Hong Kong on a plate

Want more of Hong Kong's best food? Check out Pat Nourse's picks for Hong Kong's top five yum cha spots. 

Forget Tokyo, Godzilla: there’s probably never been a better time to eat Hong Kong. Michelin has just published a guide to the city, only the second Asian guide rouge, with 22 starred restaurants. More excitingly still, wine prices here, the undoing of so many dining destinations in Asia, have been heading south since taxes on beer and wine were abolished in 2008. Hong Kong is cleaner than Bangkok, edgier and more fun than Singapore, cheaper than Japan and offers a degree of sophistication in both traditional and imported cuisines that mainland China just can’t match. (Oh, and the shopping ain’t bad, either.)

The city offers such a multiplicity of good eating at every level that it can be almost overwhelming in its appeal to restaurant addicts. Here, we’ve tried to give a picture of the very best across the board, whether it’s from the Occident or the Orient, served on Limoges or Laminex. Our sole criterion: gustatory awesomeness. Dig in.

Dan dan noodles, Wing Lai Yuen
And then there’s dan dan noodles without the quotation marks. The Whampoa Gourmet Place is about as irony-free a zone as you can imagine, but there’s a kind of mad genius in cramming branches of Hong Kong’s finest vendors under one Kowloon roof. Make a beeline for the large and well-lit space that is Wing Lai Yuen. These guys have been making the peninsula’s best peanut and pork broth since the ’50s. Crucially, the wheat and egg-based noodles themselves have a distinct flavour, and their texture is springy rather than merely soft. Shop 102-105, Level 1, Whampoa Gourmet Place, Site 8, Whampoa Garden, Hunghom, Kowloon, +852 3152 2162

This article is from the September 2009 issue of Australian Gourmet Traveller.