How can you leave Hong Kong without having Dim Sum 點心?

Dim sum 點心 is a Cantonese term that involves small individual portions of food, usually served in a small steamer basket or on a small plate. Going for dim sum is usually known in Cantonese as going to "drink tea" (yum cha, 飲茶). The word yum cha, is also the name of Adeline Grattard's restaurant in Paris, which is fitting for her contemporary Cantonese cuisine. 

The drinking of tea is as important to dim sum as the food. A popular tea which is said to aid in digestion is bolay (puli), which is a strong, fermented tea.  Oolong (wu lung) and Jasmine tea can be served as well. It is customary to pour tea for others during dim sum before filling one's own cup. A custom unique to the Cantonese is to thank the person pouring the tea by tapping the bent index finger if you are single, or by tapping both the index and middle finger if you are married, which symbolizes 'bowing' to them.

Traditional dim sum is eaten for breakfast, brunch or afternoon tea, as part of the yum cha experience. My grandmother for example, comes to her favorite dim sum restaurant as early as 7.30 am! Dim Sum includes various types of steamed buns such as char siu baau, dumplings and rice noodle rolls (cheong fun), which contain a range of ingredients, including beef, chicken, pork, prawns and vegetarian options or fried items. The serving sizes are usually small (compare to Spanish tapas size) and normally served as three or four pieces in one dish. It is customary to order family style, sharing dishes among all members of the dining party. Because of the small portions, people can try a wide variety of food - and we did!

Many dim sum restaurants also offer plates of steamed green vegetables, roasted meats, congee porridge and other soups. Dessert dim sum is also available and many places offer the customary egg tart. 

Dim sum dishes can be ordered from a menu or sometimes the food is wheeled around on a trolley by servers (I love the latter). 

I thought as my final lunch meal in Hong Kong before I jet off to Paris, why not have Dim Sum, something that represents Hong Kong cuisine at its best. For dim sum, I tend to stick to the very local venues, and coincidentally convened with my grandmother on a Sunday, where usually families get together to have dim sum anyways.

The restaurant we went to is called Foo Lum, and is located in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon. Here's only a glimpse of what Dim Sum has to offer...

A view from the escalator

Braised chicken feet 鳳爪 Fung Zao: marinated in a black bean sauce and then steamed

腐皮捲 Fu Pei guen: Tofu skin roll with shrimp

Donut sticks wrapped in noodle (Za leung)

蝦 餃 (Har gau): steamed dumpling with whole or chopped-up shrimp filling and thin wheat starch skin

燒賣 siu mai: steamed dumplings with pork and prawns topped off with crab roe and mushroom.

                                        

 鹹水角 Haam Sui Gaau:  fried oval-shaped dumpling made with rice-flour and filled with pork and chopped vegetables. The rice-flour surrounding is sweet and sticky, while the inside is slightly salty

     

Steamed meatball (牛肉球): Finely-ground beef is shaped into balls and then steamed nd served on top of a thin bean-curd skin. My ultimate favorite!!!!

Lotus leaf rice (糯米雞 lou mai gai): Glutinous rice wrapped in a lotus leaf; contains egg yolk, dried scallop, mushroom, water chestnut and meat (usually pork and chicken) that are steamed with the rice.  

Char siu baau 叉燒包: steamed bun with a Cantonese barbecued pork filling

And the traditional stamp receipt at the end and...voila! In a local restaurant, aim to pay around 200 - 250$ HKD.

Hong Kong, I miss you!

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

Sun Tung Lok 新同樂

Sun Tung Lok  新同樂 (shark fin) restaurant  is the world’s second 3 star Michelin Chinese restaurant after Lung King Heen (Four Seasons Hong Kong). It is the newest addition to the Hong Kong Michelin star group. Yesterday, I did a review of 3 star French restaurant Caprice (Four Seasons Hong Kong) and thought it would be interesting to do a comparison between it and Sun Tung Lok.

                                            

I was a bit skeptical going to this restaurant and trying the food. I'll try to explain it the best I can as it might make more sense and be more understandable to someone who has grown up in Hong Kong or any other Asian city and been to local restaurants. 

The usual: Jasmine tea

The Michelin experience: you either got it or don't...


