Who cares about Tokyo being the new gastronomic capital of the world? Because, let's face it, Hong Kong is the Wong Tai Sin for all your gustatory wishes!
The old man, ah Pak, is a hunchback selling shanjisheng and steamed egg puddings close to Rotunda de Carlos da Maia (aka "three lamps"). Shanjisheng, in case you don't know, is a popular herbal tea made mostly of Chinese taxillus twig. The herb is a mistletoe, hemi-parasitic shrub but the man who sells it might as well be the least parasitic person in Macao. Instead of begging his bread or living off the back of the welfares by the government, he choses to live up a life with his bare hands without a single word of poorness uttered, night after night.
"The first thing I tell them is to round up every price that ends with
95 cents to 99 cents. You've got an item $10.95, raise it to $10.99. If
it's $7.75, make it $7.79. All the chains have done it -- Applebee's,
Chili's, all of them. It's just four cents and your customers won't
notice, but that could easily mean $5,000 to $15,000 a year for the
restaurant."
Inspiring read from the Washington Post on how restaurateurs fiddle with tricks to save costs against soaring food prices, which reminds me the sorry state of the supplier-driven dining scene here in Hong Kong, especially those in LKF, Soho, A-Ho and NoHo...
And always remember: eat smart, not hard. Mind over mouth, always!
While the noodlicious "heaven in a bowl" writeup I did for SCMP last month leaves us in no doubt about the lure of these charming noodles joints, we must face a fact even the blind can see before we move on to plan another rewarding noodles jaunt forward: the piece is written for, well, N2N, novices to noodles.
I mean, look at the list. It practically bears no difference than pointing Robert De Niro or Al Pacino's when people asked for acting tips. For suave diners hankering a good nosh of noods, it's like -- my editor's gonna give me a nasty stare for saying this -- tickle your itchy foot without taking off the boot. List is full of shops so famed, hyped and so out-there that readers may doubt someone is just channeling a fabulous feast with leftovers. "Chaxiubao, that's it?! I can get a way better one from any celebitchy magazine selling on newstands."
But wait, doing things by halves isn't the Chaxiubao way -- and so -- allow me the indulgence to present you all "the best noodles in Hong Kong you've never heard of" series to redeem my reputation. Dare me to say, this is the list to make you feel like six inches tall even if you think you know noodles-dining in Hong Kong like the back of your hand!
I have been wanting to partake in one of these books2eat/edible book festivals for ages, so it's absolutely delightful to know that we're accepting the mantle of edible readership on our own turf this Saturday.
Date : Saturday, April 5th 2008 Place : The Rotunda, Exchange Square, Central Open Viewing : 12-3pm (free of charge) Winners announced : 3 pm Afternoon Tea : 3-5pm (HK$150 for adults, HK$30 for children aged 3-10)
I don't know about you but my chewchew entry is simple -- I don't even need to wet my hand making it; yet it's extraordinary intellectual at the same time! All I need is some kumquat, apple and ume and voila, a famed Chinese literature masterpiece is there for everyone's drooling pleasure before you knew it!
Friends are complaining about my debut write-up for the South China Mourning Post this week, saying the piece is packed with too much clarity of style -- sound commentary -- moral proses and -- hardboiled investigative and explanatory reporting... in short, too much a serious contender for the next Pulitzer Prize rather than the arrant nonsense from me as always...
Well, what can I say? This is distinguished journalism we're talking about here, right?! It's not like I'm writing with impulses on the nearest bogroll I managed to find or something...
Anyways, food always gives me tons of elan. I am actually having a good time doing this and hopefully many more will come. Last but not least, thanks goes to my editor Susan for the wearisome ordeal of patching everything together.
When I read that workers from the sex industry and concern groups marched to the police headquarters, demanding the police to end discrimination against sex workers last week, I was aghast. Not that I work in the industry myself, but I can empathy with the wrath of the our fellow sex workers. 100 per cent.
I mean -- let us not argue the matter -- whose slate is clean anyway? If you look at the homepage of Zi Teng, a local consciousness raising group for the sex trade, you'll see why a sex job is just about as respectable as any other job in this world -- it might even seen philanthropic of high distinction to some -- reasons include, among others: family burden, loneliness, or even upkeep of stray animals (shame on you PETA people who knows nothing but mooching around naked)! That's why I find it absolutely terrifying there is people who still look down on hookers and think them deserve lesser. As years rolled away, prostitutes are slighted and the imbalances they suffered received scant attention in our society.
A fact you simply can't deny is, like the banner says -- no matter how cheap and filthy you find it to be -- sex work is work; just like there's no denying that cheap food is food!
