Off to a food start

This trip, we tried a few new eateries. Since we were staying in Central, we explored mostly places within walking distance of our hotel.

One of them was The Chairman Restaurant (Kau U Fong). This restaurant has consistently won rave reviews from foodies and previously had a Michelin star (although it has since lost the accolade). We decided to have lunch here following the recommendation of my ex-boss, who's a Hong Konger. She basically said that if we could only visit one restaurant in Hong Kong, it had to be The Chairman. How's that for a rave?

Prices here are not cheap but it has a more affordable three-course set lunch for HK$198 (four courses for HK$218). For the three-course lunch, you choose an appetiser, a main and either the soup or dessert. Since we were determined to try as many dishes as possible, we ordered a wide variety among the four of us. I think the restaurant is used to diners sampling each others' dishes because the waiters set the dishes down in the middle of the table!

These are the appetisers we chose:

Wild Clams Cooked in Fish Broth and Sake

Slow Cooked Ox Tongue with Garlic and Vinegar

Smoked Baby Pigeon with Longjing Tea & Chrysanthemum

The soup of the day was pigeon soup.

Main courses:

Tea Smoked Duck with Tamarind and Dark Sugar

Pork Belly Slow Cooked in Tangerine Peel

Prawns in Ginger and Shallots with Rice Vermicelli

The Chairman's Soy Sauce Chicken

Dessert:

Osmanthus & Wolfberry Ice-cream

My ex-boss insisted that everything at The Chairman was good...and she wasn't kidding. Sure, I found the pork belly a tad too sweet but honestly, that's just splitting hairs. The food quality and preparation were superb. Everything tasted very fresh and flavourful. The ox tongue was the biggest surprise - we thought it would be tough and chewy but no, it was like very well seasoned steak. I loved the broth for the wild clams, and my favourite was the prawn dish - the prawn heads were crunchy and scrumptious.

I could go on and on but I'm making myself really hungry now...

The other much raved about eatery we tried was Kau Kee (Gough Street). In the Internet universe, it's touted as one of, if not the best beef brisket eateries in Hong Kong. Hoping to avoid a long queue, we arrived early at about 5.30pm. Not sure if we just got lucky but we were seated within 5 minutes and had a table to ourselves too!

This is one of those hole-in-the-wall places where you sit shoulder to shoulder with strangers as you slurp down your noodles, so not having to share a table with other guests is a luxury in itself. Service is brusque. Take more than a minute to decide on your order and the waitress is off to perform some other task.

The menu is pretty limited. Basically, it's beef brisket dry or soup, with a few choices in the type of noodle. There's also beef tendon in curry but we didn't try that.  

Dry

Soup

Our verdict? It's tasty but honestly, we don't see what the fuss is about. The beef brisket was tender but so are those at many other beef brisket places in Hong Kong. In fact, we prefer the beef brisket we had at Tsim Sha Tsui on our previous trip.

Finally, on our last evening in Hong Kong, we decided to splurge on a Peking duck dinner and went to Peking Garden in Central (Alexandra House).

In Hong Kong, Peking duck is sliced together with the meat so one whole duck makes for a pretty substantial meal for four.

You get two plates of the succulent duck with all the trimmings.

Other dishes we ordered included the minced pork in sesame pockets. Kenneth was so stoked to see this on the menu as he hadn't eaten it in years.

Pan fried tofu with prawns

As always, our trips to Hong Kong revolve around food and this one was no exception. The diet can wait. Burp.

Gastronomic trip to Causeway Bay

Happy New Year! 2017 started on an anomaly for us. While everyone else was preparing for the start of the school/work year, we went on a holiday!

It kinda wasn't planned. We were just so busy last year that we didn't managed to plan for a break. By the time we got down to it, most air tickets out of Singapore in December 2016 were ridiculously overpriced. That's when we realised that we had the unusual opportunity of travelling in January, since Lesley-Anne's university break extends to the first week of January, and Andre is still waiting for his 'O' level results.

So we decided that the easiest thing to do was just go to a place to eat and sleep and recharge, and the no-brainer was back to HK. Travelling off-peak is so much better value and hopefully, fewer crowds!

We're creatures of habit and tend to stick to our favourite food places in Hong Kong. What was new this trip was our venture out to Causeway Bay. Our hotel was in Central, so we decided to take the tram (or affectionately known as "ding ding" to the locals).

I loved the experience. Unlike with the MTR, taking the tram lets you see the heart of the city since the tram pathway is right in the middle of the road.

Sitting on the upper deck, with the cool breeze on our faces, it's really a throwback to more traditional forms of transport. Dirt cheap too! Just HK$2.30 (about S$0.45) per adult, regardless how far you go.

