Confirmed hotel reservations, arranged well in advance of your arrival, are advisable for all tourists who are not thoroughly familiar with Hong Kong. Certainly it would be unwise to arrive without them and be forced to rely on sheer luck or the noisy touts who besiege incoming passengers at Kai Tak. The touts are kept behind a fence nowadays, but if the unsuspecting visitor lets them steer him to a hotel, their kick-back will be added to the bill. Experienced visitors sometimes check into a modestly priced hotel for the night and spend the next day bargaining for the lowest rates at one of the better places which, when business is slow, regularly knock 30 percent off the stated charges. For newcomers, this is seldom done.
Some European and American visitors cannot be persuaded to try Chinese food. Either they think it will make them ill, which it certainly will not, or they believe they’ll look silly fumbling with chopsticks. It must be conceded that inexperienced users of chopsticks usually look rather foolish, but practically every Chinese restaurant will provide a knife and fork if asked for them.
No difficulty should arise from a determination to stick to one’s usual diet. Every first-class hotel serves an international cuisine. Prices are tailored to the room rents; high at the Peninsula, cheap at the Y.M.C.A. next door to it. In general, the meals are as good as those at American hotels and they cost considerably less. Steaks are tougher than Choice U.S. beef, and occasionally one resembles a small portion of a welcome mat. Apart from the hotels, there are about a dozen good European restaurants.
In Mandarin Chinese, there is a saying that “food is the heaven of the ordinary people,” and the Chinese in Hong Kong, like their countrymen all over the world, do their remarkable best to impart a foretaste of heaven to their cooking. Their food reaches the table in edible form, and does not have to be slashed and hacked before the guest is ready to eat it. Chopsticks are all that is needed to lift the food to the mouth. (Foreigners take weeks to get over the shock of seeing a three-year-old Chinese child manipulating chopsticks; it seems so infernally clever.)
Chinese restaurants of the colony serve four different kinds of cuisine: Cantonese (from southern China); Shanghainese (from east-central China); Pekinese (from northern China) and Szechuan (central China).
Cantonese is the type most familiar to Americans, since most of the Chinese restaurants in the U.S. are owned by Southern Chinese. Chop suey and chow mein are not Chinese at all, except that they were invented by Chinese cooks in the United States to please their American customers. None the less, Cantonese restaurants serve them in Hong Kong, as well as egg rolls, egg foo yung, and sweet-and-sour pork, if only to keep the visiting foreigners happy.
Authentic Cantonese dishes are strong on seafoods. Steamed fish seasoned with ginger, mushrooms, spring onion, salted black soya beans, garlic, salad oil, sherry, soy sauce, and sugar is a particular favorite. Shark’s fin soup which includes not only the fins but crab meat, sliced chicken, chicken broth, cornstarch, and peanut oil is a floating potpourri.
Other Cantonese delicacies are gut lee hai kim, shelled fat crabs dipped in butter, fried in deep oil and served with a tart wine-and-vinegar sauce; goo low yuk, the Cantonese name for sweet-and-sour pork; and ho yau ngau yuk, slices of beef tenderloin quick-fried with an oyster sauce and garnished with greens. Cantonese cooks are sparing in their use of salt and grease.
A lunchtime specialty of Cantonese restaurants is dim sun (tiny bits of food), which includes twenty different kinds of sweet and salty dishes; among them, steamed biscuits with various meat fillings, rice cakes, sweet buns and chicken rolls.
A few of the better Cantonese restaurants are: Tai Tung, 234 Des Voeux Road; Golden City, 122-126 Queen’s Road Central; Miramar and Ambassador (both in hotels), Nathan Road; and the Sky, 8 Queen’s Road Central. They’re accustomed to tourists, and will help with the ordering, if need be. Tai Tung is typical of the large Cantonese restaurants, catering to family parties and group dinners. Kam Ling, at 484 Queen’s Road West in the West Point section of the island, is another Cantonese giant.