On to my next HK food post! When I’m with my dad, a restaurant that we always seem to visit when we’re in HK is the Sichuan restaurant, Wing Lai Yuen. So on one particularly hot day, we visited their restaurant at Hunghom over on Kowloon side. There are many ways to travel over to Kowloon but my favourite is one of the oldest modes of transport, the Star Ferry which is also one of the cheapest! We hopped on at Wan Chai and it wasn’t long before we arrived a mere 20 mins later. It’s always nice to sit on the ferry and a great way to see the HK skyline too.
I love the shot below that Hailey took of a block of flats near the restaurant. To me, it pretty much sums up HK. High rise living, plenty of washing hanging out despite the smog, fast fashion, food and of course, those iconic red taxis. Oh how I miss them!
As with many restaurants, Wing Lai Yuen can be found inside a building/food plaza called Whampoa Gardens which houses many other restaurants. It has a mock traditional decor which pretty much borders on kitsch. Lots of red wooden furniture and also plenty of Chinese silk embroidery and framed awards on the walls.
Ready to stuff my face!
My dad likes to pretend that he’s a HK food connoisseur and he has so much fun ordering dishes that he might have seen on Chinese food programmes. I think his dream job would be to present his own food show, exploring Asian cuisine. Actually, that sounds like my dream job too!! So soon enough, our table was filled with lots of dishes and among the things we ordered at Wing Lai Yuen were their famous and most popular, Handmade Sichuan Dan dan Mien (noodles) all served in a yummy spicy peanut soup. Writing this post is making me so hungry!
We also ordered lots of side dishes including Jellyfish, Thinly sliced braised Beef and below you can see Sauteed eel with Chinese chives (garlic chives), cucumber and bean starch noodles with peanut sauce. We also ordered plenty of dumplings including wor tip (Chinese gyoza) but my favourite are the dumplings in chilli oil.
Wing Lai Yuen: Shop 102-105, 1st Floor, Site 8, Whampoa Gardens, Hunghom, Kowloon, HK.
My dad said that it wasn’t as good as the last visit (about 3 years ago) but I liked it, especially because the unfussy food is modestly priced and a meal for a family of 5 cost us about HK$500 which is £41. I’m not really picky about food but HKers absolutely love to compare food places and actually my dad didn’t consider the food cheap (which is funny because obviously in the UK, it would be an absolute steal!). The dining website, Open Rice is hugely popular over there and many people consult it to find the best restaurant to visit depending on the cuisine/price/location etc. The majority of my visits to various restaurants in HK were found via that particular website. It’s also available in English, so non-Chinese readers can also give it a go when they visit Hong Kong.
After our lunch, we decided to leave Hunghom. There really isn’t much to do over there, although there’s a department store (Justco) situated on a landlocked ship which is a bit random. From past visits, I took lots of Purikura (Japanese photo booth) in there when I was younger. So it wasn’t long before we decided to make a move and caught a taxi to nearby Tsim Tsa Tsui. Not before taking a couple of pictures with my sisters of course!
Me, Hailey and Becky
When we arrived at TST, we hopped over to Harbour City, where we browsed the shops and er…stopped off at one of their cafes to take a quick break (Strawberry Forever) and sampled the overly-custardy strawberry Napoleon below (but too vibrant not to take a photo of!).
The Cafe really isn’t really worth talking about and was just a place to rest our weary feet (Harbour City is a gigantic mall!). However the view as we were digging into our pastries was pretty damn awesome!
PS: Marian has an incredible Give away for an Alexander Wang Diego bag, I’m totally entering!
