French Toast Hong Kong-style: two thick slices of deep fried french toast, sandwiching a thick later of crunchy peanut butter with a hot mess of butter on top. Heaven on Earth.
Tsui Wah Restaurant. Wellington Street, across from Yong Kee Restaurant, Central, Hong Kong.
Can you expect anything else from a trip to Hong Kong?
Last week, I went to visit my parents in Hong Kong. They spoiled me rotten and took me to all the places that I love to eat. Naturally, we had dim sum 3 days out of the 4 that I was there. One of my favorite places is one of the only remaining restaurants on the HK side serving pushcart dim sum everyday - the 3rd Floor Chinese restaurant at City Hall. It’s clean, everything is served on Victorian china, and the wait is almost always long (make sure to get there before 12 as they don’t take reservations). I’d say that the prices range from 20-50 HKD per order? (7.8HKD = 1USD). So pretty affordable.
Dim Sum moves into the 23rd Century: just look into the TV and the food will magically appear in your stomach!
Siu Mai - steamed shrimp/pork dumplings
Glutinous rice and chicken wrapped in lotus leaf
Spring rolls. Classic.
Deep-fried yam. I don’t know about you, but I love this stuff.
Congee (rice porridge) with fried dough. Perfect for days when you’re sick. Or any other day.
Egg tarts.
A couple days later, we headed to the Lippo Chiu Chow restaurant at the ground floor of the Lippo Centre. There were 5 of us (come on, I’m not that gluttonous).
Yum… marinated pig’s ears. Chewy texture and refreshing taste!
Fried vegetable dumpling
Not really sure what this is, but it’s good. I think it’s cooked carrots and mushrooms wrapped in tofu skin.
My favorite all time dim sum - bo law char siu tsan bao, or baked pineapple BBQ pork bun? Maybe it’s not pineapple. Just some kind of sweet thing on top.
Rice flour rolls stir fried with sweet soy sauce and scallions.
Sticky rice with peanut wrapped in rice flour.
Steamed char siu bao (steamed BBQ pork bun)
Drool your heart out.
Maxim’s Palace City Hall - 2/F (though it’s up two flights of stairs) City Hall Low Block, Central. Tel: 2521 1303.
Lippo Chiu Chow Restaurant - G/F Lippo Centre, 89 Queensway, Admiralty. Tel: 2845 4151. It’s a 2 second walk from the Admiralty MTR.
Because of the Shanghai World Expo that is being held in the city until the end of October, the city has taken many recent measures to “clean the city up,” including shutting down many of the DVD shops, outlawing the wearing of pajamas in public (see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/opinion/17gao.html), and prohibiting street food vendors that usually sell the tastiest noodles, baked sweet potatoes, and freshly fried dumplings and buns. Now, we have to go into restaurants to get all of these treats.
One afternoon, Joyce took me to a Xi’an restaurant about 15 minutes’ walk from the Dongchang Road Line 2 Metro Station in Pudong.
(I am so grateful for picture menus!)
Joyce pointed out that their 凉粉皮(liang fen pi) was especially amazing, so we instantly ordered ourselves one of those. Homemade mung bean sheets require a long and arduous process, so why not just order them for 12 RMB at the local restaurant? Literally, this means cold noodle skin, or mung bean sheets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mung_bean_sheet). Usually, they are soaked in a vinegar-y sauce with chili oil, making it a refreshing snack on a hot day.
We topped it off with steamed dumplings, fried dumplings, and my recent favorite staple food, broccoli….boring, but so good.
The thin, crispy flour skin paired with the juicy pork filling make this taste so good.
Lunch for 2: 55 RMB
My latest attempt at cooking: congee. This rice porridge is commonly eaten for breakfast with fried dough and scallions, but I like eating this stuff at all times of the day. One typical Cantonese-style congee is cooked with lean pieces of pork and preserved egg (aka. thousand-year egg, usually made with duck eggs), but I am perfectly content with having just the preserved egg:
Looks like a dinosaur egg, yeah? I’d say it’s an acquired taste.
Ingredients: (serves 2)
Easy, right?
Not too bad. It’s possibly the cheapest meal ever!
This time’s challenger… Top Dumpling (項鮮湯包) versus the existing champion of the best xiaolongbao (in the Justine world), Jia Jia Tang Bao (佳家湯包).
We showed up to this little restaurant, situated next to City Shop in the basement of a shopping plaza on Tianyaoqiao Lu in Xujiahui, with our sleeves rolled up and ready to get down and dirty, to eat.
The intimidation conveyed by these Chinese masks is offset by the cheerful face of Top Dumpling.
Even though the menu is completely in Chinese, there are some pictures on each page to guide you through deducing the contents of each list. I was perfectly content with my order of wonton soup, until my eyes fell upon the tantalizing item of EGG YOLK XIAOLONGBAO (in Chinese it’s something like 蛋黃小龍包). Anyway, at about 9 RMB per “cage” of 6 xiaolongbaos, an extra order couldn’t hurt, right?
I don’t know why I like egg yolk xiaolongbao so much. It basically has more of a salty egg blended with minced pork, wrapped up in a delicate flour skin. The filling had a good flavor, with plenty of soup. The skin felt a little hard and tough, but it was pointed out that I let the dumplings sit too long before eating. I’d rather that than the appearance of a flaming sore on my mouth from the scalding soup that explodes from the depths of each xiaolongbao!
In conclusion, I still name Jia Jia Tang Bao as champion because of the smaller, bite-sized goodness of each dumpling. For me, the JJTB dumplings are actually sized to be eaten in one bite, unlike the ambiguous too-big-for-one-bite-but-a-little-too-small-for-two size of the Top Dumpling XLB’s. But that’s just my pure opinion. To be perfectly honest, most xiaolongbaos taste the same to me.
Basement of 131 Tianyaoqiao Lu, near Xingeng Lu. 4 minute walk from the Xujiahui Line 1/9 Metro Station, Exit 10.
