Note: I’ve put up nearly all of my Hong Kong photos in a public album on Facebook.

The view of Hong Kong’s skyline from the 29th floor of a Kowloon skyscraper is almost enough to distract a man from his crispy glazed eel, fish skin salad, and lamb dumplings.

On my way to Hong Kong, I flew through San Francisco and enjoyed an aerial view of the Golden Gate Bridge, probably the most beloved piece of architecture in America. What we love about the Golden Gate (and I’m stealing this idea from Christopher Alexander) is not just the bridge itself, but the fact that it takes an already beautiful natural landscape and improves it.

Fifteen hours later, I swiped my Octopus card and stepped onto the Star Ferry.

The Star Ferry carries passengers across Victoria Harbor, between Hong Kong Island (think Manhattan) and the Kowloon peninsula (Brooklyn). Locals say “Hong Kong side” and “Kowloon side.” The ride takes five minutes, a ticket costs about 30 cents, and you will absolutely freak.

Recipe for a world-class skyline: Take one island. Add at least a million people. Add money. Bake a few decades.

That’s how you build New York, Singapore, or Vancouver. Okay, downtown Vancouver is a peninsula, but a peninsula is just an island with codependency issues. It’s also how you build Hong Kong, and even if you’ve lived in the city your whole life and slaver over skyline photos like centerfolds, you’ve never seen anything like Hong Kong Island. Its north shore is as exuberantly vertical as Yao Ming, and after fourteen hours of airplane food, it looks not unlike a waiter holding up the city on a platter.

So I wandered, hungry, through the nighttime streets of Kowloon. I passed a Disney-like courtyard featuring a massive statue of a teddy bear. Hong Kong has a predilection for ostentatious and aggressively cute public art, and this was my first taste. I walked past anti-Falun Gong propaganda banners and enough neon to bring 24-hour daylight to a small town.

Hong Kong is a walking city. Its subway system is excellent, but I mostly used it to travel beneath the harbor between the Kowloon and Hong Kong sides. I walked up through Tsim Sha Tsui (aka TST), the nightlife district that affords further luscious views of the skyline, and passed hundreds of restaurants, mostly Cantonese but also Shanghainese, Western, fusion food, Indian, southeast Asian.

Just north of TST is the Jordan neighborhood, where I rented a windowless guest room at Pak Lok Mansions. The word “mansion” has somehow inverted itself in east Asia, where it means a room or apartment that doesn’t require a long-term lease. My room, which I secured through Airbnb, was clean, tiny, and boring, with an in-room shower and toilet, for $40/night.

Over on Temple Street, just west of Kowloon’s main north-south boulevard, Nathan Road, is a daily night market that opens in the late afternoon and runs until after midnight. Stalls offer souvenirs, textiles, wallets, cooking utensils, stationery, and incense. Near the south end of the market is a small street food district. At one intersection, competing spicy crab restaurants spill out into the street. I’d like to think of myself as the kind of person who, upon arriving in an unfamiliar city, would sit down with locals and patiently dismantle a whole spicy crab. I am not. I kept walking and had dinner at a chain restaurant.

This is no great surrender, honestly. Chains in Asia fulfill the role of chain restaurants everywhere: they’re inexpensive, approachable, reliable, and specialize in some aspect of the local cuisine. What Asian chains add to the equation is really good food. I confirmed this calculus at an outlet of the Tai Hing chain with a plate of “five-star” roast pork, rice, and “healthy vegetable.” The healthy vegetable was Chinese broccoli (gai lan) Hong Kong’s favorite vegetable, steamed until its juicy stalks turned crisp-tender and drizzled with oyster sauce. The roast pork belly, served bone-in at room temperature, had crackly and slightly sticky skin.

I intended to limit myself to mostly Cantonese food in HK, but with no one to lash me to the mast and alluring restaurants of all descriptions, I strayed. At San Xi Lou, on the seventh floor of a Hong Kong-side high-rise, I ate the most perfect Sichuanese food: smashed cucumber salad, ma po tofu, and pickled red turnip in chile oil. The chile oil had been cooked just shy of burning, and the cubes of crunchy vegetable were well-oiled, red and smoky, chile-hot and temperature-cold. Afterwards I rode a vintage double-decker tram along Des Voeux Road until lured out by banner with a cute polar bear advertising Hokkaido-Yo frozen yogurt at Circle K. January in Hong Kong is temperate, a lot of 65°F days, not too cold for frozen yogurt.

