PaiGu

Some of the best meals I had in Hong Kong I didn’t get to take pictures of. They included: street food at Tsim Sha Tsui¹, dinner at a Western-style restaurant on Discovery Bay², and brunch at a Shanghainese dim sum restaurant³. However, the rest of the pictures speak for themselves.

Lunch at a tiny but busy Japanese joint near Causeway Bay MTR. They are known for their fatty tuna sashimi.

Lunch at an apartment-turned-restaurant near Sham Shui Po, Western-style cuisine, prix-fixe menu that included appetizer and entree. The dessert (every single dessert on their menu) was compliments of the owner, who seemed to know my friend’s aunt.

» Read the rest of this entry «

1. Curry fish balls, lobster meatballs, sausages, roasted octupus, and deep-fried calamari. With a side of Hong Kong milk tea. [↩]
2. Deep-fried seafood platter, soooo good. Pumpkin risotto was also delicious. [↩]
3. I got two pictures from it, but the rest of the meal went unrecorded. I can’t remember what else we ordered, other than xiao long bao and shrimp dumplings, but I know there was an order we added at the end that was delicious. [↩]

I’ve been eating extremely well in China, which isn’t difficult given that everything¹ here is better than anything I’ve had in Canada times ten.

Let’s walk through a typical day of eating for me in Nanjing.

Breakfast starts at 5am² and is usually at a xiao chi dian which is kind of like a dim sum stand with road-side aluminum furniture. Sketchy? Yes, a little. Delicious? Definitely. Luckily, I’m not someone with a sensitive stomach and I have never gotten sick from eating in China.

In the last four days, I’ve had quite a variety of breakfast items: plain steamed buns (man tou), veggie or pork-filling steamed buns (bao zi), glutinous rice buns (shao mai), fried dough sticks (you tiao), soy milk or tofu soup (dou jiang, dou nao), congee (xi fan).

Some xiao chi items can be repeated for lunch, such as steamed buns. Nanjing has the best xiao long bao in the country, many would argue.

» Read the rest of this entry «

1. When I say ‘everything’, I’m mostly referring to all Chinese food. [↩]
2. Everyone gets up really early here because mid-day and early afternoon is too hot to function, so that’s usually nap-time. [↩]

A La Kitchen is located behind First Markham Place and features Shanghai-style cuisine. When we arrived before noon on Sunday, it was absolutely packed, and we had to wait for a table among pushy groups of Cantonese families. Although a packed restaurant is a good sign, I wasn’t too pleased that I couldn’t hear a single word of Mandarin. Was this really Shanghai-nese cuisine, or was it another one of a hundred Cantonese-Chinese restaurants in the area?

The restaurant is less than five years old, so the interior was still in good shape. However, they had tried to cram so many people inside that all the aisle space was taken up and chairs were back-to-back. I am pretty sure that’s a fire hazard, but nobody seemed to care. » Read the rest of this entry «