5. Shanghainese Dishes in a Cantonese Town

Since we arrived in Hong Kong a week and a half ago, the food here has been great. Without any particular planning, we seemed to end up eating at all the Shanghainese food restaurants here. Guess what, even though Hong Kong is famous for Cantonese food, Shanghainese food has also come a long way - and our taste buds told us that this is not the old Shanghainese food.



So far, we've been to Xiao Nan Guo 小南国 on Hennessey Road, Lu Yang Chuen 禄杨春, and Xin Ji Si 新吉士 in Wanchai. The best dish so far is a 'dandelion wrapped in tofu skins' dish. Only the Shanghainese would eat dandelion leaves as a delicacy. In this dish, the leaves are boiled, seasoned delicately, and then wrapped in a very pure tofu skin. The whole thing is rolled up and then sliced into sections, very much like how sushi is cut. The whole thing tastes very clean and light, the look is appealing, white rolls interspersed with dark green. I was impressed. But I don't have a photo so you will just have to come here to enjoy it. (Since this post, we went to the restaurant again and I took a photo of the dandelion dish.)I understand that these restaurants all have branches in Shanghai (or really, I should say that these Shanghainese restaurants all have branches in Hong Kong). I do have one of the restaurant's entrance shot though.



Xin Gi Si is a very nicely decorated restaurant with great services, but at a price. We had lunch there with about 10 of our relatives and the bill totaled over $1500 HKD (~$200USD)! But for that, we got to taste interesting dishes such as 'drunken crab' (raw crab marinated in wine), salted vegetable with stirred-fried rice cake, and then 'June yellow crabs' (crabs that are only available in June of every year - sort of a soft-shelled crab, all cooked in a black bean sauce.) Then of course, there are the very juicy pan-fried buns (with pork stuffing) that when we bite into one, all the juices squirt out and almost ruined our shirts!