One morning I walked up Cotton Tree Drive to the Peak Tram station and caught one of the first vintage red funicular cars of the day to the top of Victoria Peak. The Peak is a geographic feature whose existence is hard to believe, even when you’ve seen it up close: a mountain smack in the middle of downtown Hong Kong, bristling with houses that grow fancier and more Beverly Hills-like the higher you climb. The Peak itself frames the skyline. “You think you’re so tall?” it says to the assortment of skyscrapers by I.M. Pei and his ilk. “Daddy’s home.”

The tram has been ferrying passengers from the foothills to the 1800-foot summit of the Peak since 1926, and it has the appeal, and the click-clack soundtrack, of a classic wooden rollercoaster. I’ve ridden a funicular in Japan, but this one is faster, and the track curves sharply a couple of times on the way to the top. At the summit, if it’s evening you’re treated to that famous view of Hong Kong glowing at night. In the morning, you get Hong Kong cloaked in smog.

From the summit, I hiked down a paved trail, past many vigorous-looking elderly Chinese people (and bedraggled tourists and expatriate fitness nuts) hiking up. About halfway down I met up with the Mid-Levels Escalator, the world’s longest escalator complex, which runs downhill in the morning and uphill the rest of the day.

This is travel writing practice for me. Is this interesting? Do you want to hear more?

Iris and I have been working on this cockamamie theory based on the work of a dead philosopher.

Our theory is inspired by Rawls’s veil of ignorance. The Veil of Ignorance is a classic philosophical thought experiment discussed in every Philosophy 101 class and then on into the night by stoned undergrads. It goes like this: say you could choose to be born into any society on Earth, but you can’t decide what social class (or race, or ethnicity, or level of intelligence) you’ll end up in. Which society would you choose? Which would you avoid? The answers to these questions can, per Rawls, tell us which societies and policies are more just.

Well, that was heavy. The restaurant version of the veil of ignorance goes like this: a teleporter has been invented. You only get to use it once. It has a dial that lets you select a country (or maybe a city; we haven’t worked out the details yet), and a big red button. Push the button and you’re zapped into a restaurant in the selected country, with enough local currency to cover your meal. The catch, of course, is that you don’t get to decide which restaurant.

Which country would you choose? The correct answer is Japan. I can’t promise you won’t be sent to a Japanese McDonald’s, but the probability is low.

What if we made it cities instead of countries? You could do a lot worse than Hong Kong. Before coming here, I made a list of restaurants I wanted to try, and I’ve been to several of them, but I’ve also just been wandering into places that look promising, and I haven’t been burned yet. I walked past a little Shanghainese chain a few times and finally had dinner there tonight, and the soup dumplings were terrific.

Where would you set the dial? I think it’s a fun experiment, because it leads you to come up with a list that looks quite different from where you’d most like to go and eat, guidebook in hand. The USA certainly has the widest variety of great food in any country–but would you take your chance on it? Not me. I suspect Spain would outrank France and Italy, and some South American countries rarely on any foodie’s radar would do quite well.

Whole swaths of the globe remain foreign to me, so I have little sense of how, say, Mexico or India or Israel or Lebanon would rank. And I realize there is no objective measure of what constitutes a good or bad restaurant, but come on: I think everyone can agree that Sweden will rank high on the scale of social justice but not as high on the scale of restaurant awesomeness. (There, if that doesn’t get me in trouble…)

Am I on to something here or just wrapping my food prejudices in a pseudo-philosophical dreamcoat?

Here’s another brief dispatch from Hong Kong.

This morning, despite an intense craving for thick toast, I resolved to get some street food for breakfast, so I walked over to the cooked food hawker center on Temple Street where I’d seen people eating before sunrise.

