut down on my time to go out and try random restaurants. This is especially frustrating because I work at a food magazine, so I spend all day looking at all of the snackies I could be eating. The job has also shown me how little I really know about the Hong Kong food scene. I started making a list of places I have to try from noodle shops to Michelin starred fancy pants spots but the list is already like sixty spots deep and I haven’t gotten to try even one of them. I have had the opportunity to interview some of the chefs at some of the swankier spots so that’s been fun and maybe soon I’ll start to actually eat a little professionally and that would be pretty tight.

Anyway, it occurred to me that I haven’t really touched on dim sum. And that’s a shame because dim sum makes me really extraordinarily happy. Pretty much every Sunday, if we wake up before dinner, Lucky and I switch off between getting a fat sushi brunch or an equally fat dim sum brunch. This Sunday was dim sum. We went to the neighborhood spot just down the street. This spot is especially bangin because it is 24hrs and often I will go twice in a day, once for dinner and again at like one or two in the morning. This restaurant isn’t amazing or anything. It’s typical of a thousand other teashops around the city but that’s just the thing, if it were in NYC or San Francisco it would be BY FAR the best around. I just can’t believe how much cheaper and better the dim sum is here than in the states. Although, truth be told the very best single bite of dim sum I’ve ever eaten was a steamed jade shrimp dumpling in Millbrae California at the now deceased Fook Yuen. But that was just a fluke. This shit here beats all the rest by a mile.

This is the restaurant. Notice the fat stacks of steamer baskets out front. You can alway order to go dim sum if you want but seeing as how the food gets to your table within thirty seconds of ordering it I always just kick it. Also that way I can have a milk tea and watch the cooking shows on the tv. That reminds me! The TV here is wild. I'm pretty sure its all about food in someway. Even the soap operas have scenes of people eating or cooking or talking about food. There are basic cooking shows, restaurant review shows, food game shows, a show where they make models with no cooking experience prepare really complicated dishes then laugh at them and there's my favorite show in which around ten super attractive friends go to wild restaurants, order a thousand different dishes then spend half an hour stuffing their faces and looking pleased. The first week I got here there was what seemed to be a really important press conference on the big screen tv at the neighborhood mall. It was zoomed in on two really serious looking Chinese businessmen's faces, one had a little Hong Kong flag lapel pin and one had a little Mainland Chinese lapel pin. When the camera zoomed out you could see they were both holding the same over-sized golden carving knife, then a roast pig was wheeled out and the men sliced it in half pausing for a photo opp. Perfect.



Anyway, so this was the first dim sum I ordered. Its a meatball. They are so good. The meatballs are held together with tofu skin and very heavily spiced. They're big too, about the size of the palm of my hand and I can usually only eat one or two because they are so juicy (greasy). Seriously they spray and squirt juice everywhere. Sometimes in a concentrated scalding stream, sometimes in a fragrant grease colored mist.



These little guys are wild. I'd never seen these before coming here. I can't remember what's in them... I think its pork but what really makes them special is that there is a hard boiled quail egg stuffed in each one. Damn Hong Kong knows how to push the health envelope. Nothing goes better with pork fat than rich quail yoke.



These are actually my favorite dim sum. No funny business, just plane old steamed shrimp dumplings. Man when these things are done right it's on a whole other level. I wake up most mornings craving these. When their perfect they have skin thats so thin its see-thru but strong enough to get roughed up with my chop sticks without ever breaking. They should never get stuck to the paper in the basket but should have a slight tackiness in the mouth. Inside one medium sized, recently deceased shrimp, quietly curled and just barely steamed to firm, crunchy perfection. A little soy sauce and holy god.



These are another favorite. You can't see in the picture but the rolled up rice noodles contain cha siu pork, the famous Cantonese sweet bbq'd pork. They're always swimming in a really mellow, not too salty soy sauce that when combined with the sweet pork really gets going.



Here it is. The reason I can no longer walk up stairs without taking a rese. Look at the beautiful chunk of roast piggy. Portioned perfectly so every bite contains equel amounts of pink salty flesh and creamy fat, all topped off with a crunchy porky bit of roasted skin. The photo can't convey the crunchiness of this skin; the sound you make eating this sis the same one you make when you eat corn chips. On man, you take one of these little guys, drag it through the green onion infused oil, then a good long thorough bath in the fiery yellow mustard, and its worth the inevitable coronary episode.

Ok, I'll leave you with that. I'm actually too hungry to keep this up right now. Much love.

Happy New Year!

Eyo. Eyo. Sorry I haven't been updating more recently but this last weekend was Chinese New Years and I've been running around all over the place. Luckily, by "running around all over the place" I mean I've been stuffing my pudgy face to the point that I'm starting to sweat stock. I love the food in China. I love the street stalls, the tea houses, the restaurants and the banquet halls but nothing can even come close to a home cooked family feast. I'm thrilled that my friends here are some of the sweetest folks around and I was honored to be invited to meet their lovely families and gorge myself irresponsibly on their Mommies' home made snackies. I'll get to the details in a moment but first just a quick thought about the quantities. Do Chinese mothers ever sleep? The amount of food prepared for these meals was staggering! I swear to god they must have started cooking over Thanksgiving. The first home cooked NYE meal I had was at my friend Rainbow Ryder's house. Rainbow, his parents, brother (lil' Ryder), his girlfriend Piano, Lucky and I all sat down around eight and I dunno what time we left (somebody must have carried me to the Taxi) but I'm sure it was late. It all started innocently enough with a soup. Cantonese soups are world famous. Rightly so. I went into some detail about bangin broth earlier on this site but I had heard Rainbow's mom is especially slick with the soup and god damn. This was a light but flavorful fish broth with big chunks of carrot, squid, geoduck and fatty fish belly. This fish belly was just amazing. As soon as you put it in your mouth it was gone leaving only a memory of intense fishy satisfaction.