That's why I'm sharing with you the Sun Den Restaurant from Mongkok, yesh, the slum that reigns all the cheapnesses of Hong Kong. At a time when any fancy-pancy hangout in town can cost you a phallic spasm with a stratospheric bill, Sun Den is only asking a tiny fraction of that (around HK$100 per head) to give you the same level of gustatory satisfaction; just like what anyone of the hostesses from the 'one-woman' brothels around are doing when call girls from Russia checking in some 5-star hotels try Blue Bar of Four Seasons after 10 are asking upwards of HK$4,000 for comparable services.
So next time when you're in Shanghai Street of Mongkok, look out for the "divine beacon" (what Sun Den literally means in Chinese) of yummy Cantonese nosh from afar. Truth be told, deep down in the wild bushes of fluorescent signs is where a towering palace of cheap food erected. Signature dishes include sauteed fish belly with eggs, chicken feet soup, baked fish guts with deep-fried dough sticks, stir-fried beef marrow and stir-fried frog's stomaches (takes more than 40 frogs to make one plate); night in and night out, good, enrapturing food are serving here at dirt cheap prices with dedication, showing how there's nothing bad about spending low once you realize sometimes good thing in life never needs a price tag to prove it...
The only snag is, with so much captivating signs of brothels and massage parlors nearby, you'll really need to mind your step. Por una cabeza, you don't want your thirst for good food be mistakenly driven to the scent of a woman...for that'll really drive you crazy, right? [News picture to the left courtesy of SCMP]
The weirdest dick I've ever tried is that of snake (in a snake-all-the-way banquet somewhere in Dongguan) -- if salamander's isn't. Both very ill-endowed, by the way. [picture courtesy of The Times]
To be perfectly honest with you I haven't got the faintest idea what to expect from Niigata beyond the fantasy I grown from reading the novel Yukiguni (Snow Country) by Yasunari Kawabata way back when I was in high school.
Just in case you don't know, the novel is a compelling tale of a geisha and a dilettante in Niigata. The fragility of life and love is brilliantly chronicled and the ending is heart-meltingly grievous; you can almost hear a whisper of sadness from the Snow Countryas you read towards the end.
It is the book where I first read about sake: urbane geisha pouring sake for her clientèle to have the latter paralyzed by happiness. Oh, the definitive combination of good swill and good swing -- little wonder that I had loitered away half of my boyhood in countless romantic clouds that followed. Oh, g-eisha, ge-i-sha, my gei-sh-a! My dame serves me warm sake in the cold weather. It's aerial, it's musical and it's surely beautiful.
All of which does not alter the fact that sake is not served like this in Niigata in every-day reality.
Here in Ponshukan, one of the most famous sake shops in the southern part of Niigata, sakes are sold, cold, in Iidō-hanbaiki (vending machine in Japanese), as though those for condoms. If you want the sake, feed the greedy, stone cold DIY machine with coins first; put in the same kind of plastic cup they give you in the clinic for urine sample under the stupid dispenser second and third, await the machine to dole out the fluid you wanted.
Quite a dissonance, ain't it? The romance is missed, the bubble of my fantasy popped and the disappointment is beyond diagnosis.
Sharing below is a piece about wampee, a fruit indigenous to the Canton region. I dug it up from the food columns I once farmed in a local papers called Ming Pao. It was the debut from a series of Chinese food article that appears on the lifestyle section of the papers every Sunday, dating almost 2 years ago.
Unfortunately this part-time food columnist career of mine didn't last long. For one it's fairly draining to write on the upwards of 2,000 words every week outside a full-time job (umh, and keeping up this blog too) -- for the 2 months I wrote, I sleep less than 4 hours a day, at times 3 only -- I breathed and walked thinking about the deadline and the proses of my own work. More importantly, the editor was really getting on my nerves for various reasons that I'm too gentleman to mention here, or anywhere. So our marriage ended right after I did the interview with Nigella Lawson the kitchen diva.
Still, it's a very rewarding ride. It doesn't matter I didn't charge a single penny for the columns all way through because for me it's about the experience and knowing the very fact that I can impart wisdom, I can pass on the torch of knowledge about Chinese food to someone who doesn't know. Reading my own writings, in a larger than life full page on the newspapers no less, just gives me a feeling of power transfusion because I know I'm sharing the glories of Chinese food culture that I'm so proud of.
All the articles are published under the pen name 米傲(Mei O), which literally means "the pride of rice". Please enjoy if you can read Chinese.
