food in Hong Kong

I ate some really awesome food while in Hong Kong! First of all, I ate a LOT of shrimp. I used to hate shrimp (mostly the texture, but not the flavour), but in the last few years it has grown on me. I had shrimp stir fry, shrimp dumplings, fried rice with really minuscule shrimp in it, and noodle soup with shrimp. I also ate at Bubba Gump Shrimp Restaurant, but I ate a hamburger there. :)

The fruit was amazing. Mangoes from the Philippines were in season, and so tasty! One day Noreen made a mango cheesecake with layers of mango in it, which we ate over a couple of days. Other fruits I ate were blueberries, pineapple, strawberries, bananas, really tiny mandarin oranges, melon, and probably others, but I forget. Oh, dried mangoes too.

I already talked a bit about dim sum, which I had twice. We had a few of the things both times, but tried some new ones as well. My favourite are siu mai, which are dumplings with pork and shrimp in them. Both times we had some really good Chinese green vegetables along with our dim sum.

Two times we ate at Thai/Vietnamese restaurants. I'm not sure why they combine the two because they are pretty different from my experience, but oh well. Both were great meals.

There are lots of bakeries, which I found surprising. Most of the items are really refined and the dough is usually slightly sweet. Lots of things looked like they had been steamed, not baked, but I could be wrong. One yummy item was a bun with a coconut cream filling! They had lots of other buns filled with stuff like tuna and other stuff. They had individual pizzas, and a funny thing is that most of them had corn on them. Another really good baked treat are the egg tarts. These are a Portuguese thing, so I had one in Macau too. They are just little tarts that are sort of a cross between plain quiche and custard. It's dessert, but it's not as sweet as custard - more eggy. Believe me, they are so good.

I have to confess: I actually ate at McDonald's and KFC. I know I am a terrible person! I don't even eat there when I am in the US! Well, I was hungry and it was way past my normal lunch time and there was nothing around but McDonald's where I was (McDonald's are everywhere!). The interesting thing about it is that you can get a side of buttered corn or fruit. KFC has different stuff too.

I had fun trying some different Chinese and other Asian candies from Aji Ichiban which is a chain store that sells bulk candy/chocolate, as well as dried fruits and meats. I bought dried mango there, and lots of weird candies.

Well, food is another story when you cross the border into China. For lunch, we went to what was called a western restaurant, which I wrote about before where I ordered spaghetti curry. Not really anything on the menu was really western. At the spa that day, I ordered noodle soup with shrimp dumplings. It was OK, but there was something about it that didn't go down so easy, and I couldn't finish it. I didn't just want soup, but a lot of the menu looked sort of scary, and I didn't want a lot more food. So I ordered toast with it. :) The funny thing was that they brought it with a side of sweetened condensed milk. Noreen told me that they put it on their toast! They also put salad on my plate with lots of mayo on it, which is also how they serve salad in the UK, so that must be the influence of the British. The second day that Noreen and I went into China we had dim sum which was good, but then we had dinner at the Splendid China park. There were all sorts of vendors selling food. There were the nasty fish balls that I also saw in Hong Kong (OK, I don't know they are nasty, but they sound gross.) From the same place came a smell that was so sour and rank that I can't imagine how anyone could put something that smelled that bad into their mouth! I also smelled this a few times in Hong Kong. Noreen thought it was some kind of fermented tofu they were selling as well. Some of the other food vendors were selling noodle soups that looked sketchy to me. We eventually found lamb meat or chicken wing stretched out on a skewer. Noreen got some lamb, which was good, but REALLY spiced up. We also got some "pizza" from that guy, which was actually just like pizza crust with sesame seeds on it and nothing else. It tasted pretty good, but a weird idea of pizza. We found roasted corn on the cob, which looked great, but I was sorely disappointed because I don't think it was sweet corn. It was so starchy and chewy and flavourless, it had to be seed corn! We found a good noodle dish though.

I would say I had a pretty good mix of Asian and Western foods while I was in Hong Kong, which I think is pretty representative of the city, with all its many influences. I already felt reasonably comfortable with chopsticks, but now it feels more natural. It would probably be good to use them more at home, because it actually slows down the eating process, which I should do!