Tim Ho Wan - Cheapest Michelin Starred Food in the World

Hong Kong is my home and has been for the last 4 months. It tends to exact a high cost for the pleasure of living here as an ex-pat. Rents are high for small apartments, school fees are high if you do not want your child to be taken in to the rote-learning, childhood denying, character-destroying local system and anything that is good or Western (definitely not necessarily the same thing) usually costs a fair bit. However, when it comes to food, Hong Kong can still deliver great value. Not in its CBD western style restaurants but in its local eateries. This fortnight's Time Out Hong Kong's cover article is about the best cheap eats in town. Some of the places seem a bit scary for me, but I am sure once I overcome the adversion to some styles of Chinese cooking I will become a fan too. But the place that everyone is going wild for at the moment is a cheap, cheap dim sum joint set up by a high end chef. That is why Tim Ho Wan ("Add Good Luck") has been on my "must try" list since I first heard about it. We tried it last night and the dim sum does live up to the hype, but did it justify standing for two and a half hours on the street!?

The chef, Mak Pui Gor, apparently was the dim sum chef at the Four Seasons Hotel, where he worked at the three Michelin-starred restaurant Lung King Heen. He then decided to open his own restaurant during the economic crisis, in a nondescript street which sells replica guns and models to war game nerds and modelling geeks, in Mong Kok, one of the most densely populated areas in the world (OK, so that bit makes sense, to open where you have a few million potential customers within a 5 mile radius) and to sell his food for absolute bargain prices of between HK$10 and HK$16 (between 0.85euro and 1.30 euro).

He sells around 750 dishes of his signature crispy pork buns each day. If you ever have had dim sum you will have steamed char sui pork buns. This guy deep fries them and they come really crispy on the outside, stickily sweet on the inside with a lovely chewiness. Most of the other dim sum favourites are there in one guise or another, and are done well, but not really messed around with, as there is probably only so much you can do with a prawn dumpling.

Eimhear and I waited 2 and a half hours to be seated. The place is like a small greasy spoon, with formica topped tables squeezed in and diners sitting cheek by jowl beside each other (I was unable to use my chopstick's comfortably due to the close proximity of the wall, while Eimhear's neighbours had to get up a few times to let people in and out of seats). There must be no more than 40 covers, but I reckon with an average seated time of about 45 minutes and as the place ALWAYS has a queue and is open from 10 to 10, it must do over almost 800 covers a day. We ate 10 dim sum dishes and the bill including constant refills of steaming earthy Chinese tea came to HK$126. Ten pounds sterling, 11 euro!

Some of the dishes are deep fried which make a difference to the steamed dim sum ubiquitous elsewhere, although after a while the fried stuff was getting to be just a little too much. It was fantastic then to receive some delicate jellies containing flower petals and a beautiful juicy red berry I do not know the name of. Very refreshing and I was able to then try the famous char sui pork buns. Yum!

They could easily double the prices, even triple them and people would come, but maybe not in quite such droves. However, from what I hear they have no intention of increasing the prices. We were the only gweillos there!

Also good was the steamed egg cake,the turnip cake and the shrimp dumplings with cabbage, peanuts and dried shrimp. The wait is worth it, especially at those prices.

A big tick off of my Hong Kong list and to be recommended for those who have three hours to kill on a Monday night. I'd say there may be quieter times when you only need to wait an hour to be seated! Go....eat.... or die wondering.

PS Bring a good book or magazine, someone special or a good friend to talk to or go off for an hour's wander and come back. Just don't miss your number as they give you about 2 seconds to answer yours when it's called!

Cold and Steamy Windows

It is cold here. Not the chilling, biting cold of Northern Europe, more the creeping, gnawing away at you kind of cold that you get in damper climates. When I say cold though, it has been in single digits Celsius (ie about 7 to about 9). This may not sound too cold to you, but when your apartment is as well insulated as a streetwalker's stockings, the clothes you own are meant for summer barbecues and there is no central heating ANYWHERE, then one really gets to feel it in the bones as it creeps uninvited through your less than substantial clothes over clammy skin. Not a few months ago I scoffed at those fashion shop storefront posters and billboards proclaiming the arrival of the new winter season stock and Asian women were parading around in fur in 18 degree temperatures. Now, I would rip that fur from their backs, not in an Animal Rights kind of way, more in an animalistic, get-me-warm-now kind of way. I suspect some jackets and coats will be brought back from our visit to the homeland this summer and carefully stored away for next winter. Hey, I feel a wee bit bad complaining about it when most of the mid-Northern hemisphere has had weeks on end of deluges of snow and sub-zero temperatures (so for you people, 9 degrees is tropical) but for some reason it feels colder and less bearable here.

