Miscellaneous Food: Food in Macau

[Another post from my sister, chronicling her recent food exploits in Macau.]

Central Macau- two interesting restaurants

Convenient, cheap and tasty, the two restaurants in the city center of Macau in Senado Square make a good breakfast spot and a simple meal. You can catch a taxi there by telling them that you want to go to the central square or you can find your way there as it’s near the congregation of mass-market (Giordano, Baleno) shops and down the street from the churches and ruins.

Wong Chi Kei
Senado Square




The first is a typical 'cha chan teng' or coffeeshop called "Wong Chi Kei", famous for their beef noodles. You cannot go at peak hour, well, you can but the queue snakes out the door. It's best to go later at 10am or even 10pm when all the city's best are enscounced inside the casino halls. For the second-languaged challenged, this is the signnage outside the door and the modest interior.




When we went for breakfast, we had the famous noodles, with extra beef tripe and shank meat. The noodles are actually better in HK, these were a little sticky and stringy, as opposed to being full of bounce and bite. They weren't bad though and really quick and simple meal.




We also had the century egg porridge, which was good and the cold milk tea and coffee, which were excellent (and woke us up well after a long night at the Wynn).




We also had the egg and ham sandwiches which the HK-er in our group enthused about as nostalgic and from him childhood but in all honesty it was a little dry. It it typical that you go to Macau, you splurge on accomodation (mostly to avoid the hookers on the Lisboa racetrack- don’t ask me to explain) and yet you hunt out bargains for food.

Yee Shun Milk Company Macau
Senado Square




The second is le original Yee Shun Milk Company. Those who know me well will know that I am absolutely addicted to Shuang Pi Nai, or Dun Nai, "steamed milk with two films". This is basically a mixture of milk and egg white, steamed sometimes with ginger till it forms a pudding with a thin membrane layer on top. It's smooth, silky and totally yummy. Nothing makes me happier than a cold bowl of this stuff and a rich papaya milk. I just had to find the original Yee Shun, which many people told me was in Macau, which is also where this dessert originated.




Here are the pictures of the store front, with the famous shelves of steamed custard and steamed milk (for MOP14 each).




Also, more pictures of the bowls of milk pudding and the papaya milk, which comes in this kitsch engraved metal mug. The conclusion? Yee Shun in Macau is disappointing. Unlike the stores in HK, the milk pudding is watery, diluted, a poor cousin to the stiffer and smoother custard available in the Yee Shun stores along Pilkem Street, Percival Street and Lockhart Street in Causeway Bay (exit C at the Causeway Bay MTR, turn right). You can see, just in the difference in the photographs, the difference in the textures between this pudding and the one in HK. If you can get to HK, go to the bastadized city's outlets, if not, Macau Yee Shun will have to do.

Something to do in Macau

There are not many things to do in Macau, one can gamble and one can…gamble. Perhaps see some very rudimentary ruins and some terrible temples (Sorry, the alliteration was too much to pass on). Also, I tend to believe Macau doesn’t really have much that sets it apart from HK, although yes, it has a Wynn resort and a lot more casinos and probably I will eat my words in a few years when Macau has a Venetian, a Crown, an entire Las-Vegas-y strip and the best conference facilities in Asia.




However, one thing that Macau does have, is awesome pastry shops and dried meat stores. These aren’t small affairs, the shops are really quite large, especially the Pastelaria Chui Heong chain that grew up selling those ubiquitous almond cookies in Macau. These are some pictures from the dried meats seller that we visited, sited pretty near the ruins of the St. Pauls cathedral. The best things to buy are the lup cheong (dried Chinese sausages), the dark blood sausages and the dried fish.

Technorati Tags: Reviews, Macau, Food, Restaurants

Hong Kong: Day Three

We decided to have a proper breakfast on our third day in Hong Kong, which was basically milk pudding from Yee Shun Milk Company. Unfortunately, they were closed (at 9.30am - atrocious), so we had breakfast at one of the diners nearby.



