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.