My wife has been sick off and on now (mostly sick i.e., "on") for the best part of two weeks. I feel bad for her as she is going ballistic being stuck at home, too weak to stay up out of bed for more than a half an hour. It is at times like this when you realise that it is easy to take for granted good health and the good company of your life partner, who sustains you normally with happiness, sunny positivity, conversation, hugs and kisses a well as does an amazing amount of things which you can never dream of accomplishing on your own when there is just one of you! Message to my poor sickly wife - please get better soon, for all our sakes!!

The mountain, half-way up I live, has been in cloud for a lot of the last few weeks. That has meant everything is damp. Mould is starting to grow around window frames and in the guest bathroom and clothes never feel fully dry. Moulds smells are appearing. I hope it heats and dries up soon. When a man's golf bag goes mouldy he knows he needs to..... get out and play more? Hmmm, I wonder how Tiger is doing. He will speak tomorrow for the first time since his fire hydrant incident. Would not like to be in his shoes, even if the whole thing is an orchestrated, Tiger-controlled, charade.

Stay warm and dry out there.

Kung Hei Fat Choy!

The Chinese Lunar New Year has just passed in the part of the world where I currently reside. This is the longest holiday in the Chinese calendar and a time for families to reunite and exchange gifts (lai see in Cantonese). It is an extremely confusing time for a gweillo (white ghost) ex-pat person, as the rules about to whom you should give lai see are a bit hard to understand. One puts even numbered money into little red envelopes (packets) and hands them to relatives and people who provide you with services. It's like an annual tip and the giving of the lai see is accompanied by wishes of good health, happiness and prosperity for the forthcoming year. I believe they should only be given to unmarried persons, although some say I should give to all people in my office and in my apartment block who seem to be asking for it. Then, I am told if they are married, I should only give to the children of such married person. If in doubt I say, just hand them out to everyone, except peers and superiors!

It is an optimistic time of year for all, I guess not dissimilar to the Western Christmas and New year. Although many westerners I know, especially of protestant / Presbyterian denomination are consumed with Dickensian bleakness at the festive time of year. Humbug to them I say!

We have good reason to be optimistic in these parts as the Chinese economoy (if you trust the figures) is still growing at almost double digit pace, while the nations that surround it are also showing signs of solid growth. Except Japan that is. At least this week it should be quiet in work.

It is the year of the Tiger. I wonder what that means, especially for Tigers? Not sure how good it will be for one Tiger, as last I heard he was still in self-imposed exile after his extra-marital affairs came to light..... Now I wonder what Chinese zodiac signs Rory McIlroy and Padraig Harrington are....

Where to Start

Where does one start? There is a burning ambition to post something so witty, intelligent and well written that it will hook the readers (if you write it, they will read it - yeah, right). My aim here is to commit my thoughts and musings to writing and for my blog to lay witness to my life, as I try to get the most out of that life. I think writing will help me do that. I have been told that I am a good writer, I have a gift, and while a creeping negative thought will lay a seed in my mind that the people who tell me such things have misguided confidence in me, the intended effect is taking greater hold - to inspire and to embolden me to just start typing and to banish the negativity.

So, my second day and second entry. And I am feeling pretty smug still.

Birth of a blogger

Having watched Julie & Julia with a certain amount of admiration and cringing, it is with trepidation that I commence my blog. It is something I have thought of doing for quite a while, but in my usual style, I have prevaricated, dithered and avoided. So here I am on line 4 of the blog and I already feel a sense of achievement. Surely, this is why anyone (or the majority of people at least) starts a blog, for their own needs, not for anyone else. They can express themselves in an anonymous way, in a modern way and commit musings, rants and raves, excitement and disappointment to the great body of stuff that is the Internet, the blogsphere, the thingammybob of "out there" and no longer just in one's own head. Not a diary, which can be read and used against you in some cruel way, and not as difficult as getting yourself published in a magazine or in a book.

So here I am and I am feeling pretty smug.