Hong Kong Day 1 ~ Food.

The first thing I usually do when I get off the plane is to fine my favorite food that I don't get when I'm in the States. Most of them aren't super awesome good, 90% of it is really sentimental reasons.

The first thing I do is to gothese mom and pop shops and order fried cheung fun w/ plum sauce and soy sauce fried noodels. It's not that this place in particular famous for this dish or anything. As a matter of fact, you can get this dish in almost all neighborhood, almost everyone has a shop in every neighborhood. Unlike 7-11s and Circle Ks, which were neck-to-neck 3 per block and one set for 7-11 and one set for Circle K.

The soy sauce fried noodle is very no frills. It's really cooked noodles w/ soy sauce. This dish is mostly found during dim sum but slowly went to the streets. They usually have these at shops that sells cheung fun but they also have them at the tea restaurant. What exactly is a tea restaurant, it's really a small scale 'fast food' restaurant that serves everything from egg an

d toast to noodles like this, to fried rice, to congee. A variety of things...

For lunch, we went to Stanley Market which is a tourist hot spot. It's mostly known for it's flea market style shopping. 90% of them are souvenir related but occasionally you can find some good deals on factory outlet or something like that. I used to come here all the time because there's a beach near by and it's not very deep and that's the closest 'beach' there is. Now that I'm grown, that place seems small. When I was younger, I felt like we can walk and walk and walk on forever. Now, we polished it w/in an hour. Mind you take about just that much to get there thru this windy 2-way road that took alot of skills to avoid the mountain on one side and on coming traffic w/ the other. Let's just say one lady sitting in front of us was squealing because she knew back home you wouldn't drive that way.

Anyway, the food we had also from the reminiscent category. It's fish egg (not roe/caviar) noodle w/ iced lemon tea. Here's the thing about drinking tea in Hong Kong, most of them are already sweeten w/ a couple of exception. They use syrup to help sweeten whatever cold. None of the pink stuff, blue stuff or yellow stuff. It's straight shot to the tea.

This noodle dish is super easy. It's egg noodle w/ this fish mixture in a shape of a ball and some yummy soup, and there you have it. We added some Chinese broccoli for good vegetable serving.

For dinner, my aunt and my uncle, sister and brother of my mom respectively, wanted to have dinner w/ us. My aunt picked this Teochew or Chaozhou Cuisine. Chaozhou is a providence of China. While they share characters w/ the Chinese language, the way they speak it is entirely different. When my family get together and talk excitingly, that's what they speak. They are known to be very fiery people. Everytime they talk it feels like they're yelling at each other.

Anyway, their food is supposed to be famous. For this one restaurant in particular is so famous that he opened 3 shops all 3 next to each other w/ a couple of things in between. And it was funny as we walked up and tell them how many in our party, they asked if we have any reservations. Before they moved into the shops, they cooked on the side of the street. Who was taking reservations then?! But after waiting for 4o mins we got our table. This is located on Upper Central where there's still alot of Chaozhou people live and conduct import/export business there. They mostly deal w/ rice or dried goods and they still use an abacus to calculate things.

That said, their food used to be cooked on the side of the street but they are known of seafood. You can read more about the cuisine characateristic here. We had the meat platter, which as fattening that must've been, it was good. All were braised in one shape or another. There are pork, chicken, tofu, and I don't remember if there was duck or not. Then we had the cold crab. We also ordered fried oysters and they gave us a dessert and the Gungfu tea. It is said to help you be strong... I'm thinking it's because it's loaded w/ caffeine, but hey... That's part of the tradition.

Meals in Hong Kong