We went to Causeway Bay with a specific food mission, mostly to try this much-raved about ramen place - Ichiran. Ichiran is an award-winning ramen restaurant from Japan, where the noodles and tonkatsu soup are supposedly so exquisite that diners eat in individual booths so they can fully concentrate on and appreciate their meal.

At the Causeway Bay outlet, we were seated in individual booths as such:

Each booth has an order chit and an individual tap serving drinking water. You tick your order on a chit. We love that you can customise your order, from the richness and spiciness of the soup to how soft you want your noodles done and how much garlic you want in your soup. You can also add extras. Take it from me, adding the egg is a MUST.

When you're done, you place the chit at the end of your table and ring a bell. A server (whose face you never see) will take your chit and a while later, return with your very own customised bowl of ramen. He/she will then lower the blinds so you can enjoy your ramen in peace.

A friend of mine highly recommended Ichiran so we were already expecting a lot. Even then, we were WOWED. This was honestly the best ramen I've ever had. The broth was tasty beyond belief, I could slurp a gallon of it. The noodles were done just right and the egg was chilled with a natural sweetness. Andre cleaned out his bowl (and saw a bonus message). Cost of one bowl of ramen + egg is HK$103 (about S$20).

That wasn't the end of our food trip. There were a few dessert shops around Causeway Bay that we wanted to try, so we decided to buy a bit of everything. Bake Cheese Tart (basement of Sogo), the original cheese tarts from Hokkaido...

Steamed milk pudding from Yee Shun Dairy Company (Lockhart Road)...

And cream puffs from Choux Creme (Causeway Bay MTR station).

We lugged our haul back to the hotel where we pigged out had a dessert party.  

Here's my verdict: I didn't like the milk puddings, sorry Hong Kongers! The plain milk one had such a strong powdered milk taste it made me queasy. The chocolate one was better but still, I'll rather have tao huay any time. I guess it's something of an acquired taste.

The cream puffs (both cream and chocolate) were deliciously light and fluffy, but we've had them before so it wasn't a surprise. The eye-opener was the cheese tarts. I know they're all the rage in Singapore but I never bought into the trend, having tasted one from a local chain and was underwhelmed. These bake cheese tarts are exceptional. The cheese custard is so flavourful and oozy, it's addictive. Andre says it best when he described the tarts as "savoury cheesecakes".

That marked a sweet end to our Causeway Bay trip. More Hong Kong food posts coming up!

Bits and bites

Day 5 (Thu, 17 December 2015)

Ok, this post is extremely overdue. That's what happens when you lose momentum. I now only have a vague memory of what happened since this was more than two months ago, so bear with me!

Nothing much happened on Day 5 actually because we had to check out and leave for the airport in the early afternoon. So we decided to have a simple brunch at a tiny restaurant around the corner from our apartment. Incidentally, this was the place where Kenneth would sometimes buy a yew tiao and soya bean drink for breakfast cos he wakes up much earlier than the rest of us. To be honest, it's not great. Unlike in Singapore, they fry the yew tiao and leave it stacked in a container so if you don't buy it when it's first fried, it gets cold and chewy. But on a cold day, it's comforting to eat this with the hot soya bean drink.

The restaurant seemed very popular though, so we decided to eat here on our last morning.

Here's what we had:

Yew tiao wrapped chee cheong fun. Not great because the yew tiao is not refried and therefore cold.

Beef brisket and rice - very good!

Some chicken with rice and gravy, I think.

Sliced beef congee - oh, how good is this on a cold day!

This more or less ends our culinary journey in Hong Kong but here are some other interesting titbits (haha!) we discovered about food:

In Singapore, we buy teeny bottles of Yakult and Vitagen for that dose of healthy bacteria. In Hong Kong, they sell cultured drink by the litre. Like this huge bottle, on clearance for only HK$10 (less than $2)! They come in different flavours too. This one was melon flavoured, I believe.

One of the snacks I personally found great in Hong Kong was the cream puff. There are many shops in the malls and at MTR stations selling a variety of them. This one in the Tsim Sha Tsui station was particularly good.

We tried the original and chocolate. They have both custard and fresh cream versions. We tried all kinds and I probably bust my sugar limit for a month on those, but they are sooooooo delish!

We said this would be a food trip and it was! Totally worth the gazillion calories we each piled on. And as an added bonus, we got upgraded to Business Class again coming home. Thank you, Cathay Pacific!

