Dining Experiences in Hong Kong Part I...

Dining Experiences in Hong Kong

I was extremely excited about going to Hong Kong after our amazing stay in Beijing. I had heard incredible things about Hong Kong from tons of people, and my girlfriend's father had been raving about it the whole time we were in Beijing. I had heard about how the Hong Kong Chinese view food and was really excited to see just how amazing of a foodie town Hong Kong was. It didn’t disappoint. They love food! The city is extremely modern, very westernized. I loved every second of our trip there, and I would go back in a heartbeat. We ate like kings the entire time we were there, probably a huge part of the reason why I loved it so much. 

The hotel in Hong Kong was really spectacular. It is the number one hotel of the Intercontinental brand, and for good reason. We were staying on the club floor, so we had access to the club lounge. They served breakfast every morning, high tea in the afternoons, and happy hour each evening. It was absolutely knocked out. The service was incredible, the food was tasty, and the view was superb.  

The lounge however is not the only viable option for food inside the Intercontinental that sits directly on Victoria Harbour. The hotel is home to two Michelin star restaurants including Yan Toh Heen, a traditional Chinese restaurant in Cantonese style. The GM of the hotel invited us there one night, his treat, so we ventured in and enjoyed a meal fit for a king. It started off with bottles of Chandon Shiraz, a really delicious surprise. Apparently the wine scene in Hong Kong used to be crap, but its improved tremendously in the last ten years. I finally got to have my Peking duck here, and what better place to have it then one of the best Cantonese style restaurants in Asia. They brought the duck out with its head and neck on, crispy as can be. They show it to you, and then the guy begins carving off pieces of the crispy skin. They serve a piece of skin on a small flour tortilla with scallions, peppers, and a plum sauce similar to a hoisin sauce. Talk about heaven, this was incredibly delicious. The crunch was unmatched, and the sweetness from the sauce was in sharp contrast to the salty nature of the duck skin. After the skin was served, the duck was taken in the back, and we were served four other courses including a green bean dish, some melt in my mouth wagyu beef, and some fried rice. Each course was better than the next, and finally the duck came back out. It was minced in a bowl, and served lettuce wrap style. Again the duck was succulent and only enhanced by the fruity deliciousness that was the plum sauce. For dessert they came out with bowls of jade that were billowing smoke from the dry ice underneath. The presentation was phenomenal. The taste was as good as it gets for Chinese desserts. It was like a mango pudding with a bit thinner of a consistency. I was truly blown away by my first experience with a Michelin star restaurant. The service, food and ambiance are all unmatched, and I can honestly say I have only ever had all three that good once or twice before in my life. 

A quick word about the Harbourside, a buffet and sit-down restaurant in the lobby of the hotel. We went there the first day we got to Hong Kong. I ordered an Indonesian dish I had never seen on a menu before called nasi goreng. It was a fried rice dish, topped with chicken and beef satay, a fried egg, and prawns. Everything about it was superbly delicious! The rice was incredibly flavorful, the chicken and beef satays were super tender and had delightfully sweet and savory sauces covering them. 

To be continued...

Dining Experiences in Beijing Continued...

CONTINUED…

My girlfriend's dad knew the GM of the hotel we were staying in while in Beijing, and we ran into his wife quite frequently in the lounge on the club floor. She recommended a dim sum place for us to try while we were out at the Summer Palace. Unfortunately for us, it wasn’t the form of meal we were really looking for. It was a fru fru, fancy dim sum place in the Aman hotel. That being said, it didn’t prevent it from being delicious. It just really was way fancier than we wanted and not the experience we were looking to have. Dim sum is usually served in a state of chaos, with large carts of food being rolled around a dining room, and customers choosing things to eat off of the carts. But this food was plated, served one plate at a time. It was incredibly delicious though. I tried a few things I had before, and a few I hadn’t. We had some shrimp dumplings, some noodles, a papaya puff, and another form of dumpling that I cant quite remember. It all tasted good, but the portions were pretty tiny, and the food was very expensive for what it was. I guess if you were looking for that kind of exclusive and quiet experience it would have been great, but because we weren’t, it really didn’t sit well with us.

The coolest food adventure we had in Beijing was visiting the Wangfujing Snack Street. It is a street full of vendors and they serve up all kinds of traditional Chinese snacks. They had some of the weirdest things I have ever seen in my life. It definitely is the type of place that you should go with a few people after having a few drinks so you can dare each other to try different things. Many of the carts had the same things, but some of them were a bit more exotic, carrying things like tarantulas, centipedes, silkworms, snakes, sharks, scorpions, seahorses, sea urchin, chicken testicles, and pretty much every other organ you can think of. We went with my girlfriends parents and I was feeling a little adventurous, but not quite drunk enough to eat a tarantula or a silk worm, so we decided on trying a starfish. It got fried up in a wok, and served to us on a stick like a starfish lollipop. We didn’t really know what to do with it. The lady that cooked it for us could tell this, and she came over and showed us what to do. She broke off one of the legs, and then cracked it open, revealing a greenish colored meat inside. We dug in to the meat once it cooled a little bit, and realized it was ok. I was very nervous about it, but it was pretty tasty. It really tasted a lot like the ocean as most crustaceans do, so it was pretty good. It would be cool to go back with a group of people after a few beers and try other things they had. This is a must see place in Beijing so do not miss it!

