Is Hong Kong Cooked?

HONG KONG — Though it’s still unclear what changes will be set in motion when the British hand over their prize colony to the Chinese on July 1, one thing is certain: Hong Kong’s love of good food will never change.

This is a city that lives to eat--and one of the few cities in the world that can deservedly call itself an eating destination. Restaurants outnumber banks--and that is saying a lot in this city of commerce. Minuscule noodle shops and congee (rice porridge) parlors are squeezed into every block.

If your feet wear out and you decide to ride the red double-decker trams that traverse Queen’s Road, sitting on the top deck you can look in on vast restaurants that seat 200 or 300 people, all intent on putting away a big meal. But because this is Hong Kong, business is taking place too. Restaurant guides list whether or not cell phones are permitted. Competition is fierce, and restaurants don’t survive if they’re not good.

During a recent visit, I didn’t eat in a restaurant that wasn’t packed.

Getting a table at the best places requires reserving a week or two in advance.

Like L.A., New York or Paris, Hong Kong is truly an international city where you find not only the great regional cooking of China but also French, Italian, Thai, Indian and Singaporean restaurants, even California and South African cuisine. But I came here to eat Chinese. Eating Cantonese or Shanghai-style food in Hong Kong was as thrilling as encountering Tuscan or Piedmontese cooking in Italy for the first time.

After all, the best cooks are here. The money is here. And so are the products: superbly fresh seafood from the China Sea, rustic Yunnan hams and supremely flavorful vegetables grown on the Chinese mainland or in the New Territories.

“It’s very difficult to stay slim in this city,” a Hong Kong friend told me, laughing as we ordered yet another round of dim sum.

Last year, I began planning the trip with a group of friends as passionately interested in eating as I am. Meshing the schedules of several people turned out to be the hardest part. By the time we finally left, we had lost one world-class eater and now numbered six, including a 6-year-old who had his heart set on eating snake.

Essentially, my goal was to try the best of the regional cuisines of China. I didn’t want to eat only in fancy hotel restaurants, but in hole-in-the-wall places too.

Here’s my personal eating diary from my trip in March:

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Since we didn’t eat much on the plane, when our 15-hour flight arrives at 6:30 a.m., we are ravenous. After a 15-minute taxi ride from the airport, my companion and I check into our hotel, the Salisbury YMCA, on the Kowloon side of the city in the district called Tsim Sha Tsui (or TST). This decidedly upscale YMCA is one of Hong Kong’s best hotel bets for price and location.

By 7:30 a.m. we meet our friends who had arrived the previous day, and we board the Star Ferry with the rest of the morning commuters. Our breakfast destination in Hong Kong Island’s posh Central district is the venerable Luk Yu Tea House, where a turbaned Sikh doorman ushers you into a dark, colonial-style interior with polished wood wainscoting, white tablecloths and twirling ceiling fans.

Slipping into one of the two-seater wooden booths, I somehow kick an unseen brass spittoon at the foot of the table--fortunately not enough to knock it over. When the gruff, white-jacketed waiter arrives with tea, you’ve got to be fast: Unless you ask for bo lei or oolong, you’ll get jasmine.

Women in flat Chinese shoes with stainless steel trays hanging from wide leather shoulder straps offer fat har gow (dumplings) bursting with shrimp, slender vegetable dumplings in lacy wrappers, steamed bao (buns) and crab dumplings. Nothing is very exotic--or very exceptional. I’ve had far better dim sum in Monterey Park. But the place is lovely.

The trick at Luk Yu is to restrict yourself to tea and order only a few dim sum, just enough to stave off hunger until lunch. That’s what the regulars, mostly businessmen in polished shoes and gold watches reading the newspaper, order at this power breakfast spot.

Our group had reserved that night for dinner at City Chiu Chow in Tsim Sha Tsui, not far from our hotel. At the back of the large dining room is a glassed-in kitchen with a necklace of huge coral and white crabs in the window. Here, a meal begins with kwun yum, the regional tea, tannic and powerful and served in thimble-size cups. Naturally, we’d like to try the crab. Taking out his calculator, the waiter calculates a crab will cost just over $50 at the going rate. It’s served cold on an ornate gold pedestal with a dipping sauce of pungent dark vinegar and chopped ginger, a perfect foil to the snowy, compact crab meat.

Then comes double-boiled duck and salted lemon soup. The waiter lifts a whole baby duck from the clear yellowish broth and dishes out the soup into bowls, making sure that everyone gets some of the salt-preserved lemon. It’s a stunning soup: rich, warm, lemony, salty, with a finish that lingers like a good wine. Steamed goose Chiu Chow style is served in thin slices edged with the coveted fat, layered over a mound of tan tofu. Delectable is exactly the word for this goose, its rich flesh set off by a bracing sauce of white vinegar, minced garlic and chile flakes.

Slender baby cabbages are a revelation, sauteed in rendered chicken fat to intensify their flavor and wonderful with plain rice. The only dish I’m not too taken with is vaguely nouvelle, nuggets of chicken in a clear brown sauce garnished with flash-fried trefoil leaves. We finish, like everyone else that night, with wedges of juicy fresh melon and watermelon.

