(photo by wm. christman)
After five minutes of walking one of Hong Kong's market streets, the alternate language of the country is food. And as you pass rows and rows and rows of storefronts, makeshift booths and ramshackle huts, the sheer amount of edible eyecandy is physically staggering.
And that's not even counting the actual restaurants that reach out to you every 25 feet. There is literally nothing that you cannot eat here, and that is why that there is perhaps no place on earth like China when it comes to food.
...but the devil... is in Hong Kong and Tokyo for the next few weeks. What started out two years ago as a 2-3 week planned food trip to Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore (which partially resulted in the existence of this food blog) has ended up a slightly modified variant with a second trip already in the works.
In Hong Kong, we're on the self-guided "Bourdain" plan shamlessly cribbing from his No Reservations: Hong Kong television show. The plan is to both visit as many of the nine places that were in the show, as well as discover some places of our own. And from the looks of it so far, it's a daunting but potentially satisfying task.
To encapsulate the food variation in this culture is impossible. The sheer number of people demand a sheer number of choices. A trip down one, small market street (Russell Road near the MTR Causeway Bay subway station) will get you everything you need for tonight's and subsequent day's meals.
stacks of pork-y goodness (photo by wm. christman)
Meat? Everywhere. Spare parts of meat. Ditto. Preserved meats? Yeah, we got that too. Vegetables and fruit? The next stall over, and the next one too and 3-4 across the street. Fresh noodles? Which one of the 10-12 varieties would you like? 1000 year old eggs? Would like those hard or runny? Tea, beer, wine, soy drinks, soda? Um, yep. Are you getting the picture?
choy sum (photo by wm. christman)
There's really no way to write about it without a writing a gushing, detail filled novella that would probably bore the pants off a food stall hawker because food here is everywhere, and so pervasive that it's a second way of life. Suffice it to say that if you are at all curious about why this is, you should try and get over here at your first chance. The experience will be worth the trip and you will definitely not go hungry.
