Old School Street Eats
Johannes Pong journeys with food editor Bruce Dawson to track down Hong Kong street-side eateries.
“What are the Hong Kong street eats?” Bruce Dawson screams at the office one day. Although he's our food guy and a former chef, he doesn’t have much knowledge of Hong Kong-style snacks, especially the ones I thought were long gone. I drag him out of the office one morning for a little treasure hunt.
First Stop: Breakfast at Tai Hang
Suen Hing at an alley between Ormsby St. and Brown St., Tai Hang
Bruce Dawson: 10am and out of the office. Breakfast buffet at the Mandarin Oriental - been there, done that. Take me somewhere different.
Johannes Pong: Let’s check out Tai Hang. It’s an old neighborhood, with its own markets and restaurants. Most of the traditional dai pai dongs have closed, but this one called Suen Hing is still thriving and serving the breakfast/brunch circuit.
BD: It’s just a stall in a side street.
JP: Their specialty is fresh cheung fan (cannelloni-like rolls made of fresh rice sheets), a most traditional Cantonese breakfast staple. The usual condiments are soy sauce, sesame paste, sweet chili sauce, and a final sprinkling of toasted sesame seeds. But here at Suen Hing though, you can ask them to ladle on their special sauce, which is the flavorful stock in which they cook the tripe and other assorted innards.
Second stop: Sweet eats in Wan Chai
Little Bowl King, G/F, 160A Wan Chai Rd., Wan Chai, 6126-6988
BD: I feel like going for a sweet snack.
JP: This place, called “Little Bowl King,” focuses on “boot jai gou” (little bowl puddings), as you might tell from its name. We used to love buying these puddings from hawkers after school and they were everywhere – but now most of them are gone and this place is one of the very few that still make them daily from fresh ingredients.
Cantonese sweets are actually rather innovative as most of them are just sugar in different forms. See how the pudding comes in two different colours – white ones are made with white sugar while the yellow ones are made of cane sugar. You can also choose to have no beans in your pudding as well.
BD: What’s that white plastic sponge thing?
JP: The “white sugar cake,” which has a sponge-like consistency. Then there’s the sugar scallion biscuit from Chiu Chow.