These diners are really interesting - quite different from our usual coffee shops, even though you can grab a quick meal of toast, eggs and coffee at both. Hong Kong diners offer all kinds of set meals, from sandwiches to hot dogs to more traditional stuff.



I decided to go traditional and ordered a bowl of wan ton noodles, which surprisingly arrived with no visible wan tons - they were all buried beneath the stringy noodles. The noodles were excellent; thin and springy, with remarkable bite that characterises hand-made noodles, almost impossible to find in Singapore these days.



What was even more amazing than the noodles, though, was the wan ton. I don't think anyone hand-makes wan ton anymore, let alone wan ton as incredibly delicate as these were. The skins were smooth and gossamer-thin, not like the rubbery rubbish you get here, and the fillings were bursting with flavours from the pork and shrimp.



We took a day-trip into neighbouring Shenzhen, and had the worst meal of our trip - a char siew rice with barbecued meat that was almost pure fat and swimming in oil, proving that it's not just the shoppers who get ripped off in China.



Disappointed that we'd missed a chance to have some delicious milk pudding, we headed back to Yee Shun Milk Company for tea.



I sampled their egg custard, which was excellent - all silky smooth and chilled, neither too eggy nor too characterless. Yee Shun also does a steamed milk pudding with two skins, which I didn't like as much; but it's a great casual spot to meet friends over a comfortable pudding.



Dinner was at the Tsim Sha Tsui area, a place with a name like Happy Garden Noodle Restaurant or something. I ordered a bowl of char siew noodles. While the noodles weren't as mind-blowing as the ones I had for breakfast, the generous portions of char siew, each marbled with a nice ripple of juicy fat, more than made up for it.



Deciding to be adventurous, we ordered a roast pigeon, which turned out fabulously. Unlike roast chicken, pigeon has less meat, but is also less oily. It was the first time I'd had pigeon, and fears of bird flu notwithstanding, it was actually pretty delicious.

Technorati Tags: Miscellaneous, Hong Kong, Food, Day Three

Miscellaneous Food: Food in Hong Kong

[This post has been kindly contributed by my sister, who loves food as much as I do and has exquisite taste, as well as the unerring ability to sniff out fantastic food in obscure places. This is the first of her many contributory posts, reviewing some of the wonderful food to be discovered in Hong Kong.]

Yung Kee

I recently took a trip with my mother to HK before joining my dad in Macau. One of the first stops we made, for a casual dinner on the night we arrived, was the legendary Yung Kee. There are always celebrities and famous businessmen to be seen at this restaurant, though most have now migrated upstairs to the private Kee Club which serves both Western food and the famous dishes from its namesake below. On the night we were there, we saw a Phantom pull up and visting Hollywood royalty sweep out and into the club upstairs.




Many people claim that Yung Kee isn’t that great and there is better duck elsewhere, which I wouldn’t deny but on a good night, Yung Kee is pretty darn hard to beat. I go there for primarily two things, the duck and the century eggs and I like their convenient location on Wellington Street where I’ve also found a great dumpling store, a funky budget hotel, a great massage place and a cheap, old lady-run (the best kind) hairdresser where you can get a wash and blow-dry for cheap. The duck is juicy and they make a great, thicker sauce in which they soak these soft red mung beans which I have a soft spot for. The century egg is also really well-done, with soft centers. So good that my mother consented to eat one, despite this being the time that HK was rife with rumours that the Chinese had injected artificial yellow colouring into egg exports.

Yung Kee
32-40 Wellington St
Central, HK
852/2522 1624

Hutong

Perhaps the most beautiful restaurant in HK, the food presentation, the view and the location of Hutong all can’t be beat. I wanted to show my mom this restaurant as it’s just one of the most darkly beautiful that I’ve been to. It’s probably not my favourite place for local food and certainly, it’s beyond most people’s budgets but it certainly is a sight for the eyes. I’ve been told there is a US$39 per head minimum charge, or 300HKD but I don’t really think there are many dishes that cost less than that.




