Roasted goose helped turn Kam Shui-fai into a legend
A certain delicacy skilfully cooked helped propel Kam Shui-fai to the top of the restaurant trade
Yung Kee restaurant has come a long way since its humble beginnings 70 years ago, when it sold servings of roast goose from a street stall for a few cents. Today, it's a culinary giant worth at least HK$1.5 billion.
The restaurant in Wellington Street, Central, daily attracts a steady crowd from far and wide - if not for its delectable food, then for the chance of posing for a photograph alongside one of the famed roast goose dangling behind the glass window of the restaurant's glittering facade.
Yung Kee's signature roast goose is almost as famous as the people who have eaten it - former chief secretary Anson Chan Fang On-sang, former chief justice Ti-liang Yang, former president Jiang Zemin and Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou, to name a few.
Today, a dish of roast goose at the five-storey restaurant costs at least HK$150; a lunchbox at the takeaway counter costs HK$38.
It's a far cry from its late founder Kam Shui-fai's street stall 70 years ago, where he sold a dish of roast goose with rice for just five cents.
Kam, who started working at the tender age of 12, was a vegetable hawker, an ice cream maker, the guy manning the letterpress machine printing newspapers, and a restaurant apprentice before he set up his own dai pai dong, or open food stall, in Sheung Wan in the early 1940s.
During the Japanese occupation, Kam moved his business into a proper Chinese restaurant in Wing Lok Street.
But the building was soon reduced to rubbles in an air raid. After the war, Kam reopened the restaurant in Pottinger Street.
In 1968, Yung Kee shot to international fame when magazine named it one of the world's 15 best restaurants, the only Chinese one in the list.
Its signature dish soon earned the nickname "flying roast goose" after tourists started bringing the dish back to their home countries via takeaway packs on board their planes.
The trend led to a collaboration with Cathay Pacific airlines to serve the delicacy to its first and business class passengers.
In 1997, the business suffered a setback when bird flu struck. Yung Kee had to stop serving its roast goose after the government ordered for all living poultry in the city's farms to be culled.
It was the first time in the restaurant's 57 years of business that roast goose was taken off its menu.
In 2004, when Kam died at the age of 96, the running of the restaurant went to his children.
In the 2009 Michelin guide, international judges awarded a star to Yung Kee, with the comment "the higher the floor, the better the food".
But the restaurant lost its one-star recognition soon after and has since been relegated to the "Bib Gourmand" section of the guide, which features restaurants offering just "good food at moderate prices".
