wow. how awesome is this?

i would really like to go to juan mari azrak or martin berastraguei’s dinners. anyone want to join me? no, i’m serious. hit me at the email if you want to go.

lamma island is one of the outlying islands in hong kong – a 30 minute ferry ride from the central ferry piers, you have your choice of two villages to take the ferry to. we arrived too late (or early) to take the ferry to sok kwu wan, we got on the ferry for yung shue wan.

well, getting there, i didn’t know which of the seafood restaurants to pick (i’ve only been to sok kwu wan before) but there was certainly lots of seafood to choose from. we picked one at random and had a feast.

photos after the jump

fresh boiled shrimp

bamboo clams steamed with black bean sauce – these are especially delicious. i would’ve eaten another plate of these if i could.

clams steamed with the same black bean sauce. i preferred the bamboo clams, but that’s just me. these were also very good though.

steamed fish

lamma island is a 30 minute ride from the central ferry piers. usually, people go to sok kwu wan for the long row of seafood restaurants – i really don’t have one restaurant to recommend over any other. one note – these restaurants, despite the basic decorations, plastic chairs and lack of ambiance, are not cheap. the ultra fresh seafood and the laid back atmosphere make for a great day out though.

cantonese home cooking is something i actually don’t get a lot of. here in shanghai – and even in hong kong, restaurants concentrate on the banquet or the dim sum or the fast and quick barbeque or noodle dishes. homefeel makes the sort of food that mom makes at home. and that sort of hearty cantonese food was just what i was craving.

with my friend abbie we ordered grandma’s chicken, the “old fire” or daily soup. let me just stop here a second and go talk about soup – so important for any cantonese meal or even cantonese life. when you’re looking for a girlfriend or a wife – your cantonese friends will say “make sure she knows how to make soup.” If you’re going home, your cantonese friends say “Oh, you’re going home so that your mom will make soup for you.” If you’re sick, soup. If you’re feeling good, it must be because of soup. If eating is the reason for existence for Cantonese – and it is – than soup is the alpha and omega of that existence.

but since i’m not truly truly cantonese – or i’m only half way there by way of pittsburgh, los angeles and berkeley, what i really was craving for was steamed pork loaf. kind of a cantonese meat loaf. yeah, doesn’t sound too appetizing. nor does it look that great.

but this is the sort of food that my mom made for me growing up. with a salted duck’s egg and a bowl of rice, this is home for me. sure they make it with a slightly fattier pork than at home, which makes it slightly tastier.

oh and grandma’s chicken

the signature dish of the restaurant – it was kind of expensive for $95hkd for a half a chicken, but man, they make a good bird. equal parts sweet and savory, with the nice tang of a reduced soy sauce glaze contrasting with the moist juicy bird. a little bit like a hainan chicken rice chicken, but juicier and more succulent, if that was even possible. i don’t make a lot of specific recommendations, but grandma knew what she was doing when she gave out the recipe for this chicken.

for those of us of cantonese extraction, the feel good food of home feel brings us back to a place where mom is cooking for us and the smell of rice steaming pervades the home. and that’s a nice place.

C, 7/F, Lee Theatre Plaza,
99 Percival Street, Causeway Bay
Hong Kong

$100 HKD per person

yes. and yes. man, do i love hong kong or what? so i went back with a colleague who is new to china/hong kong and had spent her first week in hong kong eating at the grocery store near the office. as her time in asia is limited, i was rather disappointed and told her that that was no way to see hong kong, especially if her visits to hong kong would be minimal in the future.

now it just so happened that i wanted to go to hong kong anyways, since it had been since chinese new year that i had been there last, so i invited her along to see my hong kong, which of course consists mainly of eating.

plenty of people have written and photographed about goldfinch cafe much better than i could ever do. the nostalgia value is there, with the posters of “in the mood for love” and “2046″

the atmosphere was so thick, you’d think tony leung and maggie cheung were just around the corner eating soy sauce western food.

oh yeah, the food. well, they offered a set meal with soup and rice dish and drink. so 3 of us (out of the 4) ordered the pork chop and rice. the cantonese soy sauce cuisine pork chop has its beginnings in the tonkatsu pork chop of japanese heritage, but the breading is fried up slightly crispier than panko breading tends to fry up.

and it was everything a pork chop could be. juicy, flavorful, without being oily or fatty. fried up just right, it was really the pork chop to end all pork chops.

the soup was historically mediocre (only cream or tomato soup) – but that pork chop. it makes me weep with joy with how good it was.

come for the nostalgia, or if you’re a wong kar wei fan. stay for the western set lunch – and if they’re offering that pork chop, get yourself on that.

goldfinch cafe
G/F., 13-15 Lan Fong Rd., Causeway Bay
??????13-15 ???
$50 HKD ($7 USD) for the set-lunch

it’s a phat sh for beijing!

beijing hao chi

so i made my first meal in singapore at thye hong hokkien mee famous for their fried prawn noodles.

even though thye hong is in the middle of a shopping mall food court, they got their start in a proper hawker centreand were very famous in their original location – which i’m too lazy to look up. their calling card was to fry the prawn noodles in prawn stock.

