Hong Kong - Loaf On Cuisine

Loaf On Cuisine, Sai Kung Market - dinner on August 31, 2017

My last post on Hong Kong. It’ll be back to the recipes after this but I hope you enjoyed a little tour of Hong Kong. It wasn’t really a travelogue as I normally like to do since I didn’t do much research before or after of the places I saw nor is it any kind of bakery or restaurant reviews of the places I ate at. Regardless, I like to document some of my travels this way, not really so much as a reference for any other travelers but as a reminder to me of what I’ve done and where I’ve been, which, for me, always translates into local food and what I ate there.

For our last night in Hong Kong, our host took us to a Michelin star restaurant called Loaf On Cuisine. After our tour of the wet market, we were turned loose for an hour to wander around the various stalls, some selling non-edible items such as clothes, backpacks and bags and various trinkets. But when the time was up, we boarded a shuttle and were driven over very verdant hills and valleys and entered what seemed like a different world than the one we had just left. I don’t have much of a geographic sense of Hong Kong Island or Kowloon so all I know if we ended up at the water’s edge, at a place called Sai Kung, along a boardwalk that housed restaurants and shops. It wouldn’t be accurate to call it the Hong Kong version of Sausalito but it definitely had a more affluent and distinctively other-worldly air from the wet market and the more crowded business district of Hong Kong island.

I was a bit concerned about attire since we went straight from the wet market to the restaurant and I was in shorts and a tank top since the day was so hot and muggy/humid. But I was assured the restaurant was pretty casual, Michelin star and all. After arriving, I wouldn’t say the restaurant was casual as much as “we care about our food, not what you look like and so will you by the time you’ve eaten here”. We were shown to a table on the second floor, separated from the rest of the room by wall dividers so it was as good as feeling like we had the place to ourselves. If there were other large groups on the rest of the floor, I literally didn’t see or hear them.

Squid

Again, I don’t know what the dishes were called, but I do know they were amazing. I need to come up with new adjectives as I feel like I’ve worn that one out with my previous meals. The “best seafood dinner I’ve eaten anywhere in Asia” might come close and even that would be tepid in comparison to how delicious the dinner was.

Fried Rice

Noodles

I hardly need say the seafood was really fresh, right? Beyond that (and that’s no small thing as I’m not sure I can eat at a normal seafood restaurant again), the dishes were well prepared. I’d almost call it deceptively simple in terms of preparation because there wasn’t a lot of (or any) fancy sauces or anything fancy in the prep. One dish of whole fish appeared to just be the fish poached in salt water. I don’t know if that’s all it was. I just know that fish was fresh and really, really tasty.

The presentation was also simple but in a classy way. They let the food present themselves, so to speak. It’s hard to explain without going into endless raptures about how good everything was but the whole dinner was marked by classic simplicity and showcasing the food in the best possible way, with flavors that enhanced and brought out the best in the ingredients. 

Scallop with glass noodles

My favorite was the scallops. Served in the original scallop shells (this is how scallops really come), covered with glass noodles with a light soy sauce. OMG. So good. I could’ve eaten multiples of that alone and been happy. But yes, I paced myself again. The only one I didn’t love as much as the others was the abalone but that’s mostly because I don’t care for the rubbery chewiness of abalone, rather than anything wrong with the dish itself. And I admit, I skipped the periwinkles or sea snails. By the time it arrived close to the end of the meal, I was legitimately full and wasn’t willing to push myself beyond that just to try them.

Prawns

Prawns - freaking amazing.

Abalone

But if you’re ever in the area, Loaf On Cuisine is worth a stop on your itinerary. It was incredible. Many thanks to our host and my coworkers for not only a delicious meal but also great company to enjoy it with. After that, it was back to the hotel to pack and get ready to leave the next morning. So long, Hong Kong. I hope it isn’t another 19 years before I’m back again.

Pork

Periwinkles

Fried Tofu

Hong Kong - Wet Market, Kowloon

Wet Market, Kowloon - toured on August 31, 2017

If you’re vegetarian or vegan, you might want to skip this post entirely and come back tomorrow for the last Hong Kong post. I’m a carnivore and even I almost converted as I faced the visual reality of seeing the live or nearly live versions of the protein I consume. But that’s looking at things from a very Western lens where we are used to our proteins in nice, flat, cellophane-wrapped packages in neat rows lined up in refrigerator units housed inside large, well-lit supermarkets.

In Asia, they’re a little closer to protein in their natural forms. They aren’t necessarily nice, neat, shrink-wrapped packs but they’re definitely very fresh. Culturally, they’re also not as squeamish (as me) and are more pragmatic. Less affluent populations literally cannot afford to forego cheaper sources of nutrition (fish harvested from the sea, poultry and pork, etc).

