There is a lady of indeterminate age sitting across from me, studiously avoiding my eyes as she transfers her short rib dish from the steamer into her bowl. She raises a disapproving and painted-on eyebrow at the sauce she’s been forced to use after requesting another sauce and being rebuffed.
Or that’s what I assume has happened, since it was all carried out in rapid Cantonese (not that the speed matters when the number of Cantonese words I know is two). Everything has been Cantonese since I arrived at this small dim sum place in an industrial-ish area of Kowloon, purportedly the cheapest Michelin-star-festooned restaurant in the world.
I hear tell of crazy lines and long waits, but I am shuttled in within five minutes, albeit coupled with this strange lady and shown to a tiny table barely big enough to take my jacket off at without knocking all of the silverware on her side into her lap. I smile and nod at her, but she doesn’t look up once. She looks everywhere except at me: at her menu, at the six girls next to us who have so many pork buns on their table that they line the edges like Christmas lights, at the ceiling, at the waitstaff, at the rain.
So I look at my phone. It’s evening in Los Angeles, a reasonable time to text friends, so I text friends. I text them a picture of my menu, because I think that’s what someone at a famous and decorated restaurant might do. I’d just as soon play the game of ‘Who Can Avoid Eye Contact The Longest?’ with my tablemate, who seems vaguely disapproving of my menu-capture, except I have the handicap of facing a wall instead of the rest of the restaurant. Luckily, her shortribs arrive before too long, and I have those to stare at. Dim sum-style short ribs have always tasted somewhat spam-like and looked somewhat pimple-skinned to me, so I haven’t ordered them. I’ve ordered the most white-girl-ish order possible: BBQ pork buns and shrimp dumplings.
To be fair, the BBQ pork buns are what everyone raves about – otherwise, I wouldn’t have ordered them. Tim Ho Wan’s pork buns are the fried, crispy kind. The kind with sugar poured on top in a kind of bun-ruining splat. The filling of the buns is fantastic, though not terribly Chinese-tasting – the BBQ sauce wouldn’t be totally out of place at a Texas rib joint – but the sugar-splatted bun is reminiscent of the first time I bought a loaf of bread in Indonesia and discovered that apparently Indonesians think bread, even in loaf form is dessert. (I tried to make a grilled tempeh and mustard sandwich with it. This didn’t go well.) If I was writing a judgment-free review of these sugar buns, though, I’d have to admit that the sugar forms a teeth-pleasing crunch, like the top of a creme brulée, to supplement the rest of the crackling, fried, crumb-flaking bun. But these, sugar and crunch and Texas BBQ sauce and all, are but a mere memory once I put a shrimp dumpling in my mouth.
These shrimp dumplings are first example of something I run into time and time again in Hong Kong: there is something magical in the rice wrappers. I’ve been eating dim sum all my life – in Chicago, in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, in Beijing, in Guangxi, even in Osaka – and never knew the wrappers didn’t have to be at least kind of gummy. I never even noticed the gumminess until its absence here in Hong Kong, where the rice wrappers serve their purpose by holding in the goodies, provide a mild chew, then magically disintegrate into nothing when they’re no longer needed. Once the shrimp’s skin bursts and that salty ocean flavor, tempered by wine, garlic, and pork fat, floods the mouth, the wrapping just disappears as though it was never there. It wouldn’t want to interfere.
I see this here, at Tim Ho Wan; I see it in the green glass dumplings at Sai Yung Kee, which LOOK fat and substantial, but melt all the same; I see it at Mak’s Noodle, a no-nonsense diner where the only hint to its fame is the laminated newspaper write-ups stuck under the glass of the tables (and the presence of a branch at the Peak Galleria, but I don’t know that yet).
Mak’s Noodle does a lot of things right other than the magical disappearing wonton wrapper. Its saltwater prawn dumpling/pork-wood ear mushroom wonton/egg noodle soup tastes enough like the soups I had in American-Chinese restaurants all throughout my childhood (but not since) to make me feel familiar with it, but tastes dissimilar enough to feel like an adventure. The skinny clumps of egg noodles, for example, are made fresh with duck eggs, and are a departure from those tangled nothings you find dried in grocery stores. And the broth, said to be made from flounder, pork bones, and dried shrimp, goes so far beyond the normal weakly five-spiced chicken/MSG water as to be a different species entirely.