they’re really quite good. the noodles are tender, but with enough bite almost to be al dante – the mix of sambal paste with the seafood provides a nice spicy backdrop for the noodles.

i’ll be hitting the hawker centres over the weekend, but if you’re shopping on orchard, you could a lot worse than thay hong.

thye hong hokkien mee
Address
435 Orchard Road
#04-00 Food Republic, Wisma Atria

small order of noodles S$4.50

i made two pies based on the la times recipe. had a few missing ingredients and came up a little short on the crust – so one pie has a lot less crust.

but man, this stuff is good. it’s gooey and rich and very sweet, but one or two slices and then you think about having a third or fourth.

it doesn’t look great in my photos (again, i need work on food presentation), but it is very very tasty.

and one slice

for most of my life, i believed that tsim chai kee with its signature giant oversized wontons and cheap prices was my favorite small snack restaurant in the world. while the people over at chowhound and my mom argued more in favor of the favorite of both the rich and famous and time magazine/fodor’s and gosh near everyone else – mak’s noodles. luckily these two restaurants are located 20 feet away from each other.

jim tsai kee

mak’s noodles

we’ll start with mak’s, since it was open over chinese new year earlier than jim tsai kee. mak’s is almost universally praised for their soup base, great egg noodles and delicate wontons. they offer a much wider menu than their cross the street rivals, including things like beef brisket, beef tendon, fish balls and other varieties of accompaniments with one’s noodles.

i opted for some beef tendon beef noodles – wow, the soup was delicious – meaty and crisp with the right amount of beef flavor; the tendons were both pleasingly chewy and tender in the proportions one would expect – and the wontons were pretty much perfect.

beef tendon wonton noodles

unfortunately, the tiny proportion size (especially for the cost!) meant that i was still slightly hungry, so i ordered another bowl of the wonton noodles. without the beef flavor, the shrimp base of the soup came through stronger – if you like that sort of thing. again, the noodles and wonton were the right mix of chewy and tasty. really the perfect texture.

the masters at work:

so mak’s puts together an almost perfect meal. the drawback? the price. as you can see from the photos, mak’s is a tiny small snacks shop, but the beef tendon noodles (40 hkd) and wonton noodles (27hkd) – well, you can see their prices are quite high – especially considering the tiny portions. but the food is really quite good.

crossing the street brings you to jim tsai kee. as recently as 2-3 years ago, this was a formica round tabled place with bright fluorescent lighting open to the street. a coupe of years ago, the owners refurbished the place to this old chinese dark wood – it’s much nicer, but i think it’s lost a little bit of its formica soul.

i am, however, still a fan of the simple menu (three types of toppings: wonton, beef or fish balls, egg noodles or rice noodles, and some vegetables make up the entirety of the menu. even though they’ve raised their prices (when i lived in hong kong from 1997 through 2003, they were $10hkd for a bowl of noodles, now they’re $17), they’re still ridiculously cheap. and as the bowl is 50% larger than what you get at mak’s, and the noodles are equally as good, and the wonton are tasty, the value here is amazing.

tsim chai kee menu

the overly large wonton and a bottle of soy milk – $22 HKD

either one you choose, you can’t go wrong.

this would be my first time making this dish – and as my cousin has found out, it’s not quite as easy as stirring some stuff together.

here’s my mise-en-place consisting of grahem crackers, kraft philadelphia cream cheese, knox gelatin, jell-o brand lime gelatin dessert, vanilla, sugar and butter.

here’s my graham cracker crust – i still don’t think i’m doing this right. i think i need to crush the crackers more.

using the hand mixer. here this is 1 packet of knox gelatin, half a cup of sugar, 1 cup boiling water and 16 ounces of kraft philadelpha cream cheese.

here is the cheesecake mix poured into the graham cracker crust. the whole thing then goes into the fridge to set.

in the meantime, i start whipping up some lime jell-o. accept no substitutes! here in shanghai there’s all these euro-gelatins with german written on the package – but only the pure processed goodness of the kraft foods company will do for this cheesecake, yessir!

the making of lime jell-o consists of 1 cup boiling water, 1 box jell-o mix and 3/4 cup of cold water

ok, confession time. the first time i tried this i didn’t wait long enough for the cheesecake to set and i ended up with a slimey, cheesecake lake mess – it still tasted great, but it looked horrible. this below is my second attempt – and i STILL messed it up a little, hence the lake of cheesecake floating in the middle of my jell-o.

but the end result is pretty dang good, if i don’t say so myself. cooking with pre-packaged foods. yum yum yum.

UPDATE: i took the cheesecake to work – and even with 50% of the office gone for business travel or chinese new year it disappeared in a matter of 2-3 hour .. . some people even went back for seconds. it was right tasty. i’ll figure out how to keep the cheesecake lake from appearing next time.

this is a super tasty roasted thyme chicken dish with hollandaise sauce (yes! i even held the egg yolk over a double boiler and kept it at temperature!)

i really need to learn how to make a dish presentable.