One of my favourites: Wan Chai

We live in Central Hong Kong – behind us is Victoria Peak, to the west is Sheung Wan and to our east is my favourite part of Hong Kong, the district of Wan Chai.

Wan Chai is a great mix of everything Hoingkongish. It comes with the shopping centres which this city is known for, but also creates a link between this city’s western and eastern communities. While Central has a plethora of British pubs, and Kowloon (the portion of Hong Kong which sits on the Chinese mainland) has very few, Wan Chai manages to host the most mixed crowd you’ll find here – local Cantonese, local British-sounding folks, tourists, long-term residents, people who work in banks (from executives to tea servers), those creepy old men with young Filipino girlfriends and so on, and it is because of what this district offers.

Although it is peppered with 24-hour strip clubs and a plethora of drinking establishments, the real charm of Wan Chai lies in its small cheap restaurants called cha chaan teng (which loosely translates to “tea restaurant”) where great Asian food can be found for only a few Hong Kong dollars escaping one’s wallet. There is also western food available but it is mostly of the chain variety – Subway, McDonalds etc.

Cha chaan teng generally look a bit grubby and cramped, but I am yet to be disappointed by one. There’s no fucking around when it comes to eating in these spots – no one has hung fancy tapestries all over the place or has a leatherbound menu. The menu is either a laminated piece of paper or a giant poster stuck to the wall – with a whole lot of complicated combinations (always in Cantonese, sometimes in English, often in a hodge-podge of both) which can allegedly save you money.

Usually there is enough English on the menu to work out what is going to come, but often a little understanding of how cheap restaurants work here is required – and I am not expert yet. Do not expect a vegetarian meal. Even if you order a meal without meat, it has probably been cooked in some sort of animal fat. Those of you that hate fish? Some random dishes are cooked in XO sauce. In fact, there is one cha chaan tang restaurant we often pass in Central which keeps beef brisket and some kind of sea sponge thing warm in the same pot. If a dish says “offal” avoid it like the plague - it means entrails (you may know it as innards). Outside these few points, one can eat great food for not much money.

Cha chaan teng have sparked off similar kinds of restaurants – same set up, different food. And our discovery in Wan Chai this last weekend – this post’s Serious Travel Tip – was a Filipino eatery set up like a tea restaurant in Jaffe Street, right near Wan Chai station called Mang Ambo. We had no idea what Filipino food would taste like, but for $30 each we got a grilled beef kebab (sosatie, not schwarma) with some amazing (kind of like basting, but with something awesome added) sauce on it, two kinds of beef curry, chicken and beans cooked in a peanut satay sauce, and two portions of steamed rice. If I was more of a foodie, I would be able to tell you what was in this delicious concoction of morsels. All I can tell you is that the food was superb, the waiter/chef/maitre de spoke English and talked us through another set of (labyrinthly-construed) combos which bypassed the usual guesswork involved. And did I mention that the food was good?

A stroll around the district afterwards revealed the largest and cheapest sweet-shop which I have seen in Hong Kong – a splendour of candy, chocolate, little fragments of goodness all over the place just waiting to be forced through my greedy jaws. Cafes, furniture shops, knick-knacks, some dodgy clubs and allsorts lined the streets all the way back to Queens Road before we began strolling home.

And towards Central, the roads became cleaner, the shops became classier, the buildings got higher and shiner, there was English everywhere and we couldn't afford things anymore. I missed Wan Chai from when we were about thirty metres out of it...

If you visit Hong Kong, Wan Chai is easy enough to get to. From the mainland you can take underground trains (MTR) to Central or Hong Kong Station and then change to the Island Line (the blue one) to go two stops to Wan Chai. A ferry from Tsim Sha Tsui will also bring you to Central and if you don’t fancy trains, trams or buses, it is only about a fifteen minute walk eastwards to Wan Chai, down Queens Road.

PS. Also available in Wan Chai: western egg.

Foraging for food

People filled me up with this wank that Hong Kong was this totally Western city that somehow wound up next to China. Well, let me tell you, get that right out of your head. This is an Asian city - the premier language is most certainly not English (although the language of business is, and all signs are in English and Cantonese) and many Hongkongers only know a few useful phrases.

