Category Archives: Food

Stuff about food in general

Cheapo Steak Dinner in Tai Po

No pictures – in no small part because I’m way behind in processing photos on paid jobs and don’t want to add to my workload.

Mostly when we’ve gone out at night for dinner, we head to the oldest part of Tai Po, near the famous Tai Po Hui wet market – sometimes to the cooked food hall in the market but more often to the plethora of restaurants in the surrounding streets. Tonight we were itching to get out and my gf said she didn’t want Chinese food. There’s not too many of those in the older part of town.

So we headed towards Tai Po Center with the idea of checking out the options in Tai Po’s underwhelming “Mega Mall.” Walking through town, we passed a stretch of restaurants that I’d never passed at night before. All four of these places have English menus. There’s Eightlands Cafe, Jingles Oysters, Korea Inn and a place that seems to be just named Steak House, at least in English.

Their sign outside reads “Fried Steak”. Not too enticing, eh? But the place was full and there were people waiting outside to get in. The menu was in Chinese and English, with photos, and the prices were cheap – most dinner sets running around $80. So what the hell.

I mean, I already know what you’re bound to get in these places. Local beef or imported beef from China, often very fatty or gristly. But these days, Morton’s and Ruth’s Chris are a distant memory and Outback and Ruby Tuesday are a bit further away than I was in the mood to go.

My gf looked at the menu and then looked at the food on the table next to ours. One guy had what appeared to be a steak, a rather fat grilled sausage, french fries and veggies. She said that’s what she wanted. But I couldn’t find it on the menu. I saw a lot of other dishes that came with a sausage but none of the steak options.

The waitress (or perhaps the manager) came over and I pointed to the dish at the next table and asked what that was. She pulled out the daily specials menu, Chinese only. It was special “A”. So we ordered two of that. I mean, I was planning on ordering “Angus of beef” at $82 (or $102 with a king prawn on the side) but thought I’d go the easy route.

So we each got:

grilled steak, rather thin but only a tiny bit of fat and no gristle, smothered in black pepper sauce – actually I think this was better quality than you get from the Wanchai bars serving those $78 set lunches
a huge grilled sausage
mixed vegetables – peas, carrots, corn, green beans – probably frozen
choice of rice, french fries, spaghetti

The price for all of this? Try HK$48. And an extra $2 for a drink. So steak dinner for two HK$100. (That’s US$13.00) I’ve had worse.

Tai Po is great when you’re on a budget.

Hot Dog Prices in Hong Kong

I guess I’m still somewhat obsessed over this, after writing about it here and here. To be fair to Yonge Piggies, I should mention that Brat, a spot in Soho, charges similar prices for their gourmet hotdogs. They’re great, they’re relatively unique in Hong Kong, but I have never returned for a second visit because the same amount of money can buy so much more in other places.

Anyway, I passed a place in Wan Chai today and spotted this sign in their window:

Now I’m sure these are not gourmet sausages. I’m sure they’re not imported or artisanal or organic or anything like that.

But still. Yonge Piggies charges $65 for a hotdog on a bun with a variety of toppings. This joint is charging $24 for a set – a dog on a bun, some toppings and a drink.

I could see a gourmet hotdog being worth $10 more. But $40? US$5 more? For just a single sausage on a bun?

I know, I shouldn’t be so obsessed about this, I’ve got far better things to worry about.

But it tasks me.

Hong Kong Warped View – Addendum

As an addendum to my earlier post about the HK$65 hot dog, I honestly don’t think these insane prices are solely due to high rents.

First of all, restaurants in other major cities have high rents. And serve food with imported ingredients. And pay their staff much higher wages than the pitifully low Hong Kong minimum wage that most restaurant staff receive here. And this hot dog joint isn’t in Central or Soho, it’s in Sheung Wan (which is rapidly gentrifying, but still, it ain’t exactly Lan Kwai Fong).

