Sushi One 一壽司

For my last night in Hong Kong, before I jet off to cold Paris, I didn't want anything fancy, just good food; and I knew that knowing my lazy self, I wouldn't eat fish for a while, mostly just meat in Paris especially after coming back late nights from school and the upcoming internship- so why not some good Japanese food. Another reason why I chose Japanese is because I find it to be quite pricey in Paris for what you order therefore I wanted to get as much good sashimi as possible!

Sushi One  一壽司 has several branches in Hong Kong but I like to go to the one in Causeway Bay, out of convenience. It is a very popular Japanese restaurant that specializes, as its name suggests, in Sushi, Sashimi and other Japanese dishes. The menu is quite extensive so there are plenty of choices including maki, yakitori, tempura, etc.. The sashimi is always fresh, sweet and even melts in your mouth.

The design of the restaurant is modern, simple, yet nice. You can sit in the dining room or at the sushi bar. They have an aquarium that stretches throughout the restaurant, so the swimming fish in the tank are watching you eat fish, haha. 

The place gets packed during dinner so we tend to get there for 7 pm or else there's a huge queue. Prices for dishes vary on what you get (in terms of the color of the dish either grey, green, blue, yellow, etc...), but stays within the 100 - 250$ range (at the end of the meal) which is very reasonable especially for sashimi.

Some preview of the restaurant...

Salmon and Hamachi (yellowtail) sashimi

Salmon Sushi

Crab roe sushi

Crab and roe salad

Grilled sweet egg

Salmon belly sashimi 

Fried chicken softbone

It's not the BEST sashimi or sushi bar in Hong Kong, but it's a very good one, that has maintained its standards and I have always liked the food when I go as it is tasty and cheap at the same time; and not every restaurant can provide the best of both. 

Sushi One

G/F Chinachem Leighton Plaza, 29 Leighton Road, Causeway Bay

Tel: 3188 0083

Subway station: Causeway Bay

Tsui Wah 翠華餐廳

Happy New Year!!!! I hope you all had a wonderful countdown with family and friends and wishing you all a prosperous 2011! As always, the only thing I want to talk about is...food.


A trip to Hong Kong would not be complete without joining the locals (and I mean all locals - from celebrities, business tycoons and just your average Hong Kong-er) and ordering milk tea and a meal from an extensive menu from this 'institution', Tsui Wah 翠華. While there are many branches in town, the Central branch, open 24 hours, has become the place for breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner AND late night food after a long night out. There's always a crowd in this restaurant at every time of the day....ALWAYS.
The restaurant offers 3 levels of seating, so during a working day lunch hour, you may wait a bit but then up having a table with a local - normal proceedings at Tsui Wah and any local Chinese diner. 


Tsui Wah is one of Hong Kong's most well-loved char chan tengs 茶餐廳 (Chinese tea diner commonly found in Hong Kong). A note about Char chan tengs...

Char Chan Teng provide tea (usually weak tea) called "clear tea" (清茶 cing cha), to customers as soon as they are seated. It is also very common to use the heat to wash your utensils (this is will appear like an insult...) The name, literally "tea restaurant", serves to distinguish itself from Western restaurants that provide water to customers instead of tea. The "tea" in the name refers to the inexpensive black tea, not the traditional Chinese tea served in traditional dim sum restaurants and teahouses. 

Cha chaan teng serves a wide range of food. Both fast food and à-la-carte dishes are available. A big cha chaan teng often consists of three cooking places: a "water bar" (水吧) which makes drinks, toast/sandwiches and instant noodles, a "noodle stall", and a kitchen for producing rice plates and other more expensive dishes. 

Customers usually select their seats freely in a cha chaan teng, but in a crowded restaurant they may be given the choice of sharing a table with strangers. During peak hours, waiters in a char chan teng will seat their customers, "packing" as many customers into the restaurant as possible. In most char chan tengs, customers call out their orders to a waiter, who will jot down the prices of the ordered food 

Tsui Wah has branches all over Hong Kong, so you should have no problem finding it. This well established char chan teng is known to be open 24 hours, even during typhoons! The range of dishes served in this char chan teng will amaze, but perhaps the most amazing part is that none of the dishes has ever failed to satisfy. Locals come here, not for the service or decor but for the food. An extensive menu (shown underneath the glass table) offers a range of dishes from classic Fish ball with noodle, Chinese Fried Rice, Hainan Chicken Rice, to Japanese Udon Noodle and Indian curry - retouched to HK taste of course. This is as close as you can come to Chinese comfort food - all at very reasonable prices. 

Drinks are also varied here including the famous 'Lai-Cha' tea with evaporated milk, ice lemon tea and ice coffee. During special holidays, you'll encounter seasonal creations such as Marshmallow with Sesame Ice-cream or herbal jelly on ice. 
Everyone finds something they like to eat at Tsui Wah so don't be intimidated by the huge neon-lights and the hecticness of the restaurant. Trust me, this place has to be visited at least one time. 


During my short trip back to Hong Kong, I went to Tsui Wah A LOT as much as I could to show you the variety of food, but there's just so much and I couldn't display everything. So here's just a preview of what they offer, obviously there are many other great dishes that I didn't get to capture too... 


Tsui Wah in Central

I even have their t-shirt! :) I do love Tsui Wah

All restaurants provide the extensive menu literally underneath your table.

                              

Soft Pork bone..one of my favorites. The meat falls off the bone, is very tasty and tender so melts in your mouth.

You can even have it with Chive dumplings in Fish soup

Hands down to their fish soup stock. In this particular soup, the gravy of the pork bone adds a dimension to the fish soup that I really love, which is also why the soup acquires a brownish hue. Another topping that I love (not pictured) is fish skin dumplings (yu pei gao), essentially pork dumplings wrapped in a skin made of fish paste. 

