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!
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