Second, it’s not across the board in Hong Kong. Two examples I thought of:

* Subway – crappy chain, right? But every day their sub of the day is HK$19 and most of their sandwiches, whether you like ‘em or not, are under HK$40 for the six inch version. (Let’s not get into how they’re being sued in the U.S. because their footlong sandwich is only 11 inches.) Starting salaries for full time counter staff in Subway is HK$7,500 per month. That’s low, but it’s also well above the minimum wage.

* Paisano – this guy is selling huge frigging slices of pizza for HK$25. I have trouble finishing just one. He’s got 6 or 7 locations, all in high traffic/high rent areas in Central, TST, Wanchai and so on. And last year he traded in his Porsche for a brand new Ferrari. Which is proof that you can provide fair value and still make huge profits.

So I have trouble accepting the notion of a $65 hot dog based purely on the idea that their rent is high.

So the question is, who is the piggy in the cleverly named Yonge Piggies? Is it the sausage you’re buying? Or is it the owner?

Yet Another Reason the SCMP is a Joke

The SCMP feed has a thing on what they’re calling Hong Kong’s Top 100 Tables, “the definitive chief executives’ guide to the best restaurants in Hong Kong and Macau for entertaining clients.” I won’t make fun of the list as I’m sure there are some genuinely good places listed alongside some pretentious overpriced bullshit spots – I haven’t looked to see what’s on the list because frankly, I don’t care.

But that did lead me to an SCMP mini-site called Good Eating. It says right up top, “HONG KONG’S MOST COMPREHENSIVE RESTAURANT GUIDE.”

Comprehensive, eh? Okay. So I check their listings for Tai Po. They have 2, count ‘em, 2!, restaurants listed.

By comparison, Open Rice lists 712 restaurants for Tai Po.

I know. “Most comprehensive” is just a marketing slogan. It’s a mistake to think it would have any semblance to reality. Nevertheless, I don’t think I’ll be using Good Eating as a reference any time soon.

Then again, I suppose this bit of hyperbole is mild compared to what you’ll see on some of Hong Kong’s food blogs. You know, those blogs that also consider themselves “comprehensive” even though they never review places that require traveling 15 minutes beyond Central or meals under $500 a head (and are usually comped for those meals and somehow neglect to mention that in their glowing “reviews”).

How Hong Kong Warps Your View of Things

Hong Kong blogger Razlan has a review of Yonge Piggies, a new hot dog joint in Sheung Wan that replaces a rather average Italian joint. If I still worked in Sheung Wan, I’m sure I’d at least try this place out.

Or maybe not:

At Yonge Piggies, you have three choices of Canadian sausages – Hickory Smoked, Honey Garlic, and Picante Pepper. Each dog cost HK$65

Get that? HK$65 for a hot dog. That’s almost US$8.50. For a hot dog. Just a hot dog. With a few toppings, yeah, but just a hot dog. It’s another US$2.50 if you want a drink and some fries with it.

$8.50 for a hot dog.

And in Hong Kong, we convince ourselves that is a reasonable price. Anywhere else in the world? Maybe not so much. Except if it was made from foie gras, Kobe beef and baby glands.

Damn, I miss this place:

“Our hot dogs are tastier than filet mignon.” Last time I checked, two of the world’s best hot dogs and a drink for $4.45.

How Budweiser Became “The King of Beers”

Monty Python once had a joke that went: Why is American beer like making love in a canoe? Fucking close to water.

It turns out there’s a reason American beer is the way it is. The Serious Eats food blog has a story on the history of Budweiser beer.

Adolphus Busch, who created Budweiser in the 1870s, didn’t even like it much, calling it “dot schlop” and preferring wine instead.

Here in Asia, some people seem to view this beer as a premium import. Love it or hate it, the article is an interesting read. Check it out here.