Beijing is a really cultural place and it is worth a visit to see the sights. The food is tasty, but sometimes I definitely think an adventurous appetite is needed. Hopefully one day I can go back in the future to see how it has evolved. Cheers!

Dining in Beijing Part 1...

Dining Experiences in Beijing

By the time we arrived in Beijing we were exhausted, and that didn’t change much the entire time we were there. After 25 hours of travel time between the flight and the time change, you can imagine that would mess you up quite a bit. We arrived on Saturday at 11:30pm local time. Beijing was tough because of the lack of English spoken. You can’t walk out onto the street and grab a cab unless you have your destination written in Chinese on a piece of paper. English isn’t common unless you are in a hotel, and even then it is only a few people that speak it well enough to communicate. So many of our experiences consisted of pointing at pictures and hoping they brought us out the correct things. We ate in the hotel a few times because we were so busy all day that it was just easier to eat in the hotel when we got back late. That being said we really had some awesome experiences in Beijing.

The first of those experiences was a type of hot pot eating known as Shabu Shabu. I had never had anything in the hot pot style before, and it was a really cool experience. It was also my first experience of not being able to communicate to anyone in the restaurant but the people I was with. We had to point at things on the menu to order them, and simply hope that we got the right things in the right quantities. We did wind up getting all of our food, which was good, and it was a really interesting way to eat. We split a hot pot in between the two of us. It came out as a boiling bucket of flavor, something referred to as dashi. The meats, dumplings, raviolis, noodles, and vegetables all got dropped into the boiling broth and it cooked them up in mere seconds.

One day while out seeing the Huotongs, we walked around an area around a beautiful lake and had food at a restaurant upstairs in one of the buildings. The specialty of the place was Hunan cuisine, a cuisine from the Hunan province in China known for its dry heat. It is slightly different from Sichuan cuisine, which is known for its numbing heat. We ordered a delicious dish of stir fried duck and chilies, but I couldn’t tell which of them there was more of. We also ate some spicy gourd, some fried rice, and some delicious spicy little crispy shrimp that popped and oozed with salty sea flavor. 

We ate plenty of Chinese food while we there, but we did have one experience that was a step above the rest. It was yet another place that we had to point and order, but they are definitely pretty good at putting big pictures of the food on the menus so that you can do such a thing. This particular place was funny because of the experience we had been having with our driver. He kept telling my girlfriend's parents no when they made suggestions and he drove us past the restaurant that they wanted to go to in order to take us to the place that we wound up eating at. I am not sure of the name because it was in Chinese, but boy was the food good. We ordered hot and sour soup, orange glazed beef, stir fried pork, fried rice, and these dough creations that we stuffed with veggies. 

To be continued...

A First Class Experience...

Flying First Class on American Airlines

I was extremely blessed to accompany my girlfriend and her family on a trip to Asia last November. We started our trip on a 13-hour plane ride to Beijing from Chicago, and that flight was long! I was so excited to go on this trip that I was like a kid in a candy shop the entire flight. I will summarize the eating experiences I had in each country in the next few entries, but I did not want to review 50 different meals that I had there because it would get boring for you all out there. So I will do my best to keep it concise and enticing and I hope you all enjoy, but before I get started I just wanted to write a quick bit about the food on the flight.

 

I had never flown first class in my life before, and after flying that way this time, I know that there is no other way to fly. My girlfriend's dad bought our tickets with frequent flyer miles. That is the only way I could have afforded the ticket, and probably the last time I will ever fly first class. Haha. But from the moment that I set foot in the first class cabin, I felt like a king. Humongous seating areas, with seats that fold down into many different positions with footrests, pajamas, slippers, noise cancelling headphones, and so much food!

Champagne, all the alcohol you can drink, two five-course meals, with a two snacks in between… it seriously was ridiculous. And this wasn’t just airplane food. This was food that you can get in a sit-down restaurant.  Sam Choy, Maneet Chauhan, Cindy Hutson, Richard Sandoval, and Marcus Samuelsson all are on the list of culinary experts that design the food dishes being served on the plane. It was insane to say the least. Everyone should fly this way once in their lifetimes, but make sure its on a long flight, because it makes it that much more worth it. You don’t fly like that in first class on a domestic flight, but overseas is a whole other ball game. I can’t even imagine what it is like flying on a 5 star airline this way because American is only a 3 star airline and I felt like royalty! Save up and splurge and I promise you wont regret it! Cheers!