Restaurant review: Chang'an Taste, Hung Hom - Shaanxi fare at a fair price
This restaurant, set up by Polytechnic University graduates from Shaanxi province, offers traditional burgers and noodles from China's northwest.
Offering Shaanxi fare, Chang'An Taste is a welcome addition to the vibrant street food scene in Hung Hom. Although the small restaurant offers only burgers and noodles, it's very busy, with customers queueing up for dinner.
On offer are four kinds of , or meat burger, which is a well-known snack from Xian. The original pork rou jia mo (HK$18) uses braised pork shreds that have a strong meat flavour. For an extra HK$2, customers can add cucumber or green chilli. The pork in the burgers is mixed with 18 condiments and braised for 12 hours, giving it an intense aroma.
The co-founder, Steve Gao, a graduate of the nearby Polytechnic University. He set up the restaurant with a group of fellow graduates who are also from Shaanxi. They say theirs is the first shop in Hong Kong to sell indigenous Shaanxi fare, and that the recipes for the rou jia mo were created in the province more than 1,000 years ago.
The place offers two kinds of cold noodles, which are drenched in a sesame sauce and customised according to the customer's spice tolerance. We like the golden soft cold noodles (HK$22) with cucumber, as well as the golden stringy cold noodles (HK$22), which are chewier.
They also serve two versions of hot soup noodles (HK$38 each), one of which uses a special kind of noodle that is hollow in the centre to carry the sour and spicy stock, while the other version has straight, chewy noodles. The hot noodles come with carrot, bean curd puff and minced meat.
