Ever since I was young, whenever my mother asked me what vegetable I’d like for dinner, my answer 99% of the time was "chao ong choy", the idiomatic Cantonese term for stir-fried water spinach. (In non-idiomatic Mandarin it’s 炒空心菜 cǎo kòng xīn cài.) I don’t know what made me love it from an early age [...]
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Boba Drinks and Swings
Last night Jacob and I escaped our work desks and had a quintessential night out for being young in a small Chinese city: dinner at a sushi-go-round, an hour of games at a local arcades, and drinks at a boba tea café. Boba tea , also known as pearl milk tea or bubble tea, is [...]
Northern Snacks in Zhongshan
Zhongshan is over 2,000 kilometers from Beijing, farther than Miami is from New York City. Twenty years ago, it was hard to find northern-style foods in this Cantonese-speaking and Cantonese-food-eating city. How times have changed. At our local hypermarket Da Run Fa 大润发, the prepared foods section is dominated by northern style foods, including every [...]
Oysters for Breakfast
Even in a small city like Zhongshan (small by Chinese standards, anyway), there is a huge variety of dim sum restaurants, ranging from tiny mom-and-pop’s to large elegant banquet halls. Prince Restaurant, a 10-minute walk from my parent’s home, fits the latter description. We forgoed our usual bakery breakfast for dim sum with my parents [...]
Where Hikers and Beach Bums Meet and Eat
High temperatures and little breeze did not stop us from hiking the Dragon’s Back trail on eastern Hong Kong island on Sunday. Nevertheless, by the time we finished the 2-hour long hike, we were in need food and ice-cold drinks. Big Wave Bay (Tai Long Wan), a scenic little beach where the trail ended, had [...]
Fast Food, Hong Kong-style
In the US, I make a habit of avoiding fast food chains.* Eating horrible food, wasting mounds of plastic and styrofoam, and sitting somewhere with less charm than a high school cafeteria is not my idea of dining out. In Hong Kong, fast food is a different story. Famished after an afternoon of shopping on [...]
Pantyhose Milk Tea and Hong Kong “Fusion”
While sipping a Thai ice tea this afternoon, I was reminded of another tea using condensed milk that hasn’t quite made it to the US. On my last visit to Hong Kong, my uncle, a self-professed connossieur of Hong Kong-style cuisine, brought me to a tiny restaurant in Central to see how "silk stocking milk [...]
Video: Shanghai Street Food at Yuyuan Bazaar
Shanghai’s Yuyuan Bazaar is best known as a marketplace for all the souvenirs and tsotchkes you could want. It is also a haven for street food: soup dumplings, sweets, even birds-on-a-stick. Weekends are especially crowded, when even neighborhood grannies and little kids jostle with tourists to be next in line.
Appetite for China is all about fresh and simple Asian cooking. Welcome and bon appetit!