The most noticeable Asian aspect of this city, though, is the food. There is a McDonalds somewhere in the city, and the odd Western takeway like Subway, but for the most part it is Chinese. I have eaten more noodles in the last fortnight than I have in the previous 27 years of my life, and I've taught myself to use chopsticks - the excuse of being left-handed which I've used throughout my life doesn't fly here.

Restaurants in Hong Kong are pretty expensive, even by Cape Town standards. Pizza is excessively pricey (you won't find one for under R100, and that will be for a small margherita) as is steak, probably due to the fact that everything in Hong Kong needs to be imported - I cannot fathom where would be enough land for farms. Or even just one cow, to be completely honest. It does mean, though, that groceries are also damn expensive, particularly in the central part of town where we live. The South African rand is about 10% stronger than the Hong Kong dollar, so two pieces of lean chicken breast, costing about HK$50 at a Pick n Pay type of store (called Park n Shop, believe it or not) are about R45. So it's almost worth eating out as much as we do.

Every kind of restaurant you can think of is here. Thai, Italian, British which you can easily browse if you're prepared to pay for it.

Our personal restaurants of choice are what translates to "tea shops", called yum cha in Cantonese, if my Wikipedia browsing is anything to go by. This is where it seems Chinese people eat - I have never seen a non-Chinese patron in one of them, other than the two of us. We started going to them less for tea and more for the amount of money they charge for food - which keeps our bank accounts happy - but the quality of food served is also decent. There are stupidity traps though. The first time we went to a tea shop, we were served tea as we sat down. On our second visit to one of these shops, the waitress plonked two cups of hot water down on the table. In the spirit of trying to be Chinese, we sipped on it, assuming it aided digestion or some such shit, until we saw the table next to us putting their cutlery into it. We very quickly pretended we hadn't been so stupid, and ordered from the menu, which, in these kinds of restaurants, is noodles with a meat or soup prepared in some fashion. I find these tea shops are the best place for chicken dishes, but there is always pork (I think it's the most popular meat here) and beef on the menu, and you're looking at about HK$30 to HK$50 per meal. A lot of meals here are served in soup - like sweet and hot pork with noodles (which could conceivably stand on its own, but is served) in a bowl of soup. I assumed that sweet and hot pork was a mistranslation of sweet and sour, but no, they really meant sweet and hot, as the burning in my mouth testified.

On that note, there is a restaurant which all visitors will be taken to called Chilli Haven (we only noticed the name of it afterwards). We were walking around looking for a spot to eat when we came upon this cute little restaurant with affordable prices. In we innocently went and ordered two Tsingtao's (Chinese beer) while we pondered the menu. The beers were served in bowls, and I'm still unsure as to whether this is some ancient Chinese custom, or the staff were snickering around the corner, watching two morons lap up beer from a vessel ill-suited to the purpose. Our waitress, a seemingly innocent twenty something woman (but was actually a totally psychotic bitch) recommended we order the dumplings, a speciality of the restaurant. We took that, some peri-peri chicken dish and a dose of sweet and sour pork. Well, it tasted like these dumplings were grown in an Indian chilli plantation, cooked in gunpowder and were then pissed on by fire ants, and we put our brave faces on as we schlepped through them, wiping sweat from brow and trying to keep the limpid snot from escaping our noses as tears poured out of our eyes. During this process of trying to remember to breathe, I somehow managed to touch my eye with a sauce-covered finger - it caught fire and melted a little bit before I managed to save it by putting an ice-cube beneath my eyelid. We don't really know what the other food tasted like because our mouths were on fire until the following day, when we were distracted by the pain of, well, let's just say the food was digested in a very heated manner.

The one last and most important adjustment we have been forced to make in a culinary sense, is the staggering price of liquor in bars, compared to in grocery shops. In the 7-11, a beer is about HK$8, so not too far off what we pay in South Africa. However, a beer in a bog-standard bar in Soho will knock you back about HK$60 which is even more than you get schmucked for in a London pub. Wine, oir tipple of choice back in SA, is prohibitively expensive here - the cheapest bottle we can find (so our regular selection) is from Chile and costs about HK$45 - double the cost of a Zesty White. So we've had to revert to the amber drink of men - beer. Yes, glorious beer. In fact I am sipping on one right now while I type this.

And not one menu has had dog or cat on it. I am very disappointed.


ERRATA: In the post I mentioned that Tsingtao was a Japanese beer. It's actually Chinese. It's been changed.