Chinese food and HK food in particular are quite complex. After a couple of weeks there, I feel I’ve barely scratched the surface. Some things stood up though:
– locals love pork; you’ll also see a lot of duck, seafood and chicken; while not as vegetarian-friendly as I expected, you’ll still have a wider range of vegetarian food than in Romania
– locals love fat; whatever piece of meat you get will surely have some fat in in; sometimes you might have just the fat, without the meat
– locals love tea and milk tea; you can add them to any lunch menu for less than one EUR
Sock milk tea
That sounds like a pretty weird type of tea, right? Well, it’s just an exaggerated title. The official name is Hong Kong style milk tea. The sock name comes from the bag used to filter the drink, which resembles a woman’s stocking.
A waiter trying to be friendly:
“How do you say bonne appetite in Romanian?”
“Pofta buna”
“Pota bula”
“No, it’s with an F, pofta buna!”
“Pofa pula”
“Uhmm.. bonne appetite is good”
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- Typical restaurant
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- Typical restaurant
Night market
While street food is not as developed as in Taiwan, you can still find a few stalls – curry fish balls and grilled octopus/chicken/mushrooms on skewers. You will rather find sit-down restaurants, but of a cheaper/simpler kind. We visited Temple Street Night Marked and had us some snails.
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- Night market restaurant
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- Street food stall
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- Curry fish balls
Congee
It’s what happens when you boil rice, but put way too much water and forget about it for a couple of hours. It comes in combination with a variety of ingredients. Mine had sweet potato and taro.
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- Sweet potato and taro congee at the bottom, rice noodle rolls in the middle, pak choi salad (or Chinese cabbage) soup higher up
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- Some sort of Korean/Japanese dish
Soup desserts
Found a Michelin rated desserts restaurant nearby. Not a big fan of restaurant rankings, but since it was close and we were craving sugar, we tried it out. This way we got to experiment another local type of food. We got a spicy ginger soup with some sweet dough and sesame dumplings. The dumplings were delicious. Also got some sort of sweet soup with red beans.
Dim sum
My understanding of dim sum is steamed finger food. A portion is usually made up of 2 or 3 pieces, and 2 or 3 portions are enough for a meal. Dim sum has a lot of variety – similar to Spanish tapas. You can have dumplings (pork, shirmp, ..), chicken feet, buns (filled with egg custard, sesame, beans, …) and so on. Eating dim sum while drinking tea is locally called yum cha and is sort of a ritual.