The first shop from our cocoa maestro is finally here, the first one outside anyway of Japan and France. It's a bit on the smaller side for the moment but the second coming of JPH in the form of so-called "flagship" or "concept" store is a soo-in if you ask me: just look at the size of crowd swarming outside!
Conspicuously missing is his aperitif cheese chocolate collection (where's the pont-l'eveque, roquefort, and epoisses?! Why, why are you doing this to humanity?!), as do the soft, plum lips of his chocolate cakes to kiss. Aarrrh, where's the Guayaquil, Longchamp and Safi?! Mr. Hevin, stop teasing us!
The most poetic piece of chocolate mastery, the infamously heart throbbing stiletto is graciously here but for display only (note: I know, it officially makes me the gayest crossdresser in town). Anyways, check out the photostream below to see what happened.
Let's forget about the cute, chubby mug of Bibendum for the time being. There could be a Michelin-starred sushi bar, kaiseki ryori or ultra lush French dining room that you're set to stuff your face on while in Tokyo, but in the midst of things, "depachika" is arguably the best way to indulge yourself into the kaleidoscopic food culture of Japan in the cheap and ease.
A word formed with depa from "department store" and chika, or basement in Japanese, depachika is the Eden that never quite caught the commensurate attention of mainstream travel guides in the English world -- the wickedest sin ever committed by the articulate but sometimes malinformed travel writers. This could be, with its countless booths of wagashi and counters of patisseries, confiseries and chocolat francaise romping in various diaphanous scarves and lacquered bamboos, a Zen garden planted in spacecraft or Marianne masqueraded in kimono. Either way, a true blessing for the foodies in the know.
And thanks to the marketing savvy of the Japanese, or lack of that by the French for that matter, you don't quite need to trek across the corners of Paris with whines and frowns. With some of the most captivating designer chocolates and pastries
(Pierre Herme, Jean-Paul Hevin and Sadaharu Aoki, naming just some of
my favorite Parisien labels) and all the most obsessional produce from
around world strewing in a single strata, it is quite possibly, to put an aesthetic point to it, an ukiyo-e of the yummiest dreams you've ever made [proofs from my Flickr photostream can be envisioned here, here and here].
Before you strike your divine blitz of kamikaze attack on the booths, in the midst of things, you can go visit here and here (sorry, in Japanese only) for the latest news and promos at different depachika across Japan.
TSUKASA SAKURAKOUJI beams childishly, throws his arms open and
exclaims: "Welcome to Edelstein boarding school for boys! You must
be tired after your journey; let me help you relax." ~Cafe Edelstein in Tokyo.
Jaysus, it creeps me out like I first caught up the Thriller MTV 25 years ago, you know, like got seized by the zombie flick and let the rap by Vincent Prince twirling in my mind all over... that's how creepy this whole cosplay thing is to me. But still, I am totally hiring these creatures to my niece's next birthday...
Sorry to my fellow U.S. Olympians, so long for your cravings of Peking duck, xiaolongbao, jiaozi, baozi, lanzhou noodles and all that yums. You train years like mad to be the strongest in the world but your team cooks have you chicken out all because of a piece of frozen meat. And the gusto sabotage doesn't end there --
"Ms. Hamilton has lowered sodium, decreased fats and eliminated trans
fats — even from rich dishes like macaroni and cheese and rice pudding
— while preserving the flavor."
Well, last time I checked, the only thing that can do this trick is a) a kind of dark art or b) something called MSG; but you really have to sprint faster than Liu Xiang to make me believe Ms. Hamilton isn't adopting the latter... Sorry again folks, imported MSG is not welcome -- ours is much cheaper, even after the raging Chinflation!
It's a fish market, the largest central fish market in Japan.
It has something to do with death. Millions of fish laid low on the ground in a suffocating stillness before any sunlight crack through the air, a tell-tale of the ephemeral of life as the translucent vapor of chillness goes up from their dead bodies -- my friend, life is as fleeting as the morning dew and as lacking of importance as a fluttering leaf, so the sermon goes. The stampede of shadows over their dead bodies, however, moves as turbulent as a sea in anger, as if vying to give the audience a visual account about how vigorous life can be by the dialectic of light and darkness. Twists and turns; length and breadth; highs and lows, they've got it all in a capsule that is dawn...
In came could be your ronin with no name, lone ranger who only does what he does for his own wallet? A samurai on the hire with marginal loyalty, huhuh? Just a day in office for the ordinary salary man? Or even a nasubito (or brigand in English) disguising in a sheep's wardrobe, who knows?! All this, goes through every day the way as though human nature would have choreographed it. All this, in a giant arena blurred with the distillation of subjectivity and uncertainty.
