Hong Kong street food Westerners love … and loathe – from egg waffles to stinky tofu

In Yau Ma Tei, a bustling area of Hong Kong, food stalls stand side-by-side, enticing diners with a heady aroma from the dishes they are boiling, steaming and frying.

Street food hunters nudge their way forward in the queue, surveying the offerings with craned necks. Some scarf down their food on the go, while continuing their quest for more delights; others prefer to stop and relish the snack, before resuming their food journey.

Rising above the medley of fragrances is a pungent odour that suddenly hits the nostrils. As it intensifies, the rotten smell rapidly envelopes the whole street.

It comes from a woman who is chowing down on stinky tofu that she bought from nearby stall Gui Mui Snack. Leaning forward to prevent the sauce from staining her shirt, she sinks her teeth into the fermented, fried tofu which is slathered with a brown sauce.

Lisa Xiao, from Hubei province in central China, came to Hong Kong for a holiday with her family. “The dressing is reminiscent of my childhood,” she says. “When I was a child, I often ate stinky tofu from hawker stalls. I particularly liked the sauce. Just like this.”

By her side is her seven-year-old son, nicknamed Mai Dou, nibbling on another Hong Kong street food staple, curried fish balls.

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“It’s yummy. It’s a bit like yu rou yuan zi (fish balls braised in broth) that I eat at home, but this one is more [springy] and full of flavour,” he says.

The chou dou fu that Xiao is eating usually isn’t universally appealing to tourists – like durian, stinky tofu is something people either love or loathe.

Alexander Siöstedr, from Sweden, says with a laugh, “I loved it!” as he and his girlfriend, Rie Nikaido, share a bag of another Hong Kong street food staple, gai dan zai (sweet egg waffles).

Siöstedr first developed a taste for chou dou fu when he lived in Taiwan for two years. He says his father is addicted to it. “After we moved back to Sweden, a few times my father woke up in the morning and the first thing he cried out was, ‘I want chou dou fu!’”

Another snack that Siöstedr loves is boh loh bao – the so-called pineapple bun. The sweet bun doesn’t actually contain any of the fruit, and it is served sliced open with a slab of cold butter.

“It’s the marriage of chilled butter and piping-hot bread – hard and fluffy, and sweet and salty – that makes it divine,” says Siöstedr.

Loblack, from the Caribbean, and his partner, Rose, choose a skewer of curried fish balls to try. “It’s delicious!” he says gobbling them down. “But it’s not spicy at all. In the Caribbean, the food is really spicy. The curry in Hong Kong is very sweet, like sugared curry,” he says.

Loblack and Rose also order deep-fried squid tentacles from Gou Mui Snack server Carol Cheung.

Cheung’s face is flushed from the steam spiralling from her cauldrons. She says that in addition to curry balls, fish siu mai and skewered snacks, Western visitors tend to order the selection they are familiar with.

“Deep-fried [dishes] appeal to them, [as well as] cheese frankfurters, potstickers and crab or prawn patties, even though they are not typical local delicacies,” she says.

She remembers one Western visitor who ordered the fish siu mai, then requested that it be deep-fried. “That’s strange for us locals, but I served it as she requested. She was happy,” Cheung says.

One local favourite that foreign visitors bypass is tofu fa, or “bean curd flower”, a soft, delicate bean curd pudding. Yip, who runs Mum’s Bean Curd Pudding in Mong Kok, says that no Western visitors have come to her shop. “They don’t know what it is, and hesitate to try it.”

A Hong Kong woman in her 60s, Jessy Wong, says Westerners don’t know what they’re missing, as she slurps down a bowl. “It’s the old flavour,” she says approvingly.

“The bean curd itself doesn’t have much flavour, but we eat it for the texture. It’s very slippery, very pure. A good bowl of bean curd flower should slide down the throat – before you notice, it’s gone.

“And you must dust it with brown sugar powder. And it’s better hot than cold,” she adds.

Yip says that foreign customers also avoid innards. “I can’t recall any Westerners who ordered stewed offal,” she says. “They flinch at the innards, probably because they can’t stomach the distinct odour.” Fortunately, she has plenty of Hong Kong residents who order the stewed offal, which includes stomach, tripe, intestine, liver and lung.

The Hong Kong residents who eat these street snacks are not limited to those who are ethnically Chinese.

Two Filipinos, Elzafra and Nino, have been in Hong Kong for years, and their three children were born in the city. Elzafra munches enthusiastically on deep-fried squid tentacles and says, “the flavour is like home”. It’s a snack he can also find at markets in the Philippines, and he eats it whenever he’s homesick.

In Tsim Sha Tsui, Sister Lin Snack is tucked away in a dimly lit alley, but it’s busy with hungry visitors. Photos of Hong Kong celebrities enjoying food there cover the walls of the humble shop. Sister Lin says that the most popular items are fake shark fin soup, wok-fried beef rice noodles, egg waffles, fish balls and fish siu mai.

She’s most proud of her sumptuous fake shark fin soup – wun tsai chi. It contains none of the expensive – and controversial – shark fin, which is replaced by vermicelli. Sister Lin ladles out the soup to show the bountiful ingredients – shredded chicken, julienned winter mushrooms, slivered wood fungus, scrambled egg. The viscosity is obvious.

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“In the early days, food was scarce and vendors could only make the soup out of cheap and accessible ingredients. Today we’re blessed with abundant choice, but some profit-oriented vendors sparingly throw in the expensive ingredients,” she says.

“To thicken the soup, they may use starch, instead of letting the ingredients naturally thicken, and the [soup] lacks unami.”

Turning back to the kitchen, Sister Lin lifts a wok lid and dishes up a bowl of piping-hot fried glutinous rice to a local customer. It glistens with a layer of fat, and is scattered with chopped scallions and peanuts. The mound of rice is evenly tinged with soy sauce, each grain separate and holding its shape, despite sitting in the steaming pot for 24 hours.

It’s not easy to fry a beautiful bowl of glutinous rice. Sister Lin claimed that her tried-and-true recipe makes this hearty dish a signature snack in her stall. She says that the sign of a good bowl of fried glutinous rice is “even a toothless ah po [grandma] can chew and digest it without much effort”. It should be neither too moist, nor too dry, “but preferably a bit more on the dry side”.

Despite it being a signature dish at her stall, Sister Lin says it’s seldom ordered by foreign clientele. Although they’re eager to explore Hong Kong’s street snacks, this dish – as well as tofu pudding and stewed offal – don’t seem to be on their radar. Perhaps Hongkongers haven’t done enough to raise the profile of these lesser known snacks.

Where to get your Hong Kong snack fill

- Gou Mui Snack, 46H Dundas Street, Mong Kok

- Mum’s Bean Curd Pudding, Shop D3, 30-36 Mong Kok Road, Mong Kok

- Sister Lin Snack, Shop C, 9 Hau Fook Street, Tsim Sha Tsu