Their famous ice-tea - keeps you up and running all day (the ice coffee even more so!)

Fish Ball and fish cake with noodle. My mom orders this EVERY TIME she comes here (3 times a week at least?) and never changes, NEVER. As a local, you tend to stick to what you love, and Tsui Wah makes this the best!

Pineapple Bun with Iced Butter. You basically place the thick slice of butter served on ice inside the bun and bite! Don't forget to get yourself one of their very famous iced coffees too!

Crispy Condensed Milk Bun: toasted bun with butter topped with condensed milk

A normal breakfast: macaroni soup with ham and abalone, with 2 eggs

Some vegetables too...Gau Choy Fa (Flowering chives)

Soya sauce chicken wings (a great afternoon snack)

Crispy noodle with King Prawns. The noodle served is crispy and soft at the same time (from the sauce). It's a great combination.

You can also have the same noodles with vegetables and mushrooms

So that's a just a LITTLE preview of the extensive menu Tsui Wah offers. Like I said, you'll have to try it to understand how GREAT this restaurant is and understand why Hong Kong people who live abroad and come back to the island, come to this restaurant as soon as they get back!


Main Branch...


Tsui Wah Restaurant 

翠華餐廳

15D-19 Wellington St., Central
Tel: 2525-6338
Subway Station: Central
Website: www.tsuiwahrestaurant.com

You can take the girl out of China but you can never take China out of the girl: Dinner at Wu Yueng Chun Shanghai Restaurant (滬揚川上海料理 )

As much as I love Cantonese food, Shanghainese food is one of my top weaknesses. I grew up eating my grandmother's cooking that she cooked when she was a young girl in Shanghai and everytime I go to Shanghai, I really cannot get enough.

Shanghainese cuisine is very different from Cantonese.  Shanghainese food refines food from its surrounding provinces like Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Its flavors are heavier (it is in Northern China so has to keep you warm). They feature a lot of preserved vegetables, fish and meats. A lot of its meat dishes feature pork (marinated pork belly, steamed pork dumpling, pork meatballs) but also chicken, e.g. "Beggar's Chicken" which is wrapped in lotus leaves, covered in clay and oven-fired.

The cuisine also bases a lot on sauces, sugar, and alcohol (rice wine) for seafood (like eel and crab) but also chicken that are "drunken" and are steamed.

Tonight, I had cravings for good, and hot Shanghainese food and I knew where to go: Wu Yueng Chun Shanghai Restaurant (滬揚川上海料理), a small, cheap and popular restaurant in the city centre - just what I needed.

Unfortunately, I couldn't order everything from the menu (as much as I was tempted to) but I think we ordered a good amount! Here's a brief glimpse of the food.

Sour Chili soup (with tofu, egg, mushrooms, pork skin, pork stomach)

Stir-fried rice cake with pork and cabbage (炒年糕)

Fried pork chop with spiced salt and sweet/sour sauce

Braised fish tails in dark soya sauce

Steamed pork dumpling - Xiaolong bao (小籠包)

This just makes me miss Shanghai even more! But good to know I can always grab a bite down the road. 

Wu Yueng Chun Shanghai Restaurant (滬揚川上海料理 )

G/F, 18 Matheson Street, Causeway Bay

Tel: 2575 4805

Subway station: Causeway Bay

Bowrington Wet Market

A 5 minute mini-bus drive down/10 min stroll to Causeway Bay leads me to Bowrington Market. A local Hong Kong wet market that has existed for years. I almost grew up going to this market many times a week.


Here, there are local fruits, vegetables, meat and fish street stalls being sold to the public. It's one of my favorite markets and so unique to Hong Kong in terms of how they operate, what they sell and the general atmosphere. Many people can't really stand the smell of the variety of produce or the amount of water on the floor but it's definitely an experience for the newcomer. 

Selling bean curd and everything tofu-related

Most Cantonese food uses light flavours and emphasise freshness (particularly in the seafood). You'll see live fish, crabs and shrimps sold here by the catty; on display they all flap and jump up, sometimes meters from the trays. Even after you're given your purchases, all the way home, you can feel them flap in the plastic bag. Vendors using a traditional weight scale using a weighting rod for the larger items.

As for the fish heads and meat, don't come if you're too squeamish as men with incredibly huge and sharp cleavers cut them off and then open the fish and display the bits to the customers. The gills of the head still beat in the fillets!

Just point and say how much you'd like and it's cut in front of you

If you enter the market a little more, you will also find some shops selling dried mushrooms and dried seafood such as mussels, clams, oysters and scallops. 

Finally, one of the best parts is buying ready cooked meat: this goes from soya sauce chicken, steamed chicken, roast pork, crispy pork, pig ears, pig intestine, etc...Just say if you want half or a whole and they chop it up for you, add some yummy sauce and ginger and scallion.

A typical Shanghainese store used to lie in the market as well but has for the last several years moved 300m up the street. Whatever Shanghainese item you're looking for, they'll have it. My mom loves coming here.

They serve a variety of items like air-dried cured pork belly, fish and sausages, sticky rice cake wrapped in zhong leaves (Zhongzi) and Shanghainese hairy crab when it's the season.

One of my favorite desserts: glutinous rice cakes (Ding Xing Gau in Shanghainese) with red bean inside - the pink one is usually served on Birthdays

And some eggs cooked in spices and soya sauce...

And finally, Shanghainese rice cakes (Cho Ni Go 炒年糕) in the blue buckets. You preserve them in water so they can become soft, cut them in slices and stiry fry them with cabbage and pork - YUM!