The Japanese must have thought they've got all the cacao glories in the world. Well, well my friend, time to kiss your sweet "choko" illusion goodbye (sorry for the bun: the word "choko" in Japanese sounds the same as toddling and naive).
Look what I've just dug up...look who's coming to town?! Check out here for a sneak preview of our sweet revenge.
My my, my spying perfection as a vigilant foodie certainly has no limits, nor does my affixation that Hong Kong is the Wong Tai Sin to your stomach, not less than Tokyo is the so-called new gastronomic capital of world (as claimed by a food critic in France in the wake of the 2008 Tokyo Michelin Guide release -- but does he know the fact that Tokyo is three times the size of Paris as a city?), as I found one more song to chorus my sweet aspiration (sorry, in Cantonese only)!
Campaign for Lynx (or Axe outside UK) new chocolate-flavored "Dark Temptation" deodorant. Man, you can almost smell the unbeatable choco-goodness if you gawk hard on the picture, if you gawk hard on picture!
Speaking of which, what better way to start the Year of the Rat with the ladies than a spray of this? Cheesy, creepy yet tasty. My kind of game.
And this one, yet more junky tweak to crack up the year of the Rat! I luuuv chocolate...
I remember we met somewhere by the south of the border and the west of the sun, at a time when the wind was singing the Norwegian Woods. We pampered ourselves along the shore of Rainbow Bridge of Tokyo, with me holding Kafka's The Trial reading halfway through.
From that day on I start to write a chronicle about our happiness everyday after dark. And the title of it is called The Happiness of Mochi.
When I was attending college, which is 2 years ago, I had a classmate from Japan whose name is Natayama. A mellow and humble (or kenson as they say in Japan) fellow; never good at conversing with others in a large part owing to his ineptitude of both English and Cantonese. For this reason probably, he was often saw alone, withdrawn in thoughts in a geekish way around the campus. Anyways, to cut long story short, Natayama and I became good friends because we're assigned to the same group in an elective, from where we discovered our common aesthetic interest on the recher-che stylishness of bathing suits selling in Japan as well as our genuine concern of the models who wear these bathing suits.
One day I got curious and asked Natayama how people in Japan pronounce my name:--
Granddad was right about how many wrongs the Japanese did -- let there be no escaping -- the Raping of Nanjing, the human experimentation in WWII and, to crown it all, the sad, pre-matured retirement of Ai Iijima the AV actress, as if we need to take out a few drops from the bucket.
Enraged, my desire to return the flavorfavor to the Japanese is now as keen as wasabimustard. Avenge is the week to come. Alternating between rages and hungersangers, my fist of hungryfury will land on a karateka with black belt as though he's nothing more than a nigiri (sushi rice) wrapped in dried seaweed and my chopsticksnunchucks will fret into a kendoka like a tuna makizushi (sushi roll) he is.
Licking will be given to the Japanese, no messing. You just watch me.
I am very ill-rounded as a traveler in that all I love to do is to eat,
eat, and eat when I travel abroad. Don't get me wrong, I do other
things. I even like to do other things. But when asked for what I love
to do when travel, that's it. Everything else is dispensable filler with minor consequentiality. Like most of you, I design my trip centre around food.
Needless to say, knowing that there are hundreds of food stalls at the mezzanine of Kozponti Vasarcsarnok (Central Market of Budapest) -- and all open in the wee wee hour of the morning just send thrills of pleasure through and through me. Perfect spot to make up the first half of my day before I hit the famous Gerbeaud Kavehaz.
Let's get this right out of my chest first -- I was tempted to think about something a little bit more dynamite (something like this, to say the least) when I saw the title!
This is exactly the reason why we need a more rigorous standard on journalism nowadays!
Below you'll find a trilingual list comprising 341 fishes (aquatic animals, to be exact). First column in Japanese, in either hiragana (平仮名 ひらがな) or katakana (片仮名 カタカナ) script, most with a kanji (漢字かんじ) follows in parentheses; second column of romaji to help you pronounce the name and in the third column is the common name of the fishes in English.
The best thing about this list is that all romaji names are arranged in alphabetical order so that even those with very scant Japanese knowledge can breeze it through and find out the Nemo he wants.
It takes me 3 weeks to patch up this list and it tops my original bilingual fishy project in leaps and bounds. I know I gonna fish out the "A-game" with this from the sushi syokunin (寿司職人, sushi master in English) behind the sushi bars in Japan come January. Yay, I gonna eat like fish in water with this fishy list of mine!
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