Shenzhen serves up regional China on a plate

don't think twice about grabbing a British fry-up for breakfast, sushi for lunch, and sitting down to a fancy French dinner after work. But, when it comes to Chinese food, Hongkongers can be oddly conservative. We love our Cantonese food, and while some regional Chinese cuisines are common here, many of the mainland's culinary traditions are woefully under-represented in the city.

So where do hungry Chinese food fanatics go when they are craving a fiery seafood hotpot from Guizhou? Or the pungent pickles and preserved meats of Yunnan? The answer is just a train ride away. Shenzhen is one of China's great immigrant cities, and restaurants have sprung up apace to serve the recent arrivals a taste of home.

One of the best of these restaurants is the Hunanese chain restaurant Mao Jia Fan Dian, or the Mao Family Restaurant. Some Hong Kong diners may find the Mao Zedong-themed interior off-putting, but put your politics aside because it serves excellent and authentic dishes from the late leader's home province.

Where Sichuan focuses on the interplay of numbing, cooling, savoury and spicy, Hunanese cooking tends to go all out with the chillies. Some may find it oily or too hot, but for the people of Hunan, nothing satisfies like a fiery chilli-studded fish head, or a bowl of fatty red-cooked pork.

At Mao Jia, the two-colour fish head (52 yuan/HK$66) is plated beautifully, one half buried under green pickled chillies and the other under a mound of the more commonly used red chillies. The fish head is rich and meaty and the pickled chillies give the dish a hint of Latin American flavour.

It also does the more rustic home-style dishes well. The Mao Family cooked pork (41 yuan), said to have been one of Mao's favourite dishes, is excellent, with thick layers of fat cooked to an almost custard-like consistency.