Hong Kong's Comfort Zone
Revisiting the site of their wedding 50 years ago, Eileen Yin-Fei Lo and Fred Ferretti find a city once again in love with Cantonese classics.
Fred Ferretti & Eileen Yin-Fei Lo reports.
Our visit to Hong Kong a few months ago was a trip to our personal pasts together and nostalgic visits to friends of many years as well as to many parts of this city that holds memories of decades, for it was in Hong Kong that we met and married in June of 1959. We return to this busy, vital place of ours quite often, usually to report periodically on its culinary customs and shifts, yet always to renew ourselves and to remember this city we love.
And so, this year was, as always, a kaleidoscope of the new and the familiar, the fresh and the old, but with an overlay of 50 years of recollections. A late night Star Ferry watery chug across Victoria Harbor, one of hundreds in past years, from the sky-high lights of Hong Kong Island competing with the stars to the newer illuminations of Kowloon. An early morning stop, once again, at the Tai Cheong Bakery in Central, where Christopher Patten, the last of Hong Kong's British governors, went daily for his flaky custard tarts, then on to the Lin Heung Tea House nearby for pleasantly bitter cups of bo lei tea poured from battered brass kettles, then on again up the steep Victoria Peak for a walkaround. We had a lovely lunch at the Luk Kwok Hotel, with a spectacular lor han platter formed from shredded taro and fried into an edible bowl holding a mass of eight-treasure vegetables. This, follo wed by an anniversary cake in the Canton Room of the hotel, built upon the foundation of the old Luk Kwok, where, in the Blackwood banquet room in 1959, we had our wedding.
The next day, it was a surprise breakfast in bed, all duvets and down, egg noodles and eggs Benedict, congee (a rice porridge) and Champagne, in a sunlit suite in the Four Seasons Hotel, overlooking the harbor. Then on to dim sum in the very old, but still there, lobby restaurant of the Shamrock Hotel on Nathan Road, where we stayed when we were married. The Green House Coffee Shop on Prince Edward Road no longer exists, nor does the Red Ruby Restaurant on Carnarvon Road-where we had our first dates of coffee and tea and chaperoned pork chops-but Tai Ping Koon, a "see yau chan gun," or "soy sauce" Western-style place, once the rage of Hong Kong, does. In the old-fashioned booths on Granville Road, with a history of 100 years, we ate chicken wings in "Swiss sauce" (make that sweet and red) and mud-brown fried rice noodles with scallops of beef, and our joy was undiminished.
So much of remembered Hong Kong remains, yet, like every major city, it has been affected adversely by the global economic downturn, and its citizens have chosen, or been forced, to change dining habits. More and more, older restaurants-many generations old and family run, particularly those devoted to cooking traditional dishes-have become quite popular, not only for their cooking of the classics but because they're informal and inexpensive.
To be sure, most of the city's finest Chinese restaurants remain well-attended, particularly Lung King Heen in the Four Seasons, which so wowed the Guide Michelin tasters that it, and its chef, Chan Yan Tak, received Hong Kong's only three-star rating. Lung King Heen is sleek and handsome and serves thoroughly Cantonese food but with a keen, modern edge, as do other Michelin
rosette-recognized places such as T'ang Court in the Langham Hotel and its brother, Ming Court in the Langham Place.
These restaurants seem but lightly affected by today's economics, but otherwise Hong Kong's discerning diners turn more frequently to those small outposts of tradition, some with less than a dozen seats, most often in small alleys and noisy commercial cul-de-sacs scattered throughout the city. All of them are Cantonese, with roots in old Guangzhou. Over many years we have eaten in scores of them, and on this occasion we remembered tastes.
One example is the New Chui Wah Restaurant in Causeway Bay, a tiny tiled place that is arguably the only kitchen in the city that cooks clay pot rice in the classic way, completely over charcoal. Other restaurants cook it partly over gas flames, partly over charcoal, but chef Chan Cheung Ming insists upon doing it the way he has done it for 40 years: rice, washed, placed into a thick earthenware clay pot with pork and pork liver sausages and seasoned with sweetened soy sauce. As it cooks, the clay bottom caramelizes the flavored rice. Utterly delicious.