The tiny bowl disappears too fast. I’d been waiting all morning for it to open, erroneously assuming Hong Kongers eat noodle soup for breakfast just as the Vietnamese and Cambodians do, opening their pho, hu tieu, kuy teav, and nom banh chok stalls as early as 6am. But Mak’s opens at 11, leaving me wandering through the bizarre K11 Art Mall with my stomach growling as I observe blocky birds flying through the entry way, fluorescent mosaic exit doors, and graffitied understairwells. I keep out of the rain under building-sized plastic shower curtains and, while still lukewarm on Hong Kong as a whole, wish we museumed our malls like this.
II.
“Is that… gold?” I ask incredulously as I use the end of a chopstick to lift the tiny, but unmistakable sparkle away from its off-purple base pile of paste.
The concerned but smiling face above me inclines towards the paste. “You should try that before you mix it. Just to make sure you like it.”
“The crab paste?” I know it’s crab paste, because I read the menu. I already know I like crab paste. But to accommodate him, I taste the crab paste. “Mmm. I like it. But… is that…?”
“Good!” he exclaims as he glides off towards the end of the miniscule bar to grab another customer’s tray of soup, which may or may not also feature a tiny speck of gold leaf atop a mountain of crab paste.
The bowl in front of me looks tangentially like the ramen I’m used to, but for the gold leaf and the fact that the broth is bleeding black from a shot of squid ink. Nobody thinks the fact that there is gold in the soup is weird, and upon further reflection, neither should I, given that I’m in Hong Kong, a city which appears to have more people than square feet and more jewelry stores than people.
My Kowloon hostel sat on a block with at least seven of them, several of them clones, despite the congested apartment blocks rising from those ground floors where people all lived jumbled on top of one another, their incense wafting into each other’s windows, the laundry on their lines fluttering against one another’s, their drying foodstuffs clogging the hallways, and their elevators sagging and clunking with illegal loads. Where are the people who are keeping these jewelry stores in business?
The gold leaf is decoration, of course, like gold anything, and goes down without comment or fanfare. The ramen, similarly, is more pomp than substance. While the squid ink bleeds dramatically, oil-like, into the pork bone broth, the whole thing tastes vaguely of iron. I muse in the background of my bites that I shouldn’t have mixed in the crab paste, that I should have eaten the whole pile of it in one mouthful.
The whole time I’m eating, the waiter and I are having a spirited conversation about what the best countries in the world to live in are (him: Germany; me: Taiwan) that takes a left turn into autism when he asks what I do. We speak easily. But when he asks me whether I like my bowl, I turn shy. “It’s interesting!” I say, as though that isn’t code for “Please don’t make me state an unequivocal opinion!”
“I can tell,” he replies, but I, for one, can’t tell whether he’s saying he can tell I like it or can tell I’m lying.
“Good!” he exclaims as he glides off towards the end of the miniscule bar to grab another customer’s tray of soup, which may or may not also feature a tiny speck of gold leaf atop a mountain of crab paste.
The bowl in front of me looks tangentially like the ramen I’m used to, but for the gold leaf and the fact that the broth is bleeding black from a shot of squid ink. Nobody thinks the fact that there is gold in the soup is weird, and upon further reflection, neither should I, given that I’m in Hong Kong, a city which appears to have more people than square feet and more jewelry stores than people.
My Kowloon hostel sat on a block with at least seven of them, several of them clones, despite the congested apartment blocks rising from those ground floors where people all lived jumbled on top of one another, their incense wafting into each other’s windows, the laundry on their lines fluttering against one another’s, their drying foodstuffs clogging the hallways, and their elevators sagging and clunking with illegal loads. Where are the people who are keeping these jewelry stores in business?
The gold leaf is decoration, of course, like gold anything, and goes down without comment or fanfare. The ramen, similarly, is more pomp than substance. While the squid ink bleeds dramatically, oil-like, into the pork bone broth, the whole thing tastes vaguely of iron. I muse in the background of my bites that I shouldn’t have mixed in the crab paste, that I should have eaten the whole pile of it in one mouthful.
The whole time I’m eating, the waiter and I are having a spirited conversation about what the best countries in the world to live in are (him: Germany; me: Taiwan) that takes a left turn into autism when he asks what I do. We speak easily. But when he asks me whether I like my bowl, I turn shy. “It’s interesting!” I say, as though that isn’t code for “Please don’t make me state an unequivocal opinion!”
“I can tell,” he replies, but I, for one, can’t tell whether he’s saying he can tell I like it or can tell I’m lying.