I stepped inside a dim covered area and up to a stall, seen above, where an assortment of fresh ingredients sat ready to be pressed into service at the customer’s whim. I was (sorry!) briefly reminded of Subway. This is only two blocks off bustling Nathan Road, thick with tourists, but nobody here spoke English and there were no other Westerners.

The place specialized in jook (aka congee, okayu, rice porridge, 粥), a popular breakfast throughout Asia, and I ordered by pointing and smiling and shrugging a lot. The cook put a few slices of raw fish into a bowl, ladled in the porridge, and garnished it with scallions, whole Spanish peanuts, and shredded ginger. I added a bit of hot sauce at the table. It was more than I could finish, the price was about US$1.50, and it was very good, especially any bite with a peanut in it.

Do you have any memorable breakfasts while traveling? I’d like to hear about them.

Hey, folks! I’m in Hong Kong for a couple of days. Here’s a brief report.

At home in Seattle, Laurie drinks black tea with milk. I drink green tea. Neither of us will go near the other’s tea. She thinks green tea tastes like leftover water from boiling spinach. I think milky black tea is for English grannies. (I have nothing against English grannies except as culinary role models.)

In Hong Kong, however, I’m drinking milky tea several times a day and loving it. It’s called milk tea, and the way it’s made is preposterous. As I understand it: First you brew some very strong black tea, boiling the tea leaves for several minutes until you have an inky, astringent liquor, then strain it through a fine mesh cloth and mix it with heated evaporated milk. Sugar is optional; I skip it. Milk tea is deceptive: it looks like cafe au lait but is smooth, strong, and astringent. It would freak out an English granny.

I had my first mug of milk tea at a restaurant called Australia Dairy Company, a Hong Kong-style teahouse with no shrimps on the barbie. The tea came with a breakfast set consisting of scrambled eggs, macaroni soup with ham strips, and thick toast. The latter can take many forms but in this case was two slices of crustless toast glued together with a layer of melted butter. (Peanut butter is also popular.) None of this was any better than it sounds, and the service was neglectful, but the milk tea was wonderful.

My plan was to have one classic Hong Kong fusion breakfast and then dedicate my other mornings to rice and noodles and dim sum, but the following morning, I had a craving for more thick toast and ended up at a chain restaurant that sounds like a brand of condom: Maxim’s MX. It’s a cafeteria-style place where, for about US$3, I got more thick toast and milk tea, this time with a fried egg, a slice of ham, and a bowl of rice vermicelli soup topped with seasoned ground pork. It was good enough to wipe away the memory of macaroni soup.

Asian chain restaurants are the greatest. You can spend time on Chowhound hunting down the very best pork bun or ramen or wonton noodles, or you can go to a chain restaurant and eat a pretty-good version of what you’re after, without waiting on line or paying tourist prices. American chains are fast, cheap, and not very good; Asian chains complete the trifecta. I quite enjoyed the crispy roast pork belly at the Tai Hing chain, which I ordered with rice and “healthy vegetable”: steamed gai lan with oyster sauce. Gai lan, also known as Chinese broccoli, is HK’s favorite vegetable, sold from huge mounds at streetside vegetable stalls and in plastic bags at urban supermarkets like Wellcome and ParkNShop. I’ve seen many ParkNShop locations; none has offered parking.

These little supermarkets are wonderful. The Wellcome store down my street is in a basement and is much smaller than an American convenience store but sells enough appealing fresh ingredients to make me wish I had a kitchen.

Now, I’m off to have dinner in a building notorious for murders, electrical code violations, and smelly backpackers.

Toodles,
Matthew

A couple of weeks ago, as kids often do, Iris pulled a surprise. It all started with 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne pepper.

Laurie made classic American tacos for dinner, the kind you may have heard about on a recent Spilled Milk episode, and she made homemade taco meat from the Cook’s Illustrated recipe. That recipe includes a bit of cayenne pepper, which I usually leave out so as not to singe the tender palate of my wimpy child. You’d think after 16 years of marriage Laurie would have developed the ability to telepathically intuit my recipe modifications, but this is not the case, so she included the cayenne.

“Hey, these are spicy,” complained Iris. “Why did you make them spicy?” Then she ate four tacos. It was a shot-for-shot remake of the time she ate two spicy enchiladas before she turned one.

