Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [87]
A giant, one-story, free-standing image of a crab—covered with long, silky hairs that camouflage it in patches of seaweed—serves as a sign for the restaurant, as smaller drawings of crabs also do in Chaozhou. Shellfish and fish of all kinds are specialties of the cuisine, often served with zippy sauces. Other favorites include goose, frequently flavored with a garlic and vinegar sauce, duck, and shark’s fin and bird’s nest preparations. Chefs pride themselves on a variety of vegetable dishes, from deep-fried greens to sweetened taro, and also on elaborate vegetable carvings, which are used to decorate tables. Diners usually start and end a meal with an exceptionally strong oolong tea nicknamed “kung fu” and “Iron Buddha” because of its ferocious caffeine kick.
The waiter brings us tiny cups of the tea as soon as the hostess seats us. One large room, lively with conversation and laughter, the restaurant teems with businesspeople grabbing a meal between work and home. The menu doesn’t prove terribly helpful to us, with just a few English descriptions of dishes and a smattering of photos, and none of the staff seems able or willing to speak English. By pointing to names and pictures, we manage to order deep-fried crab and shrimp rolls, a disappointment, and a “sizzling” freshwater yellow croaker that sounds like it would be fried but is actually poached in a light and delicate broth with toppings of Chinese chives, Chinese cabbage, fresh bamboo shoots, and bits of mushrooms. Our waiter demonstrates putting some of the fish in a small bowl with broth and a bit of chile oil, and then shows us a Chaozhou method of eating rice, pouring broth over it to make a soupy mixture to scoop up with a spoon. The standout dish of the evening, one of our favorite simple preparations of the whole trip, is wok-charred green beans cooked with bits of minced pork and black olives from China. “I’m going to make this when we get home,” Cheryl says. “It’s superb.”
The stroll back to the hotel takes us along the promenade that fronts the harbor, where hundreds of people have gathered to watch the nightly Symphony of Lights, which the Guinness Book of Records lists as the world’s “Largest Permanent Light and Sound Show.” Thirty-three of the most prominent buildings on both sides of the harbor project a dazzling array of beams into the sky, carefully choreographed in a sequence of patterns converging into a blazing crescendo. After we watch it for about five minutes from the waterside, Bill grabs Cheryl’s arm and says, “Let’s get upstairs to our room as quickly as we can.” Seen from our bank of windows, the spectacle sets the heavens aglow like a dancing rainbow.
Our walk the next day covers a bigger area, all of it on Hong Kong Island. The famous Star Ferry hauls us across the harbor to the Central District, the financial and governmental heart of the city. Architects come from around the world to see some of the contemporary skyscrapers—such as I. M. Pei’s Bank of China Tower and Sir Norman Foster’s Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation’s structure—but we only glance at these briefly on our way to the historic and traditional Chinese warren of small streets called the Western District.
Our route along Des Voeux Road Central leads us to several pedestrian lanes, barely larger than alleys, packed with market stalls selling clothing, handbags, costume jewelry, and trinkets of all kinds. Deeper into the neighborhood, the businesses get more exotic, selling “chops,” or personalized, carved stamps for documents or possessions, intricate bamboo birdcages, death money for the afterlife, antique snuff bottles, and an incredible range of food and medicinal items, including ginseng, preserved sea slugs, dried fish bladders, twigs, seeds, powdered horns of different animals, and live snakes (favored in a warming winter soup and in a rheumatism cure, where the patient swallows the gallbladder in a glass of Chinese