Chinabites

Posted: Mar. 07, 2009

Tonight I met up with two friends at a noodle restaurant in Wanchai called Wing Wah Noodles. It was a relatively small place on the north side of Hennessey Road, which is one of the big main drags on Hong Kong Island. I got there late, so sadly they had all but decimated what was probably the most interesting dish of the evening, preserved pomelo skin. I'll have to make another trip to get a photo of that. They suggested I try the house specialty,
fried noodles with shrimp wontons in oyster sauce

This is not only the representative dish of the restaurant, but probably one of the most representative dishes of daily life in Hong Kong. Available at most small cafes (cha canting) it is more or less always a variation on a huge pile of almost crispy noodles with some sort of main dish and oyster sauce. This was also one my very first dishes in Hong Kong back in early January at a different restaurant, albeit that time it was with pork instead of shrimp wontons.

I have to say that noodles with oyster sauce a taste that I haven't yet totally acquired. The subtly of Cantonese food is touted as its virtue, but my Philistine palette can't help but commit the faux pas of finding it bland. Boiled noodles are about as bland as it gets, and the oyster sauce in general just adds a little bit of saltiness to the dish. The noodles are extremely al-dente, almost to the point of crispiness. I can't shake the feeling while eating them that I'm chomping down on ten cent ramen that hasn't been cooked long enough. The shrimp wontons are certainly delicious, but still end up being bland enough to require a little extra vinegar / soy sauce to really get me excited about them.

Wing Wah is actually a great microcosm of everything I'm finding to be true about Cantonese cuisine. I like to think of it as the mullet theory of Cantonese food: business up front, party in the back. The front of the meal is straightforward, bland, meeting the basic standards of its genre without any panache whatsoever, but when you get to the end, that's where the real action is. Specifically I'm talking about Cantonese desserts.

Chunks of mango with huge tapioca pearls in milk. Simple, healthy, and outrageously delicious. I honestly can't understand why desserts like this couldn't catch on in the United States, other than perhaps the relatively scarcity of mangoes? Anyway, I'm still committed to acquiring a taste for Cantonese food in general, but if I do, you can be sure it was the desserts that got me in the door.