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The next day, a lunch of dim sum at Victoria City Seafood in Wangchai blows every other dim sum experience I’ve ever had right out of the water. Originally opened as the dim sum adjunct to the famous restaurant East Ocean, Victoria City is thronged at lunchtime with tycoons, politicos and lesser lights, all with a cell phone close at hand. Here, instead of ladies passing with carts, dim sum is ordered from waiters (there is a menu, but not everything is on it).

Boom, boom, boom, the plates arrive one after the other in rapid succession until the entire tabletop is covered. Har gow, with their delicate wrapper and vivid taste of superbly fresh shrimp, are ethereal. And I love the small envelopes of tender, flaky pastry filled with a particularly delicate char sui (barbecued pork) or with starchy, delicious purple-gray taro.

Enticing, too, are the salted, floured pieces of snowy milk fish. They have to be eaten very hot. But then the Cantonese like to eat everything extremely hot, before it has a chance to cool down. Even something as ordinary as tofu is exquisite in quality, cut the size of dice, veiled in salt and pepper and extraordinarily custardy inside. But my favorite has to be duck gizzard paired with slices of crunchy yellow-green pickled vegetable.

After quite a substantial dim sum course comes the piece de resistance: an enormous flower crab (so-named because of its pretty coral-and-white patterning), steamed and presented on a platter in a lake of bright yellow sauce redolent of Chinese rice wine and chicken fat. The idea is to eat the crab, leaving most of the incredibly rich sauce. Then the platter is whisked away, followed by another house specialty, little toasts topped with glassy-skinned chicken masquerading as Peking duck. The flower crab sauce returns later enriched even further with the crab butter and egg and tossed with flat, handmade noodles. A pinch of salt and a drop of lemon juice bring its flavors into sharp focus. It’s as spectacular a pasta dish as the golden tajerin of Italy’s Piedmont region.

I could have gone back and eaten the same meal for dinner. Instead, that night five of us go to one of Hong Kong’s best Shanghai-style restaurants, Snow Garden in Causeway Bay. Booths with frosted glass partitions are aligned along one wall of the long narrow room. Everyone I talked to raved about this place.

I don’t regret ordering a dish of hard bean curd, cut in julienne, with slivered Tientsin cabbage, intensely flavorful black mushrooms and prized Yunnan ham. The salty, delicious ham shows up in a dark concentrated broth with braised fish head, fava beans and ginger. The one disappointment is the famous Shanghai soup dumplings, which I expected to be the best version I’ve ever had. They aren’t.

The pan-fried dumplings far outshine them, with a sweet pork filling flecked with green, enrobed in a bread dough that reminds me of my grandmother’s dumplings. More dumplings are on the agenda for dessert, specifically a deep bowl of miniature marshmallow-size mochi (pounded glutinous rice) swimming in sweet rice wine. With just one meal, we have barely dipped into Snow Garden’s extensive menu.

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Since the 6-year-old son of one my traveling companions has expressed the desire to eat snake (cobra, he insists), lunch the next day is something different. Actually, Benjamin encounters a live example that morning when we wander through the Yau Ma Tei district of Kowloon, where the streets are a maze of torn-up asphalt, sagging apartment buildings and outdoor market stalls. Shoppers snap up black-skinned chickens with scraggly white feathers, snowy winter melons or bundles of flat Chinese chives and papery brown shallots. Improvised aquariums are jammed with crabs, frogs and conch, and live fish flop in shallow bowls of water. Amid the stalls stacked with crates of live poultry, the boy finds one selling live snakes and photographs a caged cobra with its hood spread. Yet just around the corner on Nathan Road, we pass a spiffy McDonald’s, a Pizza Hut and countless glitzy jewelry stores.

We end up at Ser Wong Fun Restaurant (Snake King), a small, simple place on a narrow street in Central. The entire kitchen is a glassed-in, closet-size space where two cooks ladle fragrant soups into bowls and dish out roast goose and mustard greens with rice. We sit on little stools around a round glass-topped table, next to a shrine lighted with red lightbulbs.

There is an English menu, but the day’s specials are written on bamboo staves mounted on the grass-paper-covered walls. In winter, the specialty is snake; the rest of the year, people flock to Snake King for special medicinal soups.

We begin with a soup made from five venomous snakes--including cobra. Everything in it--snake, fish maw, mushrooms, black fungus--is boiled with pepper root and finely shredded to a tweed of cream, taupe and brown. I don’t know what its effect is supposed to be, other than to fill you with rich, nourishing soup. But it certainly is restorative after spending the morning tramping all over Central.

We eat snake congee, too, and two kinds of chicken soup, one made from black-skinned chicken, the other a fragrant white chicken soup with fresh water chestnuts. Turtle and chicken-foot soup is supposed to be good for your yin. But you can get other things, too, such as barbecued goose with plum sauce, or a plate of two kinds of lop cheung sausage, one sweet, one dark and livery, and both fabulous.