Our last full day in Hong Kong was a team-building activity where we gathered as a group to be taken on a tour of Kowloon’s “wet market”. In the Philippines, we would call them “palengkes”. In the US, they’re like farmers’ markets on steroids where not just produce is for sale but also poultry, fish, pork, beef, etc; some cooked and ready to eat, some raw and available for purchase in family-consumable sizes. 

Our guide said he wouldn’t call himself a food guide but he had spent years learning about the history of food and its culture in Asia and he had some interesting stories to impart about where certain practices came from and what those common practices were. For instance, he showed us a stand where selections of freshly cooked pork was laid out on a table. Customers can come up and choose what they wanted and walk away with their selection, the meat ready to eat and to supplement a family’s dinner.

Ovens are not common in Hong Kong (as they aren’t in the Philippines) and certain meats were rarely cooked by a home chef but were instead always purchased from vendors who had developed the expertise and had the facilities and sources to prepare the meat. It was easy for consumers to stop by on their way home from work to purchase parts of their dinner. This is the same in the Philippines so the practice wasn’t foreign to me. It’s no different than Europeans picking up a baguette on their way home from work to include as their dinner. There are many bakers who produce superior bread and have the facilities to do so and it’s culturally appropriate and easy to buy a fresh loaf than to spend the hours making it yourself.

We walked through various parts of the wet market. There were rough groupings of types of food; some were stalls, others were more traditional stores. The stalls were mostly the freshly cooked meats and poultry or raw seafood while the more traditional stores sold fresh produce. We did go to a particular building that housed 3 stories, the first two floors of which were stalls upon stalls of fresh seafood or produce. And when I say “fresh seafood”, I actually mean “live fish” you can select. Some were freshly killed and keeping in water. This was the umpteenth time I considered going vegetarian even though I don’t eat a lot of vegetables. But I could definitely understand why people go vegetarian and vegan.

Chinese doughnut

But I wasn’t there to judge (or be a hypocrite). It was an interesting, close-up look at Kowloon’s wet market, an exposure to a different type of “foodie” experience, one that is more real than I usually get. It gave me a huge appreciation for the amount of work that goes into providing a food supply for the population and it’s probably normally thankless work. 

Hong Kong - Ho Lee Fook

Ho Lee Fook - dinner on August 30, 2017

Yes, you read the name right. Sound it out if you wonder why we got a chuckle when our Hong Kong host brought us here. But supposedly it means “good fortune for your mouth”. Apparently, this is locally famous and well-known for its beef ribs. It didn’t matter. Our Hong Kong host(ess) hadn’t steered us wrong yet so I was a willing lemming to follow her lead.

We entered the restaurant at street level, saw a bunch of mounted cat clocks (see pic, I’m not kidding) at the top of the stairs and took the stairs down into a darkened room that had a definite clubby feel. This is not a place where you take your sweetie so you can whisper sweet nothings to each other. This is good for group dinners, small and large, when you want a high energy, dancy vibe. Awesome 80s music the whole time we were there so it made me feel right at home.

Once again I cannot tell you what exactly we ate so this isn’t going to really be a restaurant review but more like a food porn post with some words. And some of my pictures didn’t really turn out because the lighting was so dark and I did not have the luxury of making fussy lighting adjustments with my phone before the dishes were passed around and spoons gouged out servings. So it’s more about “hey, here’s one of the places we ate at in Hong Kong”.

By now, I was a veteran of our team meals and had learned to pace myself. No matter how good something was, I knew enough to only take a small portion or else I was going to be hopelessly full too soon and would miss out on possibly the best dish(es).

Two dishes did stand out though. One was fried chicken wings that were crisp and amazingly flavorful. They were spicy; you know I don’t normally go for the spicy but these were really good, not burn-your-mouth-spicy but wake-up-and-say-hello-flavorful-spicy. At first I couldn’t recognize them, not just because of the poor lighting but because they were literally buried under a pile of crisply toasted chili peppers. At least that’s what I assume they were. I don’t know if anyone ate the chilis “straight” but the chicken wings were soon gone and the platter only contained crispy peppers.

The other dish that stood out in my memory came out last (see, this is why I save room) and were the famous ribs. I had gotten used to thinking of American-style ribs like baby back ribs but these were dinosaur-sized (okay, I exaggerate) ribs with generous slices of beef arranged around the bone. The outer edges were almost charred but only served as a nice contrast to the tenderness of the beef ribs inside. Very yum.

I miscalculated my pacing though and ran out of room for dessert. Which was some kind of ice cream or yogurt with some sort of fruit, served in bowls meant to be shared by 2-3 people. I cried uncle by then and didn’t get to take a picture so you’ll have to just imagine it. Another great dinner, another fun night in Hong Kong.