Since the taco incident, Iris has requested spicy tacos as her pick of the week. She goes around saying, “I love spicy food.” See, it’s true what they say: if you repeatedly serve a kid a food you want them to try, eventually they’ll dig in. It only takes seven years.

Anyway, Iris’s timing is good, because I’m in love with Fuchsia Dunlop’s new cookbook, Every Grain of Rice. Unlike Dunlop’s two previous Chinese cookbooks, which focused on Sichuanese and Hunanese cuisine, this one is an eclectic collection of recipes. But it’s the most inspiring recipe collection I’ve ever seen between two covers. I’ve cooked over a dozen recipes from it so far; nearly all are winners, and nearly all contain either hot oil or Sichuanese hot bean paste (doubanjiang).

I hate being told what to do, too, but hot oil is one of those ingredients that you simply have to make yourself; the commercial stuff is lousy. Luckily, making it is easy, because hot oil is simply any kind of neutral oil infused with spicy dried red chiles. You can use crushed red pepper like you’d find at a pizza joint. You can crush any kind of dried red pepper you find at an Asian supermarket, or use Mexican chile de arbol. Dunlop, however, recommends Korean chile powder (gochugaru), and I happened to have a sack in my freezer. I heated soybean oil with the chile powder and a bit of crushed ginger and sesame seeds, and a few minutes later I had an intensely red, fiery oil to use in recipes or just drizzle on noodles. It’s good in the fridge for several weeks, but I used it up long before that, and now I need to make more.

In the US, the fava bean will likely never shake off its association with Hannibal Lecter. Every spring, I bring home the leathery pods from the farmers market and enlist my family for help in the endless process of preparing them: peel off the outer pods, blanch the beans, slip off the inner jackets, then saute in olive oil. What looked like a generous pound of beans turns out to be a stingy pile of green ingots, but the flavor is worth it. This happens once each spring, and then I forget about favas until the following year.

Aside from cannibalism, then, fava beans are a symbol of the Alice Waters style of local, organic, European-inspired, don’t-mess-with-the-ingredients cooking. In Sichuanese cuisine, however, favas are eaten daily in the form of doubanjiang, and someone else has done all the hard work for you.

Most versions, including the bestselling Lee Kum Kee (which is available in many Western supermarkets), are made with soybeans, and they’re good, but the fava bean version is better: more complex, more of a fermented character. To find the real stuff, I went to Viet Wah, a Vietnamese grocery in Seattle’s International District, where I faced off against no less than three dozen different chile pastes. Eventually I found exactly one that was made in China and contained fava beans (billed on the label as broad beans). Here’s the one I bought:

I asked about it online, and it turns out (thanks to @dianalesaux on Twitter) that this is Sichuan hot pot base. It has added ginger and garlic, which plain doubanjiang doesn’t.

No matter. It’s terrific stuff, and I used it last night to make one of my all-time favorite recipes, Dry-Fried Chicken, from Dunlop’s earlier book Land of Plenty. It’s a recipe I’ve made in the past for me and Laurie when Iris is out clubbing, or whatever eight-year-olds do out on the town. Last night, however, Laurie was out and I found a couple of chicken thighs in the freezer, so I made this recipe, which consists of cubes of chicken cooked far longer than necessary in peanut oil and doubanjiang until the hot bean paste becomes a crust on the chicken and the meat itself takes on a pleasantly chewy texture. As the dish finished sizzling on the stove, I tasted a chicken chunk and said, “Whew! This is spicy.”

Iris looked unnerved, but she ate a ton of chicken, drank two glasses of water, and said, “Dada, you have got to make this again.”

So I’m going to need more doubanjiang. My friend Marc Schermerhorn just got back from a cooking class in Chengdu, Sichuan, and I asked him what kind to get. We found a sketchy-looking website selling all sorts of chile pastes and split and order of two kilos of what Marc believes is the stuff he used in Sichuan. Yes, two kilos. Marc is skeptical of my ability (not to mention his own) to use up a kilo of chile paste, but I have a pint-sized secret weapon.