A-Tisket, A-Brisket

Day 4 (Wed, 16 December 2015)

One of the food items I wanted to try on this trip was beef brisket, having heard of the legendary melt-in-your-mouth quality done Hong Kong style. Kau Kee is the one most commonly sited by foodies but we didn't want to bother making a trip to Central, so we settled on Chiu Fat at Tsim Sha Tsui, which was walking distance from our apartment.

It's quite a typical Hong Kong-sized "restaurant" ala coffee shop, containing maybe 10 small tables or so

This was what we ordered:

Beef brisket noodles

Sliced beef porridge

Jellyfish and century egg

Extra plate of beef brisket

The food was excellent and the portions generous. The brisket was indeed very tender with a scrumptious herby flavour. The century eggs were exceptional. Lesley-Anne wondered how their t century eggs could taste so much better than the ones in Singapore. "Maybe they're two centuries old!" she offered. I enjoyed the porridge tremendously, especially since it was a cold, cold morning in Hong Kong - 18 degrees celcius! The porridge was thinner than the typical Hong Kong-style congee but very tasty.

We were a little startled by our total bill though - it came up to about S$70. I've since come to the realisation that Hong Kong has become very expensive food-wise. On average, prices have gone up 10-20% from when I was here less than two years ago. While in Singapore, I find eating at restaurants pricey, there are at least cheap dining alternatives at hawker centres and food courts. In Hong Kong, a bowl of noodles or a plate of rice at their hole-in-the-wall outlets found in abundance are usually at least HK$40 (about S$7.40). No S$3.50 plates of char siew rice, no sirree. The cheapest dining options are the cha chaan tengs and even then, a drink is about S$3 and a simple pork chop bun about S$4.

As an aside, look at what was on offer at Chiu Fat - Saliva Chicken! What on earth?

After brunch, we took a stroll to K11 mall which is dubbed the "art mall". Throughout the mall, you can find art installations such as this one in the lobby. It lights up for 5 mins every half hour:

"Artificial Moon"

This too was an art installation. Looks like the bookshelf in my nightmares!

On a separate note, the latest HK food buzz in Singapore is the Jenny Bakery cookies. They recently opened an outlet in Singapore and I heard you had to queue for them. To be honest, we'd not heard of these cookies until we read the news, so we were a little curious. Are these butter cookies really all that they're made out to be?

The HK outlet at Tsim Sha Tsui was just around the corner from our apartment (we really did stay in a convenient location!) Kenneth figured that the cookies would make nice gifts for relatives and since we slept in every day when we were there while he was an early riser, he very kindly offered to queue up for the cookies when they rest of us were still in zzzzzzzzz Land. 

This was the queue - it went around Mirador Mansions where Jenny Bakery was.

After inching your way around the building, just before you enter the building, you're given a ticket and 10 customers are let in to the shop at a time. No ticket, no cookies! Prevents queue-cutting, I guess.

There, you give your orders to a no-nonsense counter lady. She's very, very fierce. Kenneth said an elderly lady was queuing in front of him and when she reached the counter after having queued for 50 mins, she was just told very brusquely, "go away, not selling to you." Wah. I think they don't like selling to locals who might be buying the cookies for resale.

After 50 mins of queueing, got our cookies!

Christmas tin, no less!

Jenny Bakery is famous for mainly their two types of butter cookies - plain and coffee-flavoured. This is the standard tin which comes in four flavours.

So our verdict? To be very honest, we're very puzzled as to how this product earned its cult status. The butter cookies were light and buttery, yes, but they were far from mind-blowing. In fact, the plain butter one was quite bland. I preferred the coffee one as it had more flavour. The other two flavours in the tin - shortbread and oatmeal and raisin - were so ordinary I lack the words to describe them.

If you want my opinion, get the cookies only if there's a short queue or you want to bring home gifts for the folks who would probably appreciate the effort you took to get your hands on them! I would dearly love to know the secret behind their success though - how does one maintain such interest in a less-than-stellar product so as to attract perpetual queues? (Kenneth says the queue comprised mostly PRC and Korean tourists). Even hype dies off eventually, right? Well, when I figure out their secret, I'll be off making my first million!

Dinner that night was back to Honolulu Cafe because some of us were having food fatigue and we couldn't agree on what we wanted. So we decided to go where the menu ran into endless pages and we could all eat whatever we wanted.

Not gonna post pics cos they're similar to what we had on Day 2. Instead, I'm going to post pics of Li Yuen Street East and West - you can pass either of these two narrow uphill streets if you're walking from the Central MTR station to Stanley Street where the restaurants are. Colourful sights and colourful people at every turn, with quaint makeshift shops stuffed full of every kind of knick knacks imaginable. If you want a real bargain and not the touristy knockoffs, I highly recommend coming here instead of to Ladies Market.