Why So Many Chinese Have Overbites

From the NY Times review of the book Consider The Fork by Bee Wilson:

The British, on the other hand, with their abundance of firewood, went in for enormous haunches of beef spit-roasted in front of a roaring hearth. And spit-roasting entailed a universe of now defunct technologies like gravity jacks, which replaced child- or canine-powered turnspits. (There was even a dog of that name with short legs and a long body, specially bred, as Wilson puts it, to “trundle around” in a large wheel connected to the spit with a pulley.) Medieval Britons consumed the final product by clamping the meat between their incisors and tugging or cutting off the hunk that remained in their mouths with the sharp personal eating knife they carried at all times. By the 18th century, they had adopted the fork, and in changing their table manners also changed their physiognomy. Wilson cites the provocative theories of the aptly named anthropologist Charles Loring Brace to show that the overbite we consider a normal part of our anatomy is only about 200 to 250 years old. If we still used the inelegant technique Brace termed the “stuff-and-cut,” we would have an “edge-to-edge” bite like that of chimpanzees. The fossil record shows that the Chinese, who have been cutting up their food very small for centuries, developed an overbite 800 to 1,000 years earlier than Europeans.

Hong Kong Food Bloggers Never Write Bad Reviews

That’s one of the first things I was thinking while reading this hilarious takedown by the NY Times of Guy Fieri’s latest restaurant in New York.

Hong Kong food bloggers (at least most of the English language ones) are not visiting restaurants anonymously, as a paying customer might. They are generally writing their reviews based on invitations from the restaurant or tasting sessions held for the media. (I’ve heard tell that some of these bloggers actually call restaurants to ask/beg/threaten for a free meal.) However, real food critics go to restaurants anonymously so that they are treated the same as any other customer, pay for their meal, and often revisit the same spot more than once before finally writing a publishing a review. Meanwhile, the English language magazines in HK will criticize restaurants to some extent, but a one-star review is extremely rare, since they’re not about to alienate potential (or current) advertisers. About the only place that consistently published negative reviews was this guy, who stopped just over a year ago.

Anyway, Pete Wells has written this review of Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar, located in Times Square. I don’t think the review will matter to the success of the restaurant. Guy Fieri is a celebrity chef and the people who go to Times Square will be mostly star-struck tourists who’ve watched him on TV and never look at the New York Times.

Be that as it may, here are some tasty nuggets from the review, which is set as a series of questions to Fieri, starting with wondering if he’s ever actually eaten there:

Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex? When you saw the burger described as “Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, LTOP (lettuce, tomato, onion + pickle), SMC (super-melty-cheese) and a slathering of Donkey Sauce on garlic-buttered brioche,” did your mind touch the void for a minute?

Were you struck by how very far from awesome the Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders are? If you hadn’t come up with the recipe yourself, would you ever guess that the shiny tissue of breading that exudes grease onto the plate contains either pretzels or smoked almonds? Did you discern any buttermilk or brine in the white meat, or did you think it tasted like chewy air?

Why is one of the few things on your menu that can be eaten without fear or regret — a lunch-only sandwich of chopped soy-glazed pork with coleslaw and cucumbers — called a Roasted Pork Bahn Mi, when it resembles that item about as much as you resemble Emily Dickinson?

Hey, did you try that blue drink, the one that glows like nuclear waste? The watermelon margarita? Any idea why it tastes like some combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde?

Does this make it sound as if everything at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar is inedible? I didn’t say that, did I?

Is the shapeless, structureless baked alaska that droops and slumps and collapses while you eat it, or don’t eat it, supposed to be a representation in sugar and eggs of the experience of going insane?

Okay, Hong Kong food bloggers, it’s your turn.

Tremont Restaurant, NYC – Food Is Bond

While in New York, one of the things I had to do was have dinner at Tremont Restaurant, corner of West 4th and Bank Streets in the Village. The reason for this was simple – my cousin Jeremy Blutstein is the executive chef there and I was eager to try his food.

Since I only get to New York once a year and my visits are relatively brief, it’s been more than 10 years since I last saw Jeremy. In the interim, he learned to cook, worked at some places near his parents’ home in the Hamptons, spent some time under Mario Batali, and now is running the kitchen in this wonderful spot. Of course I’m biased but you can also check out the reviews on Yelp and in the Wall Street Journal. The restaurant was also a semifinalist in the Best New Restaurant category in the 2012 James Beard awards.

Tremont has a bright corner location. The large windows, high ceilings and clean interior make up for the relatively small space.

