Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Celebrity Cuisine - Quintessential Cantonese Luxe

Chicken wings stuffed with birds' nest
We've all heard stories of misguided visitors looking for chop sui in Hong Kong (hey you, the guy looking for Peking duck in Hong Kong, don't you dare chuckle either), but sometimes even locals don't know where to find good, classic Cantonese food. Restaurants like Celebrity Cuisine and Manor are the last bastions of traditional Cantonese fare in Hong Kong. This is one restaurant that the Hong Kong Michelin Guide was finally right about - Celebrity Cuisine is a star-worthy restaurant (although whether it should have 2 stars is arguable). For a restaurant that specialises in the traditional, it's relatively new - didn't open till 2007 - but the chef, Cheng Kam-fu, has been in the biz for more than two decades; he was the private chef of late Hong Kong tycoon, Lim Por-yen.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Edo & Bibo - Mediocrity at its best

Oysters!
I heard recently that the owners of the Sai Kung private kitchen One Thirty-One* had opened this new place, Edo & Bibo in Causeway Bay. I've never been to One Thirty-One, because every time I tried to book they were full (it would always be on a weekend, because what other time would I be in Sai Kung?) So when I heard about the new Causeway location I couldn't wait to try it.

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Not a camera review - What I'm using right now, in case you're curious

Current camera inventory
The camera on the left is a Panasonic LUMIX LX3, the one on the right is a Canon 600D with a 50mm f/1.4 Canon lens. I bought the former about 2.5 years ago, after my Samsung NV10 died in the cool mountains of the Cameron Highlands (I remember exactly because I couldn't capture the historic event of me eating durian).

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Tamashii & Daruma, Causeway Bay - Ramen in Hong Kong doesn't always make sense

Daruma
If you live in Hong Kong, you would have noticed a crazy number of ramen openings in the past 18 months or so. While this has done wonders to kick places like Ajisen in the butt, it's also meant that restaurants and marketers have had the chance to take advantage of HKers' relative lack of knowledge about ramen and their burning desire to find the "best" or "most authentic". Urgh. The most obvious  new ramen openings in Causeway Bay were probably Ippudo and Butao (I went to the one in Central), and I haven't been to either because of the crazy queues. Instead, I went to Daruma and Tamashii.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Housekeeping - Eater Heatmap to Hong Kong, Flipboard & SCMP

The Eater Heatmap to Hong Kong
Please forgive me for doing the blogger's equivalent of attaching "Excellent Work!" stickers to my primary school uniform. The past couple of months have been particularly exciting and I thought I'd share the joy and update you all on what's happening (a lot... too much, almost...!). Last week Eater asked me to come up with the first Eater Heatmap to Hong Kong, and a couple of months before that I became a "Cool Curator" on Flipboard*.

e_ting on Flipboard for iPhone
This blog is never going make me money, I do it because I love to eat and I love to share my experiences through (unedited) writing. It started that way, and it will always be that way, so in this ever-changing, increasingly-crowded world of digital media, to hear that people appreciate my rambles means a lot to me.

You'll also find me every Thursday in the Food & Wine section of the South China Morning Post where I have two columns, Take 5 and Legends, and occasionally write other features/stories.

Sorry if I sound like I just won the Oscars or something, but as I've finally eased into the fact that a new year has begun, it seemed appropriate to think about where I fit in the world and what I should be doing. Things are as messy and as exciting as the state of my desk (very) so please stay tuned, and thank you for reading. Hope you'll stick around.

*To find my feed on Flipboard, simply search for "Janice Leung" or "e_ting".

Saturday, January 07, 2012

Xian Jin Seafood, swimmin' down a Taipei lane

Point and cook
I've been to Taipei many times, but always for ridiculously short trips. This is probably the most ridiculous of all - one measly day. This time, it was just a stop enroute back home from Hualien. Being only an hour away by plane, Taiwan does make a very good Hong Konger's weekend jaunt. That said, I always leave feeling I need to stay longer. Now that I've explored a fair bit of the countryside, I think it'd be pretty cool to retire here too... Anyway, that's another story for another day.