Everything but the food: 
1. to award this place 3 stars is a slap in the face of chefs around the world trying to obtain such high prestige not only in Asia but around the world.
2. 3 star experience of staff is absent, it reminds me of any other kind of nice local eatery in Hong Kong that serves dim sum in the day and changes to a seafood restaurant at night


But then again perhaps this doesn't matter quite as much since the Michelin guide has been giving stars to REALLY GOOD hole-in-the-wall dim sum venues and dumpling restaurants in Asia. 
The problem is, is not that Asian restaurants are not worthy of stars and the Michelin should just award imported European restaurants in Asia; of course not, but I felt that Western restaurants bring something new to the table, making customers eat the unordinary, give them something to think about, tickle their palette and basically at the end of the day, serve them food that you cannot get in your small local supermarket. Perhaps some people might be able to get certain produces in their food store but I think accessibility is more difficult in France. 


At the end of the day, the customer is paying for food and not necessarily the decor so the real question is to see how good a 3 star Cantonese restaurant is compared to say, a French equivalent.


What do you look for in a 3-star restaurant? Something that you can find easily in your neighborhood/city just with a bigger price tag and some fancy sauce? Or innovation, you being brought on a journey of limitless perhaps even awkward tastes, letting the Chef go beyond the conservative, the traditional methods of cooking and just basically trying something NEW.


I think that is a key problem for Sun Tung Lok, and high end Asian cuisine. True, high end Cantonese food can be something separate from day-to-day Cantonese cuisine but the difference I feel is that it revolves around 3 expensive ingredients (abalone, shark's fin and bird's nest soup and likes to stay traditional. Those who have tried to innovate, have not been celebrated the same way as they do in Europe. Chefs like in Bo Innovation may fall flat on their face. Sun Tung Lok is definitely high end Cantonese dining with 4 decades of history and meals revolving around the various ways to eat abalone, and shark's fin. Tradition is much more important in high level Cantonese cuisine than it is in Western ones.


Appetizers...

Braised chicken feet in abalone sauce. The sauce was quite tasty and thick but not anything that I haven't tasted before.

Fried string bean with mince pork and chili

Mock goose with mushrooms

Main dishes

I ordered XO chilli (as I always order chilli with my Chinese meal) and was surprised to find it staring at me on the bill at the end of the meal...

Ham sauce for the shark fin

Shark fin...the soup was very thick and had a nice consistency but a bit bland for me and nothing extremely spectacular

Braised prime rib of beef  - this was quite good, the meat fell of the bone

Deep fried crispy chicken (a usual suspect in Cantonese restaurants)

Braised pork with preserved vegetable in casserole. This was my favorite of the evening (not because I  love pork but because of taste) - but again something I grew up with

Fried rice with conpoy, shrimp and barbecued pork (it was good but usually there aren't so many ingredients in the dish)

As I was eating my meal, I was thinking how smart Adeline Grattard's 1-star restaurant Yam t'cha (in Paris; please see my comments as well) was. If she came up to investors in Hong Kong with her concept, no one would be interested. Why should people pay for the exact food they have eaten most of their lives with a huge price-tag? But she didn't open this restaurant in Hong Kong; she opened it in Paris...a Cantonese restaurant serving steamed fish, crispy pork and bean noodles - you cannot find this in Paris, not all Parisians have been to Hong Kong, let alone Asia and they have opened their arms to Grattard's restaurant.

The price of the meals are calculated in reference to how many shark fins you'd like to de-fin and the quality of the dried abalone. The most expensive set menu I saw was about 7,000 HKD$ (700 euros) for 1 person. Those better be impeccable abalones. There has been some speculation that Michelin gave the restaurant 3 stars for their shark's fin but this has been denied by the group. If they did give them stars for the fin, I can gladly give them a list of my favorite Cantonese restaurants where my shark's fin was more tasty and more in quantity for 1/2 the price. 

On my experience, it was an unimpressive way to spend on food (EXACT food that I can find in my favorite local Cantonese seafood restaurant minus expensive wines from Europe - but I don't like to drink red wine from Bordeaux with my steamed chicken and white rice) where most of the courses were “cooked” in front of us by a waiter with a butane can.

Perhaps I was expecting too much, perhaps I should have gone here first before eating at 3-star Caprice. But to be honest, I probably would have had the same reaction because I see innovation as key to a restaurant and Chef's development and success; and I know, I can find these elsewhere. 


If you want shark fin and abalone, fine but know that there are just as good non-starred restaurants that can serve the same quality meal as Sun Tung Lok. 

In a couple of days, I will post an entry on Chuk Yuen

竹園

a local seafood restaurant that my family enjoys. For a third of the price, we can enjoy just as much if not more variety, taste and just a generally good atmosphere at one of our favorite local restaurants that Hong Kong has to offer. 

Sun Tung Lok
4/F, Miramar Shopping Centre, 132 Nathan Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon
Tel: 2152 1417
Subway station: Tsim Sha Tsui
Website: http://www.suntunglok.com.hk/