A spice odyssey
It's curry, but not as we know it. Take a tour of some off-the-radar restaurants for an authentic taste of the subcontinent
While outside the subcontinent you can expect better "Indian" food in Bangkok, Malaysia and Singapore, Hong Kong's 50,000 South Asians are a large enough population to support a great number of restaurants. The British legacy has also helped - nobody, it seems, loved a good curry more than the colonials.
You'll notice "Indian" is written in quotation marks; that's because what is commonly considered Indian cuisine has a much more complicated identity than any one label can contain. India, which used to include modern-day Pakistan and Bangladesh within its borders, is a collection of radically different regional cuisines and distinct, deeply felt cultural values attached to food and eating. The food that has come to represent India on the international table is as much in debt to modern Bangladeshi immigrant chefs, and colonial and modern Western tastes as it is to what Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis eat in their own countries.
On our hunt for the best, we've found restaurants that are off the beaten path and those that offer dishes rarely served elsewhere. We'll take you out of your comfort zone, guiding you away from the chicken tikka masalas in favour of more obscure delights. So, get ready to travel into the heart of the subcontinent, all without leaving Hong Kong.
A long-time well-kept secret of Hong Kong's Indian food lovers, Handi is one of the best places in the city to sample northern Indian specialities. This restaurant is truly in the middle of nowhere, so you should accept the offered free ride from the Tung Chung MTR when you make a booking on their website. Once you get there, Handi is an oasis of calm. Pull up a chair under the trees and enjoy an ice-cold Kingfisher lager while you peruse the lengthy menu. All of the options here are good, but the Punjabis that run the restaurant are especially proud of the dishes from their home state. Start with the boti kebab (HK$82), grilled chunks of heavily spiced lamb served on a sizzling plate, on top of a bed of fantastic fried onions. Another excellent choice is the chilli chicken (HK$89) with big chunks of fried fowl coated in a sticky, sweet-hot sauce. Widely considered an Indo-Chinese fusion dish and a staple of Chinese takeaway joints in the West, it is also commonly enjoyed in India.