The restaurant serves Northern Chinese food but jazzed up by inventive cooking and beautifully fresh ingredients. The first dish was a chicken, stuffed with glutinous rice and baked in lotus leaves, wrapped in a casket of clay. The baked bundle was brought to our table and we were invited to pound the clay shell in a mortar. The taste was wholesome and just salty enough from the chicken oils that had infused the rice.




The second dish was also beautifully presented, in a painted, native red-weave basket. The colour of the basket was highlighted by the bright red dried chillies, intersperced with generous pieces of soft-shelled crabs. This dish was actually way too spicy for my tastes but my less spice-wuss Singaporean friends just lapped it up. This dish can also be done with Sichuan prawns.




The third dish was a simple saute of mustard greens, well done, if a bit oily. In this picture, you can see how fresh each piece is and how it’s cooked just till it’s translucent, so that it still has plenty of bite but the sweetness of the vegetable is released.




The fourth dish was my favourite, as well as one of the restaurant’s signature dishes. The lamb ribs are juicy on the inside and crispy on the outside and they come presented on a half meter long wooden plate or sometimes a narrow stone slab. This is a presentation that I’m actually seeing more and more in Asia but I believe that Hutong was one of the first places to debut it.

It is served with a thin soy sauce with sliced ginger and hot chillies. The secret to the two textures is that the lamb ribs are deboned and slow cooked while the skin is fried to a crisp and the two parts are reassembled.

Hutong
1 Peking Road (28th Floor)
Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon HK
+852 3428 8342

Location: 4/5
Ambience: 5/5
Service: 3/5
Food: 3/5
Overall: The taste of the food just doesn’t live up to how beautiful the dishes and restaurant are but this restaurant in any top city would be considered a must-try.

Yee Shun Milk Company

Ah...my favourite place in HK. No, that’s pretty sad but seriously, this milk pudding is the best. Yes, I have heard of the one in Jordan and I promise to try it the next time I’m in HK but I have it on good authority that it is only as good as Yee Shun.




This company only deals in milk and it’s logo is a cow and it’s all about flurescent signs of cows (as many people as there are in Singapore) and their product is great. For the uninitiated, before you go there and curse at me, I should add that Shuang Pi Nai, or Dun Nai, “steamed milk with two films” is an acquired taste. This is basically a mixture of milk and egg white, steamed sometimes with ginger till it forms a pudding with a thin membrane layer on top. While smooth and silky, some people find the taste of powdered milk overwhelming or find it too ‘jelat’ to eat an entire bowl (I, on the other hand, can eat two).




The papaya or mango milk here is also very good, look at the creamy colours!




Yee Shun Milk Company
Several locations: Pilkem Street, Percival Street and Lockhart Street in Causeway Bay (exit C at the Causeway Bay MTR, turn right)

Tsim Chai Kee

This unpretentious dumpling soup shop on Wellington Street is a treasure! Introduced to me by a friend as “There’s this place where the dumplings are the size of your palm”, it didn’t disappoint.




These are pictures from the store front and inside the store, which is air-conditioned (which I appreciated especially during the summer).




The dumplings are chock full of prawn and black mushroom, which you can see through the thin skins. You can also see the ladies in the back of the shop, stuffing the dumplings from a mountain of prawn stuffing. I get a kick out of that. My mom’s opinion was “Shiok!” and she really liked how each regular serving is a small bowl so that you can have it for an in-between-meal snack. Most Singaporeans think Mak’s Noodles is the place on Wellington Street to go to, but take it from a very picky noodle eater, Mak’s has nothing on this place and the service at Mak’s is just god-awful, having fattened their coffers so much from Singaporean tourists.

Chris Pattern’s Egg Tarts/Tai Cheong Cake Shop

It was reported that this shop had closed down and egg tart lovers around the world mourned. Fear not, it has not closed down…it has merely moved to across the street. It used to be at 32 Lyndhurst Terrace and I’m not sure if that is the new address but I found it along the way walking to Lyndhurst Terrace anyway and I usually walk there from Wellington Street (no prizes for guessing why). I walk up Lyndhurst, toward the GOD store at the top of the street and the store is right there.




The picture on the right shows the guys in the glass making the tarts with the famous, laminated picture of Chris Pattern.