Jeremy was aware we were coming and I assume the staff also knew this – plus the cousin I went with (author Glenn Kurtz) had been there before and the staff clearly knew him. Both waitresses were extremely friendly and patient with us – but based on the reviews I’ve read and what I observed at other tables, that’s just how they are. It’s a friendly, relaxed vibe and the 3-1/2 hours we spent there flew by.

We ordered three starters – and were sent 6. Most of them were memorable – what surprised me most was that the dish I expected to like the least was probably the most memorable of the night – Truffled Polenta Croutons, with 3 kinds of mushrooms and Parmesan cheese. It may be why I didn’t get a good photo of this dish, because my expectations were so low. When I finally tasted it, my eyes popped open – but there wasn’t enough left on the plate to get a good photo. It had the strongest combination of flavors and textures of any dish on the table and I love it when caught by surprise like that.

Other starters that we had included Crispy Heritage Pork Belly (pickled radicchio, caraway, New York State apple bourbon chutney) and one of the specials that night, tuna crudo. The pork was tender and full of flavor, the tuna as you can see was as fresh as it gets with a very nice combination of flavors.

We also had braised octopus (smoked andouille sausage, fennel, preserved lemon, calabrian chile, spiced pecans) and aside from the sophisticated flavor combinations, I was knocked out by how tender the octopus was. There was also a special salad that night – sorry, I forget the list of ingredients in it.

After 6 starters, the three of us were actually feeling rather full! Jet lag was getting to my appetite as well as the glass of red wine I’d had at the start – lately red wine and I do not get along and I keep forgetting this. At any rate, at this point we ordered another starter – their take on mac and cheese (seems like every modern American restaurant in New York has to include this on the menu) – and just one main dish, seared sea scallops with crispy brussel sprouts, grapefruit, pine nuts. The scallops were perfectly cooked and a light enough dish rather than going with some of the things that I had hoped to get to, in particular the apricot glazed pork shoulder, which will have to wait till my next visit.

We took a long break at this point. I was getting my second wind and when the kitchen sent us three desserts, I didn’t complain.

This was the unexpected winner, a pear tart with rosemary gelato. Rosemary gelato? Completely blew me away. (Jeremy told me that the woman doing their desserts has a way of working with savory ingredients that’s unique and I’d have to agree.) The other two desserts weren’t shabby either:

Those donuts were amazing too!

The bill came and we were of course only charged for the items we ordered and not the other dishes that were simply sent to us. For four appetizers, one main dish, 5 or 6 glasses of wine, 3 coffees, it was an amazingly reasonable US$170. (We guessed that if we’d been charged for everything we ate, the bill would have come to at least $300 and so we tipped 20% of $300 and not $170 – the staff deserved it.)

Cousin or not, free dishes or not, take this with as many grains of salt as you want, if I lived in NYC, I know I’d be going back there many, many more times.

I’d asked Jeremy if it was okay for me to bring my camera and get some photos of him at work. I was picturing some huge kitchen with a dozen staff working away, he warned me it was a tiny space with just him and one other person and he wasn’t kidding!

So while I had this idea that I could stand in some corner and capture him as he cooked and assembled various dishes, I realized it simply wasn’t going to be practical. I grabbed a few quick photos and then got out of everyone’s way.

I really thought about this a lot since then. Look at that kitchen. It ain’t big, there’s no windows and I’m sure it’s hot as fuck in there. The restaurant does lunch 3 days a week and weekend brunch as well as dinners and I know he’s doing those day time services too. The restaurant may be small but I understand that on many nights the tables will turn 3 or 4 times. So he’s on his feet in that small space how many hours per day? Turning out 100+ dishes per day, day after day? Can you imagine how hard that is, physically? The work ethic that’s involved with that? Plus he absolutely loves what he’s doing. It seems like he ends every post he puts on Facebook with the phrase “food is bond.”

