Next was Soho Noodle Shop: plastic chairs, authentic and cheap. I preferred the curry Pops and David liked the plain. Incredibly rich and thick broth with tender brisket, potatoes, and onions. Kau Kee featured only beef brisket noodle soup, with or without curry. Now it was time to hit three noodle shops, each with its own noodle focus. Sure, it's a touristy thing to do: Most locals would not be eating roast pig out of a plastic bag on a charge through the market. The smell of roasting ducks and pigs was in the air, gloriously attacking our nostrils as soon as we started walking around, eventually breaking our will. The street butchers were hard at their open-air work, breaking down whole sides of beef and pork, selling everything: heart, liver, kidney, intestine, penis, spleen, the whole show happening in 85-degree heat. The striking thing, in contrast to an American market, is the abundance of foods that are dried, both for cooking and medicinal purposes: fish, scallops, shrimp, oysters, fish maw, mushrooms, seaweed, roots, bird's nest (nature's Viagra, the Chinese believe, fashioned by swallows from their saliva, and one of the most expensive foods in the world per pound). He would show us another strange bit of sea life and explain how he would cook it. Pops kept picking up the creatures to show David, getting chastised by the vendors, but he didn't care. It was a culinary zoo of squirming creatures, fascinating to David: funky-looking shrimp, all types of fish, crabs, eels, frogs, snails. We arrived at Bowrington Market, already packed on Saturday morning, and gawked at the produce, meats, and seafood, the latter live, of course. Pops, David, and I went on a market walk that was also a hunt for the city's best bowl of noodle soup. Hong Kong markets burst with fresh seafood, mountains of produce, dazzling arrays of dried foods. There is nothing better than a family dining with this much joy. We were eating, laughing, talking with our mouths full, and just loving life. Now, my mom and David love chicken feet as well, but Polly and Henry can't quite get past the visual of those chickens strutting around the farm, stepping in their own stuff. If you don't like the sticky rice, Henry, no big deal: Here come the steamed shrimp and pork dumplings, soup dumplings, pork buns, crispy shrimp flowers, spring rolls, crispy Shanghai sesame cakes, crispy pork belly, twice-fried noodles, wok-tossed pea tendrils, and, my own favorite, braised chicken feet-slippery, knuckly, delicious. For sheer variety of tastes, dim sum is our family's favorite way to eat-everything plunked on the greatest restaurant innovation, the lazy Susan.
It's a little cheesy to eat here, and a lot fantastic. Jumbo Kingdom is the most famous dim sum restaurant in the middle of Hong Kong harbor, built on huge barges, a floating amusement complex that is swarmed by tourists and locals alike. And Mom, the fish-head eater, reveled in chewing the bones and skin.
Served with Szechuan peppercorn salt, the bone course was, to use a professional term, so freaking good! And it was very important for my kids to see an example of such frugal culinary genius: nothing wasted, everything delicious.
Then the topper: the bones hacked up and deep-fried! All the remaining skin could be gobbled up, and even the small bones were easily crunchable. At Li Qun, they carve the duck with slices of skin and meat together, more in a French style, and the meat is fantastically juicy, yet the skin stays crisp. This preserves the lacquered crackliness of the skin, but the meat can dry out. Tradition calls for skin to be removed first, then the meat, with the bones used to make soup. At this point, the ducks were neck-and-neck with those at Made in China, but the carving made all the difference. Then they hung the birds to drain off the remaining fat, leaving delectably crispy skin. The first thing we saw after making our way down a narrow hallway was a small cherry-wood-burning oven where two sweaty, wiry men in singlets, one smoking a cigarette, were positioning ducks by the fire and quickly roasting them (it took less than 45 minutes by my watch). This place was as local as it gets, inexpensive, and, it turned out, produced the best Peking duck I have ever eaten. Compared to the fancy Hyatt, this was a down-home joint, a converted hutong (a narrow alleyway formed by lines of traditional housing complexes that one to two families would share with the fire/cooking done in the middle of the courtyard). Two days later, the family made its way to Li Qun for more Peking duck.