A Rainy Day with Friends

We met at the southern tip of Mong Kok (旺角), at the Yau Ma Tei MTR Station (油麻地站), to begin our trip up the area around Nathan Road, finding good eats along the way.

It was raining the entire day, sometimes quite hard, and we all got pretty wet.  But at least there were no lineups anywhere (unlike yesterday =.=), as no one wanted to go out to eat in the rain.  

Our first stop was at Man Ga International (萬家燒餅皇), known for their siu beng (燒餅), a Chinese flatbread with seasoned pork in the middle, sort of like a Chinese pizza.

 Here's half of it:

We continued our rainy walk up Tung Choi Street (通菜街), Tung Choi literally translating to "hollow vegetable"(Ipomoea aquatica), which is a popular veg here.

Tung Choi Street here is known as the Ladies' Market (女人街), a popular street market for selling various goods (most of which are marketed to women, hence the name).  Further north, it would become the Goldfish Market (金魚街) - guess what that sells? 

A short (but as the girls pointed out, long in the rain) walk north, with a detour to find various raingear that the girls (although I had told them to!) did not bring (Antonia, I'm looking at you).

Kam Wah Café (金華冰廳) is another great representative of the Hong Kong diner, or cha chaan teng.

Cramped, noisy, and specializing in local comfort food.  Gloria had a iced yuanyang (凍鴛鴦), a half-and-half of Hong Kong-style milk tea and coffee.  ("For the caffeine," she said)

This place's claim to fame is that it sells the best pineapple buns in town, with a flaky, not-too-sweet crust, served piping hot from the oven.

A popular variation on the pineapple bun involves sticking a huge slab of butter in it:

 Another specialty of this place is the egg tarts:

We headed a few more blocks north to our real lunch spot:

One Dim Sum (一點心), a place that has a particularly good pedigree for dim sum:

One Michelin Star.  The Michelin Guide is the oldest hotel and restaurant guide in Europe, and gradually over the last few decades has extended its reach to North America and Asia.  As the Wikipedia explains:

• "The guide awards one to three stars to a small number of restaurants of outstanding quality. One star indicates a "very good cuisine in its category", a two-star ranking represents "excellent cuisine, worth a detour," and a rare three stars are awarded to restaurants offering "exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey"."

So naturally, I was expecting some very good dim sum.

Does that all look very average?  Because that's how it tasted.  There were two things that stood out though,

The Mala Cake (馬拉糕), a light and airy sponge cake flavoured with brown sugar and traditionally molasses.

I have no idea what this is actually called, so I'll just call it coconut mango roll (椰子芒果卷), fresh mangoes ("there was a good batch at the wet market today," explained our waiter) wrapped in a glutinous rice pastry and dusted with shredded coconut.  Delicious.

From here, I had absolutely no plan for the day.  So we went to Mak Man Kee for wonton noodles.

And then watched the Dark Knight Rises at the cinema at Langham Place.  Two and a half hours of classic American action (set in New York, nonetheless!) makes you feel like you're in North America again, so imagine our immediate culture shock when we stepped out into the exit corridor and were greeted with this:

An eighth storey view of Mong Kok below us.

It was almost 8:00, so I took the two to the Tsim Sha Tsui Promenade, beside the Avenue of Stars, for a once-a-night light show:

Every building across the Harbour lights up and shoots searchlights into the sky, in time with music blaring from loudspeakers around the promenade, in this "Symphony of Lights" (幻彩詠香江) for fifteen minutes every night.  Guinness calls it "the world's largest permanent light and sound show".  The Hong Kong Government really has too much money from all the land sales it does to waste...

For dinner, we went to the Tsim Sha Tsui branch of Din Tai Fung (鼎泰豐), a Taiwanese chain specializing in Taiwanese/Shanghainese/Sichuan cuisines.

I had a bad feeling about this when I saw the labels on the condiment bottles:

But they were temporarily assuaged by these:

 Xiaolongbao (小籠包), an iconic Shanghainese dish consisting of a thin wheat wrapper filled with pork and soup.  Yes, soup.  You're supposed to bite a small hole into it and slurp up the piping-hot soup before eating the rest of the dumpling.

We had two types: the regular (top), and one filled with crab roe as well as the regular pork (above).

Not having had a single veg all day, we decide to order stir-fried tung choi (蒜蓉通菜):

Way too oily.

A standard Shanghai dish is stir-fried shrimp (清炒蝦仁)

The shrimp are supposed to be tiny, almost as small as large rice grains... but no one seems to do that anymore.  And this was $148 (CAD $19.50).  Not a good deal at all.

Stereotypical Shanghai:

Hot and Sour soup (酸辣湯).  Obviously catering to tourists, this was not spicy at all.

Representing Sichuan, Dan Dan noodles (擔擔麵), hand-pulled noodles in a spicy, peanuty soup.

No spice at all.

From Taiwan, Braised Beef Noodle Soup (紅燒牛肉麵):

Not bad, but the noodles are supposed to be thicker.

I think I've come to a conclusion after this dinner.  Tourist-friendly areas are never the place to get good food, even in Hong Kong.

Hope you're not too tired on your flight, Gloria!