Hong Kong Food Guide

Hong Kong doesn’t wear the mantle of Asia’s most cosmopolitan city lightly. Hong Kong’s restaurants serve almost every style of Western cuisine, French, Italian, Greek, Mexican, German and American as they cater to the city’s large expat population and its own peripatetic people. Asian restaurants serve the very best of authentic traditional and contemporary Indian, Lebanese, Burmese, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian and Malaysian cuisines.

But what Hong Kong does best is Chinese regional cuisine – in all styles right from Cantonese to Hunan, Beijing, Sichuan, Shanghai and Hakka. It is, indeed, the best place to sample Chinese gourmet delicacies – Shark’s Fin, Bird’s Nest, Java Sparrows, Wood Ear mushrooms, Beijing Duck, Green Pigeons – or grab a bite from the many street vendors cooking up a storm every couple of metres. Chinese "wines" are distilled from rice, millet and other grains, flavoured with herbs and flowers and promise to be a panacea for more than one ailment!

Dim sum is a uniquely Cantonese dish steamed and served in bamboo baskets and eaten either as breakfast or at lunchtime. Dim sum can be ordered in either specialty dim sum restaurants or bought from hawkers. Honkong also has a variety of dumpling delicacies which are worth a try- Har Gau consists of a steamed shrimp dumpling while, Siu mai is a steamed diced meat dumpling flavoured with egg or saffron- bith are worth a try. More daring people might like to have a go of the Cheung fan, a steamed rice flour roll often flavoured with barbequed beef, pork or srimp.
But any Hong Kong gourmet experience is incomplete without a visit to a traditional teahouse – an outing that delights the aesthetic sense as well as the palate.