Golden Island Bird’s Nest Restaurant, where we dine this evening, is a clamorous, popular restaurant near Kowloon’s Star Ferry pier. It’s decorated with lots of bright reds and golds, and you can hear the sharp clack of mah-jongg tiles coming from the private rooms in back. In the main part of the dining room, raucous celebrations are carried on in improvised rooms created with movable woven screens. While one birthday party is in progress behind us, two Filipino nannies entertain twin toddlers at the next table.

Waiters have little patience for non-Chinese speakers like us, and service is rudimentary. The atmosphere is fun, though, but neither duck soup with lemon or roast goose is as good as City Chiu Chow’s version. The best dish is pea shoots with dried scallops and straw mushrooms, and prawns boiled live--always a sure bet.

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On a narrow street in Central lined with street stalls selling everything from inexpensive handbags that are knockoffs of knockoffs to hardware and Chinese ink brushes, is Mak’s Noodle House. Squeezing past the glassed-in kitchen in the front window we find a table in the tiny dining room crowded with office workers taking a quick lunch. The specialties here are beef brisket--cooked very slowly with five-spice powder until it turns a dark mahogany--and beef tendon in translucent chunks scattered with yellow chives. Glorious handmade flat noodles are served with a bowl of broth on the side. You can order them garnished with dried cuttlefish or sprinkled with bright red dried shrimp roe. Splash on a little broth, and season to taste with chile sauce. This is the kind of place I would love to have around the corner from my office. They do only a few things, but do them extraordinarily well.

For dinner that night we head for Yunnan Kitchen, located in a glass-sheathed skyscraper in busy Times Square. Yunnan Kitchen is the only Hong Kong restaurant I know of that serves the cooking of the southwest region of Yunnan province. The postmodern decor with its stylish leather chairs is an odd contrast to the waiters’ traditional costumes: red cotton trimmed in embroidered ribbon.

The clientele is young, hip and upscale. You get things here you rarely see anywhere else. There’s a marvelously concentrated distilled chicken soup cooked in individual lidded clay casseroles. And that Yunnan ham again. Two pages of the menu are devoted to wild mushrooms: I order a gorgeous single matsutake mushroom fanned out on the plate and decorated with matchsticks of ham, carrot and scallion. Boar’s-head mushroom, which looks something like a cauliflower, is covered with dominoes of ham. And there are a couple of strange but wonderful vegetables: fried Yunnan lettuce stem and grass bud garnished with young garlic.

After just these few tastes, if I’d had time, I would have caught the next plane or train to Yunnan province, and while I was at it, onward to Hunan and Sichuan too. There aren’t any truly representative restaurants of either Hunan or Sichuan cuisines in Hong Kong. That’s because dishes have to be tailored to suit Hong Kong’s predominantly Cantonese palate.

There’s no truly spectacular restaurant featuring the cooking of Beijing either. That’s one thing bound to change with the Chinese about to come to power. Where are all those Beijing officials going to eat? You can be sure some of Beijing’s best chefs will be showing up in Hong Kong very soon.

Virbila is The Times restaurant critic.

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GUIDEBOOK Eating Out in Hong Kong

In Hong Kong, the sky’s the limit in terms of what you can spend in a restaurant. But if you forgo such expensive delicacies as shark fin, bird’s nest and abalone (which, to tell the truth, aren’t all that thrilling), you can eat splendidly for normal, big-city prices. Make sure to ask the price of those fish swimming in tanks before you order; some can cost upward of $100 dollars. Most restaurants take major credit cards. A 10% service charge is standard in Hong Kong and will be added to your bill. When warranted, you might want to add 5% more.

No matter how sweltering it is outside, bring a sweater. They keep these places as chilly as a walk-in refrigerator. Restaurant telephone numbers below are local; to call Hong Kong from Los Angeles, dial 011-852 followed by the number.

City Chiu Chow, 98 Granville Road (East Ocean Centre), Tsim Sha Tsui East, Kowloon; telephone 2723-6226. Expensive.

Golden Island Bird’s Nest Chiu Chau Restaurant, East Half Star House, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon; tel. 2736-6228. Moderate.

Luk Yu Tea House, 24-26 Stanley St., Central, Hong Kong Island; tel. 2523-5464. Inexpensive.

Mak’s Noodle Restaurant, 37 Wing Kut St., Central; tel. 2541-6388. Inexpensive.

Ser Wong Fun Restaurant, 30 Cochrane St., Central; tel. 2543-1032. Moderate.

Snow Garden, 8 Sunning Road (2/F Eight Plaza), Causeway Bay; tel. 2881-6837. Moderate to expensive.

Victoria City Seafood, Sun Hung Kai Centre, 30 Harbour Road, Wanchai; tel. 2827-9938. Expensive.

Yunnan Kitchen, 1 Matheson St. (Times Square, 12/F Food Forum), Causeway Bay; tel. 2506-3309. Moderate.