Hong Kong: BBQ & Junk Food
Hong Kong: BBQ
Last Saturday I spent the day at Above Second gallery in Sai Ying Pun. My friend Minh teaches an awesome kid’s art class there and we prepped for it by making papier mache pinatas. If you’re ever in Sai Ying Pun, stop by Above Second – they currently have an exhibition called Small Victories up, it was produced in collaboration with one of my favorite design websites – booooooom.com.
After a couple hours of covering balloons in wet newspaper, we started to get hungry and Minh suggested we grab some food at a nearby restaurant simply called, “BBQ”. With our friends Jasper & Larry in tow, we headed on over. BBQ is a really interesting place. It’s totally bare-bones, a little greasy, and all the waitresses have fucking amazing asymmetrical haircuts! BBQ’s menu is an amazing mish-mash of Japanese yakitori skewers, Cantonese seafood classics, and elegant interpretations of Western dishes. A really fantastic combination. The dishes range from $12 – $50HKD, and the portions are huge – so beware of over-ordering!
The menu at BBQ is pretty vague, listing dishes simply by what they are. No fancy descriptions. You order from a little checklist, and I think the checklists are color coded or something. We let Jasper take the reigns and he ordered up 17 dishes for us to sample. I love these people – they really take it from “dinner” to “competitive eating.” We started with giant clams on the half shell – cooked over the grill with green onions. The seafood in HK is so fresh… these babies were sweet and tender and cooked in their own clammy juices.
Of course we had to have razor clams as well..
The lamb chops were the star of the entire meal. After munching on things like grilled clams and squid balls on a skewer, I definitely did not expect a dish of perfectly seared-on-the-outside, pink-on-the-inside lamb chops to arrive on our table. They were seasoned gently with some assortment of spices (fennel? cumin? magic?!) and served up with a dallop each of yellow mustard and mint pesto. Genius. Just pure genius. They come four to an order – we had two!
The grilled oysters here are amazing. They are cooked in the half shell with shredded cheese, minced onion, green onions and then topped with a bit of tobiko. BBQ really has their cooking system on point. While the clams or oysters are on the grill, the chef will gently lift each morsel of bivalve goodness and turn it over in the shell, maximizing flavor seepage! Not only that, but the chef also takes the juice from one clam and uses it to baste the next. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen such effort go into preparing food – it’s the real difference between Cantonese food in HK and in Shanghai.
BBQ also serves up your typical items on a stick – quail eggs, various seafood balls, chicken hearts, a gigantic portion of super tender beef tongue, eggplant with bonito. Also a few “HK-style” yakitori items, one of my new favorites being BBQ’s grilled gai lan (chinese broccoli). The gai lan soaks up all the smokey flavors from the grill and transforms from a humble green to something really spectacular.
17 dishes later, we had crammed every speck of food on our plates down our throats, yet we were still in search of dessert. A nearby 7-11 offered the perfect solution – ovaltine ice cream cones!
Enjoy!
BBQ / BBQ2 – 美食店
129 Third Street at Pok Fu Lam Road
Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong
西環西營盤第三街129-號地下B號舖
+852 2548-9880
Above Second Gallery
31 Eastern Street,
Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong
+852 3483-7950
Hong Kong: Random Food Finds
Whenever I go to Hong Kong I get a little crazy about the food. I can’t even make it down the block without ogling every edible item in sight. And there are a lot of edibles in sight.
Here is a mix plate of bean curd/wheat gluten goodies I picked up at a veggie restaurant in Sai Ying Pun. The mix plate costs $25HKD and you get a little bit of everything – regular wheat gluten (my fav), curry flavored gluten, sweet and sour gluten, fried bean curd sheet rolls, and various other bean goodies, all of which have different textures. Some are soft and silky, others are firm and smooth like the white of an egg. All worth a try!
After watching my friend Lindsay’s food films, I was really itching to try a 7-11 hotdog. Actually, I want to try all the weird food they offer at 7-11. But thats for another time. You buy these refrigerated and use the microwave to heat it up. Verdict: not bad!
I took a quick trip to the island of Cheung Chao (長洲) for some E&E – exploration and eating. Cheung Chao is only about 35 minutes away by fast ferry, which you can catch from Pier 5 in Central. Like Lamma and Sai Kung, its got a bunch of beach-front seafood restaurants offering up classic Cantonese dishes. Cheung Chao is a really nice place to visit, its got lots of winding lanes, cute boutiques, and beaches and hiking trails. So much to explore!
There are also lots of street eats – we tried this grilled dried squid snack basted with hot sauce. Delicious! Apparently there is a nightly street food market at the pier when the sun goes down – can’t wait to go back to check it out.
Enjoy!
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