Tai Cheong bakes hundreds of egg tarts daily, as well as other Chinese pastries, so you're assured of a fresh, warm tart no matter when you go.




The egg tarts are beautifully baked with the wobbly custard still hot and slightly liquid on the inside but firm and springy on the surface. This paired with the savory shortcrust pasty is a persuasive pairing, my mother, usually not a dessert lover, was completely sold and we returned several days in a row to buy boxes of the tarts. The best way to eat them and compose an ode to egg tarts, is hot on the street corner.

Technorati Tags: Reviews, Food, Hong Kong, Restaurants

Miscellaneous Food: Hong Kong Part 4

The next couple days in Hong Kong were fairly uneventful and work-filled. Thanks to the blistering heat and then the blowsy air-conditioning in the hotel, Colin was starting to feel a bit ill, so we reverted to looking for comfort and soupy food. We had planned to go to Yung Kee for dinner but were defeated by the long lines and wanted to make it to a massage after the meal.


Given the time constraint, we trooped around the corner at Cochrane Street and came upon this restaurant that I've seen often and which my cousin has told me is a restaurant with live Snake. The restaurant is called Se Wong (or Snake King).


Well, desperate times so we went in anyway and luckily they had tons of soups. We tried to ascertain that we were ordering one without snake and also got two plates of char siew noodle.


While distinctly a sub-par HK noodle, this was still superior to anything that the rest of Asia offers, so we were fairly happy and noted that there was nary a snake in sight (though the word snake, was all over the menu).


The next day, we did go back to Yung Kee and we finally got our meal of clear chicken, carrot and corn broth, roast goose, sweet and sour pork and vegetables. It was satisfyingly solid, Yung Kee is such a pain to queue for but it's hardly a disappointment.


After dinner, my brother and I had a little time and I'd be leaving Hong Kong the next day. We decided to go get some dessert and because my beloved shuang pi nai (steamed milk pudding with two films, I love that name!) was way out in Causeway Bay, we decided to stay in expat Central and go to Honeymoon Dessert in Sheung Wan.


There used to be a Honeymoon Dessert smack in Central near Lan Kwai Fong, in Entertainment Building, but it didn't seem very popular and now the only Central-esque branch that remains is in Sheung Wan, near the Shun Tak ferry terminal to Macau. You can take a cab there or just walk all the way down Hollywood Road toward the kitschy Western Market building.


The Western Market building is very interesting, it was built to house greater things but today, it just has a lot of strange make-shift textiles shops, dessert huts and on the top floor, some KTV that streams live 'music' from their patrons through the whole building.


The highlight of Honeymoon is the sago desserts, of which there are a huge variety. Pretty much you can get any kind of fruit with sago and any combination of those and other HK desserts, like soyabean, black bean, sesame, papaya and fungus. My favourite is their mango pomelo sago and they have this awesome hot dessert, which is a baked taro with sage. It sounds dense but it's really yummy. I also quite like the papaya shake, though not as good as at Yee Shun.


One quirky thing that I like a lot about this place is the melamite bowls and plates that they have. The cheery yellow plates are inscribed with the corniest pictures and wordings, all disturbingly featuring children. For example their plates have this little girl dreaming of a muscle man and the captions are typically Japanese lost in translation. Apparently the guy who makes them takes classic propaganda motifs of Communist-era children and mixes them with captions off Japanese stationary. I've tried to buy the crockery off the owners but they refuse to do a private order. I thought it'd be hilarious to use it at home, with every scoop, the baby on the spoon laughs up at you through your dessert.


Honeymoon is a chain and is also available in Shanghai. I think there are obviously some great local dessert huts and I have a few favourites but I think this shop, being one of their largest, is consistent, convenient and clean. Definitely worth a dessert stop if you're still hungry!


Yung Kee
32-40 Wellington Street, Central, Hong Kong
(852) 2522 1624
info@yungkee.com.hk

Honeymoon Dessert
Shop 4-6, ground floor,
Western Market, Sheung Wan
852-2851-2606
www.honeymoon-dessert.com