We ate perfectly roasted goose, oily in its own fat, at Keung Kee in Wan Chai, where the secret is to use only fresh fat geese of about eight pounds. No other. We had fresh crab in Under Bridge Spicy Crab, cut up, oil-blanched, and deep-fried, then served under what can only be called a dense blanket of minced fried garlic and chiles, the traditional "typhoon shelter crab" as eaten by the fishermen who once lived aboard the junks in the sheltered cove of Causeway Bay. In Cheung Mat Sum's 60 year old Wing Wah Noodle Shop in Wan Chai, we feasted on so-called "cart" noodles in soup with black mushrooms, noodles once sold by street hawkers. They are traditionally made by artisans who, while holding a bamboo pole anchored between their legs and jumping quickly up and down and side to side, pound masses of dough into thin noodles. The same sort of noodles, equally as good, we found in Mak's Noodle, a small shop in Central where only duck eggs are used in the noodle dough mix.
A special love of the Cantonese are small balls made from hand-minced and seasoned fish, cuttlefish, and shrimp. They must be boiled, and often they are overboiled to rubbery bounciness. At Man Fai they are done just right. This Causeway Bay cubbyhole forms them by hand, boils them briefly in a fragrant soup made from pork and chicken stock simmered for 24 hours, then serves them in the soup with strands of seaweed that absolutely must come from Fujian in southern China.
The resurgent popularity of such traditional favorites hasn't escaped the notice of some of Hong Kong's greatest established restaurants, especially those steeped in Cantonese custom. Fook Lam Moon in Wan Chai, which has, under the tutelage of its founder and owner, Chui Wai-Kwan, provided chefs who today are regarded as "dai see Fu," or masters to hotels and other restaurants throughout the city, in particular serves classic dishes. Suckling pig is served the traditional way, on the tiny rib bones, and the restaurant offers a preparation rarely seen, whole Japanese abalone, the best, aged for years, braised into softness and accompanied by a cooked wedge of pomelo skin and mustard greens. Marvelous.
At Yue in the City Garden Hotel in North Point, chef Kan Chit Ming, a Fook Lam Moon alumnus, cooks congee the old-fashioned way, the way it was in old Guangzhou, for hours in clay pots, its base a rice broth of dace bones and garoupa fish, with black mushrooms and dried tangerine skin. In Shang Palace in the Kowloon Shangri-La Hotel, chef Ip Chi-Cheung has diners waiting in line for his gum chin gai, or gold coin chicken, a classic of layered medallions of chicken liver, fried pork fat, and chicken; and for his lang yue, a stuffed Canton carp in which the fish is boned without disturbing the skin, head, or tail, then the meat is stuffed back into the skin and the fish is fried. It looks like a fish, but is actually a fine terrine.
And in Yan Toh Heen in the InterContinental Hotel, chef Lau Yiu Fai often sets aside his "health" dishes to cook the traditional dai tin Jeung, an "old sauce" casserole of gently simmered oysters with dried chiles and shallots.
Finally, we must mention two other notable preparations we revisited. The first is the miraculous herbal jelly, a spiced herb-infused gelatin based on quiling, a fungus the name of which translates as "turtle." This "herbal tortoise jelly" is thick, black, and served with liquid sugar syrup in Kung Wo Tong in Kowloon, where it originated 100 years ago. Hong Kong says it prevents cancer, detoxifies the body, and cures the flu. The second is a tea, specifically nai cha, at Kam Fung in Wan Chai, a Chinese take on the British cuppa tea made with a blend of various Sri Lankan leaves, said at one time to have been strained through fine silk stockings for ultimate smoothness and mixed with milk. Lovely.
Eileen Yin-Fei Lo's latest book, Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking, is due out this month.
CANTONESE and HONG KONG CLASSICS
Big Chicken Buns (Gai Dai Bau) Large steamed wheat flour buns stuffed with chicken, Chinese black mushrooms, and salted egg yolks. Lin Heung Tea House, Central
Five Snake Soup with Abalone The meat of five different snakes, plus abalone, flavored with lemon leaves (Ng Seh Gung) in 100 year old Ser Wong Fun, Central
Salted Fish & Pork Patty (Ham Yue Yuk Bang) Minced salted fish, ground pork, and preserved vegetable (Mui Choi) made into patties and fried. Ming Yuen, Kowloon
Wuxi Pork Ribs (Wuxi Pai Kwat) Pork ribs braised with Shao-Hsing wine, red bean curd juice, sugar, and vinegar. Summer Palace, Island Shangri-La Hotel, Central
Shanghai Choy Sin Strips of eel, twice-fried to crispness, then tossed with a sweet, brown sauce. Dong Lai Shun, Royal Garden Hotel, Kowloon
