(Action shot of Mak's Noodles being made in HK)
Greetings fellow yummylicious food lovers! Though I am currently in California, I still have quite a few more Hong Kong food pictures to post since I ate up to 4/5 meals a day while I'm there. The exciting news is that at the same time I'm eating delicious food in L.A. as well! Win-win! So today's post is on two small shabby restaurants in Hong Kong. I find it uber unfortunate that many people prefer eating at really nice restaurants instead of out at a place that can only hold 20 people at one time. Luckily I live for places that hole in the wall places- either figuratively or literally so today I'll spotlight just how awesome the following two places are. Exhibit 1: Mak's Noodles in Hong Kong.
Mak's Noodles is "THE" place to go when visiting HK. Many food critics have stopped by. Their most famous dishes are their Zha Jiang Lo Mian and Wonton Noodles. Unfortunately, when I went, I was not in the mood for Lo Mian. Box 1 is their wontons and Box 2 is their regular dumplings. Mak's always boast that back in the day they served their famous wonton noodles to Gernal Chiang Kai-shek. Their menu says that their soup base is made of powdered dried flounder, dried shrimp row and pork bones. Though people always complain of their small, stingy servings at Mak's, it's apparently done so to keep the noodles from going soggy. For the record, I think it's also because they are stingy though!
Here is an order of pork's kidney. It's steamed with soy sauce. Sounds gross but it's delicious!
Place 2 is Koon Thai in Wan Chai. We stumbled upon this lovely Thai place after being hungry and finding out the the other place we were actually looking for had closed down. But with a light up chicken head in the store, it was clear that we could not go wrong. We later learned that Koon Thai is a chain in Thailand and also has a number of stores throughout Hong Kong.
We were pretty entertained by some of the "specials" that were served here. Box 1 you can see Crocodile Meat in Soup. Intriguing I have to admit. I really wanted to try it but didn't do so. I'd imagine it'd taste something like the cheap versions of shark's fin soup. Box 2 shows you the special choice of Garlic Beard you can have. I would love garlic bread but garlic beard? I'm not too sure... Misspelled signs are always fun.
Ah! The house speciality finally arrived. Thai style Hainan Chicken Rice. At first I was skeptical since Hainan Chicken is not a Thai dish, but once we sat down at this place they had a flat screen TV with a famous food critic saying this was the dish to try! And judging from the Chicken logo, we concluded that it was our best bet and boy was it delicious. What was even more mouthwatering was the red sauce you can see in the picture above. It's this restaurant own special sauce that they sell. We were so impressed that we bought 4 bottles of it to go!
Our other dish to come out was our order of Spicy Tom Yum Gong Soup. How can you go to a Thai restaurant and not order their signature dish? Honestly we were disappointed that it didn't taste authentic but I guess the rice and sauce was already enough to surprise us since we were not planning on eating good Thai food at all in Hong Kong. The apple soda drink I got was amazing though. Crushed dried apples with soda! Yum!
Make sure not to forget small restaurants when you are eating! Happy Eatings!