Shanghai - If You Only Eat 3 Things...

If you only eat 3 things in Shanghai, at least take home a fourth - frozen Jia Jia xlb, anyone?

How crazy would you be if you went to Shanghai and could only eat three things? Well, you wouldn't need a proton pump inhibitor, that's for sure (if you don't know what a PPI is, lucky you), but you'd be missing out on a lot. These are, aside from the xiaolongbao, just the top three things I had when I went this time round. The first was new to me too - always nice to make new discoveries - the other two are old faves.

Wuhan & The Curious Case of the Hand-Pulled Noodle

It seems like hand-pulled noodles are all the rage in the US at the moment. Even for us in Hong Kong it's always been a spectacle, available for viewing only at fancy/kitsch restaurants like Peking Garden (I don't think they even do it customarily anymore, only on special request). When I went to Wuhan late last year, I found that in some parts of China, hand-pulled noodles aren't "special" at all. It's just the way they, ahem, roll. (In fact they roll nothing, just thought it would be a funny dough-related giggle. Anyway, didn't quite pull it off, did I? Ok, I'll stop, I'll stop.)

Shanghai - The Xiaolongbao

Lin Long Fang

Just after Christmas, I did an annual holiday/food vacation with my two bestest friends (I sound so high school - wait - we did meet in high school) to Suzhou and Shanghai. We ate lots, of course, but let's begin with the elephant in the city - xiaolongbao. These little mounds of pork steamed in a basic flour-water veil of dough sound like the easiest thing in the world to put make, but as with all things deceptively simple, they can drive people crazy in trying to perfect them, taking over the world with them (hello, Din Tai Fung), or in our case, trying to taste them all.

Light shows and lightly salted fish - Yan Toh Heen

To be fair, I took this on a boat, not the InterCon, but this is pretty much the view. And I apologise on behalf of Apple for the iPhone 3GS quality

The best views of HK harbour are from Kowloon side, and one of the best places to view it is at the InterContinental. The light show I refer to in the title is that flurry of laser beams they have on either side of the harbour everyday at 8pm, if you're into that sort of thing.

Making tofu with Yin Yang's Margaret Xu

The only Detour event (architecture event held in Dec 2010 - I'm totally living in the past, I know) I went to this year was a 'masterclass' with Margaret Xu, the acclaimed self-taught chef and owner of locavore restaurant/private kitchen Yin Yang.