Hong Kong has around 17,000 restaurants for 7.5 million people, and eating out is not an occasion but the default — kitchens in Hong Kong flats are small, and a great many people eat two or three meals a day out.
The base is Cantonese, which within Chinese cooking is the tradition most concerned with freshness, texture and restraint — the aim is to taste the ingredient rather than the seasoning.
The Cantonese repertoire
Roast meats — siu mei. Char siu (barbecue pork), roast duck, roast goose, crisp-skinned pork belly, soy chicken, hung in the window and chopped to order over rice. Yat Lok and Kam’s Roast Goose both hold Michelin stars for what is essentially a lunch counter.
Steamed fish — whole, with ginger, spring onion and hot oil poured over at the last moment. The test of a Cantonese kitchen.
Wonton noodles — thin egg noodles with prawn wontons in a broth of dried flounder and pork bones. Should be served with the noodles above the soup so they do not go soft.
Clay pot rice in winter. Congee at any hour. Beef brisket. Hot pot, which is a communal winter institution.
Dim sum has its own entry.
Hong Kong’s own cuisine
The cha chaan teng — milk tea, pineapple buns, macaroni soup, baked pork chop rice. Hong Kong-style Western food, which exists nowhere else.
Dai pai dong — the licensed open-air street stalls, of which around twenty-five survive from thousands. The Stanley Street cluster in Central is the accessible one.
Egg waffles, curry fish balls, stinky tofu and siu mai from street carts.
Everything else
Hong Kong eats internationally at every level. Substantial Shanghainese, Sichuan, Chiu Chow, Hakka and Northern Chinese presence, plus very good Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Nepali, and — through the domestic worker communities — Filipino and Indonesian, concentrated around Central and Causeway Bay on Sundays.
Chungking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui holds some of the best and cheapest South Asian and African food in the city, in a building with a reputation that is largely out of date.
Etiquette
Tap two fingers on the table when tea is poured for you.
Leave the teapot lid ajar when it is empty and it will be refilled.
Serve others before yourself. Turn the lazy Susan clockwise.
Chopsticks: never upright in rice, never used to point.
You will often be given a bowl of hot tea and a basin to rinse your cutlery in before eating. This is normal and not a comment on the establishment.
Tipping and bills
Most sit-down restaurants add a 10 per cent service charge. Beyond that, rounding up or leaving the loose change is the convention — tipping on top of the service charge is not expected.
Cheap places, dai pai dong and cha chaan teng: no tip.
Cash or Octopus at the lower end; cards at anything mid-range and above.
Tables are shared at busy times without ceremony, and turnover is fast — lingering after the plates are cleared is not the custom.
Vegetarians
Better served than the roast-meat windows suggest. Hong Kong has a long Buddhist vegetarian tradition — zaai — and dedicated restaurants attached to temples and elsewhere, using mock meats and mushroom-based dishes with real skill.
Note that Buddhist vegetarian cooking traditionally excludes onion and garlic, which changes the flavour.
Beyond that, the Indian restaurants at Chungking Mansions, the growing modern vegetarian scene in Sheung Wan and Sai Ying Pun, and any dim sum menu’s vegetable dumplings and turnip cake.
Meal times
Hong Kong eats early and late and not much in between. Yum cha runs from mid-morning; lunch is a fast 45-minute affair from about one; dinner from seven, with kitchens often closing by ten thirty except in the night-market districts.
Congee and noodle shops open very early and are the breakfast institution.
Water
Tap water in Hong Kong is treated to WHO standards and is safe, though building storage tanks vary and most residents boil or filter it. Restaurants serve tea rather than water as the default.
Ordering without Cantonese
Menus in tourist areas are bilingual. Away from them, many are not, and staff may speak limited English.
What works: pointing at what someone else is eating, photographs on the wall, and the fact that most specialist shops do one thing — a wonton noodle shop sells wonton noodles, and asking for “one” will produce the right answer.
Translation apps handle Chinese menus reasonably well from a photograph.
The Michelin effect
Hong Kong has had a Michelin guide since 2009 and a large number of very cheap places carry stars or Bib Gourmand listings — which has brought queues and, in some cases, price rises and a decline.
The listing is a reasonable signal and it is not the only one. A queue of local office workers at half past twelve is a better one.