Let's see what else was there... My god there were so many. Oh yeah, big chunks of soft yam in a thick sauce flavored with big chunks of salty pork and spring onions (and maybe oysters? I should write this stuff down...)

There was a big bowl of this absolutely wild dish that I had never seen before (although would see more of before the weekend was over). In Cantonese the name of the dish is a homophone for Happy New Year so it's a popular holiday snackie. It's made of tender vegetables, spring onions, pork, sea cucumber, mushrooms, more fish tummy and HUGE oysters. All of the ingredients are stewed together with... well with whatever that is. I thought it was sea weed but was assured it was a kind of grass that only grew in the desert. I can't remember the Chinese name except that it had the character for "hair" in it. On its own the grass brought more texture to the table than flavor, but all together the grass was integral in bringing all of the disperate ingredients together into one rich and delicious dish. Sorry about the photograph; this might me the most difficult dish to photograph in the world.

Next came, well not really next as everything pretty much came at once, one of my favorites. A large plate of fresh steamed shrimp with a simple sauce made by adding scalding oil to a dish of soy, sugar and pepper. I love these little guys and would have happily eaten the whole plate of them. The family made fun of me for the way I ate them, leaving the shells, heads and appendages in tact, but let me say loud and proud that my way is better! The shells add a nice little crunch, I'm sure it's good for your skin or something and by not peeling every single one you can stuff you gullet more efficiently.

Now it was time for the WHOLE STEAMED CHICKEN. Oh man I love simple steamed chicken. Chicken at home just doesn't taste chickeny enough. This bird was steamed beautifully and served with a thick condiment of ginger, scallions, garlic, soy and scalding oil. Just look at this beautiful bird! See those dark bits on top? Those are the gizzards and assorted offal and they were unbelievably delicious when loaded up with ginger and garlic. Yum!

Now peep Lucky being a fat beast!

I feel like I'm not even doing this meal justice. I'm forgetting so much. Just look at these gorgeous greens!

Oh yeah and look at this! This was actually one of my favorite dishes of the night, assorted vegetables with slices of fish and pork meatloaf and chinese sausage. Anyone who knows me will know that it was the sausage that really did it for me. This stuff is just amazing. It is made with Bai Jiu (a strong sorgram liquor) and the booze perfectly cut through the greasiness of the cured pork fat and lent the whole thing a kind of sweet, warming alcoholy flavor.

Oh wait! Let's not forget the whole steamed fish! The Cantonese sure know how to rock a fish. This one was steamed simply in soy with spring onions and strips of ginger. Every ingredient (all three or so of them) carefully selected to highlight the fish's natural flavor. I usually have a problem with Chinese fish (which is a shame because they might just be the best fish in the world) because of all the bones but this one wasn't to boney at all, just fleshy and succulent. Also, because I was a guest Rainbow's Mom offered me the fishy's plump little cheek. What a wonderful woman...

I was really starting to slow down at this point. Surely we were almost done... but wait! Save room for the whole steamed crabs. Full of garlic and spring onion and so fresh they still tasted of the sea. Unbelievable.

Now it was time for what I was assured would be the last dish. A yummy simple soup of a light barely-there broth enveloping lovely little tender silky smooth dumplings. I'm sorry to say I could only eat one or two but they were delicious.

Now, only forty eight hours later I headed out to my other friend, Killer's family's house for another New Years Eve feast. I forgot my camera but this was another off-the-rails meal. This time it was hot pot. We started with blueberry cheesecake (always a good sign) then gathered around a caldron of boiling water. Ingredients were scattered all around the large table and as people laughed, chatted and drank we all threw them in with abandon. There were fish balls, meat balls, little sausage nuggets, fat mushrooms, skinny mushrooms, tomato slices, yam chunks, lettuce, bok choi, fatty pork, thinly sliced lean beef, and paper thin sheep. Served with everything were heaping platters of the best god damned kimchee I have ever put in my mouth and a dipping sauce of garlic, ginger, spring onion, Thai chili paste and fragrant fish soy sauce. Just as the meal was winding down his mother brought out a heaped bowl of bou zai fan (rice cooked in a pot, see my previous post). This particular bou zai fan was topped with minced pork and salt cured fish and was the best I have ever eaten. Even my Hong Kong freinds agreed it was the best they'd ever eaten. The fish, which Killer's aunt brought from the fishing village where she lives, was especially incredible.

Then a quick bite of left over "Desert Hair Grass New Years Dish" and after dinner, fresh oranges and pomello slices. Life is good.

Now I can hardly convey how amazing these meals were or how gracious the family Rainbow and the family Killer were for sharing them with me. Thank you so much and happy new year to all!!

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

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