I mean, yeah, I know this is common in the restaurant industry (one reason I don’t go there myself) but it’s really uncommon in my family! I’m so impressed with the work he’s doing there and so very proud of him. Yes I’m biased but I’m convinced he’s going to be on TV and going to have his own cookbooks. And then I’ll be able to say, “I told you so.”

Food Blog Code of Ethics

From here.

FOOD BLOG CODE OF ETHICS 2.0

We understand that the moment we put anything up on the internet (a blog,restaurant reviews, recipes, videos, photography, and comments) we automatically become a publisher and therefore have the responsibility of a publisher.

We accept the responsibilities that come with publishing. We will be accountable for our actions.

We will be civil.

We will be transparent. We will disclose gifts, comps, samples, and financial relationships with specific businesses if we write about them.

We will not steal other people’s work. Other peoples’ content (writing, recipes, photos, video, illustrations) will not be taken or used without written or verbal consent from the creator of said material. If we use someone else’s material and change it for our own use (i.e. a recipe) we will give attribution to the original resource.

I’m not sure what offends me more – that certain HK food blogs regularly ignore #4 or that the food photography (often on those same blogs) is so bad. My opinion is that some people use blogs as a way to eat in more expensive restaurants for free and are willing to trade positive reviews for a free meal, consequences be damned.

Why am I so offended? I’ll tell you why. I can’t afford to spend more than a few hundred HK$ for a dinner for two very often. When I am in the mood to do so, the choices in Hong Kong can be overwhelming – we have more than 10,000 restaurants here. I’d like to turn to reviews as a guideline for where to go and what to sample. But when that reviewer has got a free meal and doesn’t disclose that – even if the food is good – and I then choose to go to that place, then I have been cheated.

That first link in point #1 is to an article on the Columbia Journalism Review website titled Everyone Eats … But That Doesn’t Make You a Food Critic. They’re talking about the U.S. and New York in particular, but much of this holds true for Hong Kong.

Food blogs cover all aspects of the city’s food scene. Some concentrate on recipes, some on chef interviews, some on greenmarkets and community-based food issues. But many are concerned, partly or fully, with reviewing restaurants. From their inception, these restaurant-reviewing blogs saw no point in adhering to the rules established by Claiborne, nor did they, in most cases, announce what the substitute rules were. Most rejected anonymity, accepting or even soliciting free food in the restaurants under review.

To accommodate the mania for quick reviews, restaurants started hosting press dinners prior to opening, called “preview meals.” Organized by publicists, and including introductions of chefs and staffs along with free food, these events were typically attended by a broad range of food writers. Eventually, professional reviewers came to attend these meals. These previews also represented a sort of subsidy by the restaurants for the publications, since the meals wouldn’t be expensed. Hosting preview dinners allowed restaurants to control the circumstances in which reviews were written.

The preview dinner became the stock-in-trade of food bloggers. Many had ambitions to make the jump to the professional ranks, and the preview dinner made a more complete review possible. Restaurants sometimes tried to forestall early reviews by declaring “soft openings” or “in previews” periods, much like Broadway plays. Restaurants also began to host “friends and family” weeks prior to opening as a way of perfecting the menu before the bloggers arrived. These gatherings, too, soon became thronged with food bloggers.

More than ever, diners could use a reliable critical guide. But where once there were a few dependable voices who reviewed restaurants based on a common set of professional standards and strategies, there is now a digital free-for-all. As with many things on the Web, this profusion of voices is often touted as a wondrous blow for democracy, a long-overdue rising up of the masses against the elitist overlords of the culinary realm. Thus the runaway popularity of sites like Chowhound and Yelp, which publishes city-specific reviews by anyone who cares to weigh in on everything from restaurants to churches, and whose motto is “Real People. Real Reviews.” I’m all for everyone having his or her say, but when it comes to cultural criticism there is a strong case to be made for professionalism and expertise.

Craig Claiborne, and those who followed him, lifted the restaurant review out of the realm of marketing and made it a public service—a job defined by professional standards and expertise. Today, despite whatever benefits come with the every-man-a-critic ethos, we are in danger of losing that public service.

Unscrupulous food bloggers in Hong Kong are crooks in my opinion.