I eat an amazing amount of good food on a daily basis.
That may sound like bragging, but...well, it *is* bragging!
Hong Kong is a wonderful place to eat.
It's totally possible in the course of a few weeks to have multiple experiences that etch themselves into your gastronomic memory. Things like...
Black truffle xiaolongbao in the Willy Wonka of a dumpling factory that is Din Tai Fung. No skimping on the black truffle here (you can see the bits from the broth in my spoon). Heavy duty sultry truffle flavor and wonderful porkiness and then the elasticity of the dumpling skin... 
Sticky, gritty, powdery, goldeny-orange palm sugar to top off a delicate tofu pudding with ginger juice at Island Tang. While I don't recommend this restaurant (had the food been frozen and reheated?), this very simple dessert presentation bewitched me.
Candied taro at Lippo Chiuchow. I love it when my friend J-- comes to town. She always introduces me to these dishes that are so...cool. Jenga-shaped beams of mellow taro on the edge of mushy and crisp -- coated with a thick layer of hard sugar. Almost as hard as those sugar Easter eggs my sister and I got as little girls. This may not sound "good" but the experience was so fascinating my mind keeps going back to it...
Can you see the exquisite orchid in the back? It must be at least 20 years old. I love the orchid, the waiter's jacket, the stained glass, the booths...and I actually quite enjoyed my corned beef tongue with noodle soup. Tai Ping Koon is a 150+ year-old "Chinglish" restaurant that has partially Disneyfied itself for tourists, yet maintains a lovely old-world vibe.
Rose petal macaroons at Petrus on Mistress's Day (February 13th). A crispy candied petal on top, a scoop of rose-flavored buttercream in the middle, and a wonderful chewy cookie below. I'm a texture junky, what can I say? We didn't even order this. They just brought this at the end of our meal. And it was in another class entirely from the food, which was very hotel-y. Interestingly, I rode the elevator with two teenage boys last night, one of whom was carrying a tube of extraordinarily beautiful French macaroons. Where did he get them? The Shangri-La, of course.
Baked pork buns at Golden Leaf restaurant in the Conrad. What I love about this is the garnish: maraschino cherry and parsley, bright red and dark green. Sweet and savory. A fitting touch to the plate bearing a dish which is essentially a pork doughnut. A very, very expensive pork doughnut, by the way. Fancy-pants food blogger Peech (Diary of a Growing Boy) described Golden Leaf as "good food at a discount," yet our bill was substantially higher than for dim sum at Lung King Heen. Maybe the raised their prices since he started singing their praises!
A petite man wearing a medical mask and spectacles approached me in the yogurt aisle.
"I'm sorry, but you are not allowed to write down prices or photograph the food.""But I'm trying to make a budget. How else am I supposed to figure out where to shop?"
(Shuffling feet, uncomfortable pause...)
"Are you asking me to leave?"Yes, dear readers (hi Mom!), I am possibly the first tai-tai ever to have been more or less kicked out of HK's local temple of imported food, CitySuper.
Now I understand that grocery retailing is a competitive business and that innovative store design and pricing strategy add up to big bucks, but I was not there to steal CitySuper's secrets. Nerd that I am, I was simply shopping my regular grocery list at four stores to figure out once and for all which has the best value for the mixed basket of Western and Chinese goods we buy.
It will come as no surprise to any Hong Konger that CitySuper didn't win the contest ;-)
In NYC people will talk passionately about subway routes for hours on end. In Hong Kong, ask any expat where they shop for groceries and get ready for agony, frustration, and confusion -- but also scheming and triumph!
You may have heard that the real estate in Hong Kong is a bit expensive. Every postage stamp of buildable space in this city has a multi-story building sitting on it generating bazillions of HKDs. Agriculture just can't compete.
This creates a unique shopping climate where:
- The most "local" meat and produce comes from mainland China;
- Everything not from China is shipped in from a bewildering list of countries, including far far away South Africa (grapes) and Brazil (chicken);
- Warehouse space is limited so products disappear and reappear unpredictably;
- Prices vary wildly for foods eaten by the masses (spring onions for US$0.33/bunch) to those eaten by the minority (yogurt for US $10.31/container);
- Retailers *seem* to set their prices with a cynical eye toward overpricing items their particular clientele won't be able to guess the local cost of.
Add in the stress of aisles as narrow as HK sidewalks, taxi scrums outside supermarkets, cashiers who sometimes short-change you, and stockers that plow down their own customers...and well, it's pretty intense.
My friend D-- has stopped cooking at home more or less. She covers her face with her hands, "I just can't go in Wellcome. It's so awful."
Our Wellcome *is* awful. I feel angry just thinking about it.
But down to brass tacks -- the price off.
On a single day -- February 17, 2011 -- I priced a list of 52 items that we typically buy at least once every two weeks. This included dairy, meat, produce, prepared foods, dried goods, cans/bottles, paper goods, bread, beverages, and frozen food. I wrote down our preferred brands and acceptable substitutes. Then I did my very best to get everything on the list, or the closest thing to it, at four stores:
- Wellcome on Robinson Road, Mid-Levels
- ThreeSixty in the Landmark Building, Central
- CitySuper in IFC
- TASTE at Hopewell Center, Wanchai
The results?
Drumroll please....
First, there's the issue of availability. NONE of the stores carried all of the items I was looking for -- or even a workable substitute. Out of 52 items, six were unavailable at ThreeSixty. This included *peanut oil* if you can believe it. They had bran oil, soy bean oil, a gazillion kinds of olive oil, but the most common oil for cooking Chinese food? Ixnay! At Wellcome, four items were unavailable, the most irritating of which was vanilla yogurt, a staple in our household. Grrr. At TASTE, three items were unavailable: a certain type of tomato soup E likes, cut up melon or a half melon, and Kellogg's Low Fat Granola With Raisins. Actually none of these is a crisis item except the granola, but none of the stores carries it anymore, so I can't fault TASTE specifically. The disappearance of the granola from the entire HK SAR has been a great drama in our household and I continue to look for it, but that's another story. But, to sum up: TASTE wins the availability content. ThreeSixty fails on Chinese staples, while Wellcome fails on Western staples. CitySuper excused itself from this contest, but not from the next one...
Next up, prices! I compared all four stores on fifteen items they stocked and didn't bar me from pricing. This happened to be mostly produce, dairy, and prepared foods. The winner? TASTE at 273 HKD (about US$ 35). I could get the same approximate basket of goods at Wellcome for 288 HKD (6% more expensive). At ThreeSixty, I could pay 312 HKD (14% more expensive). If I really wanted to throw my money around, I could pay 445 HKDs for the same approximate basket of goods at CitySuper (63% more expensive!).
Where does CitySuper pack on the pounds? Besides *only* carrying super-specialized Japanese strawberries or weird amounts of American ones, CitySuper takes ordinary Australian carrots and plastic wraps them two at a time (about 526g worth) onto little styrofoam trays. So instead of paying 11.9 HKDs for a 1kg bag of Australian carrots at TASTE or even 8.9 for FirstChoice brand carrots at Wellcome, I would have to buy two trays of CitySuper carrots for a total of 36.8 HKDs (209%-313% more expensive).
Besides produce, CitySuper also overpriced locally-made Habibi hummus, charging 52 HKD compared with 39.8 HKD at both TASTE and Wellcome (31% more expensive). I also saw that they charged 37 HKD for Pura Hi-Lo milk, where ThreeSixty charges 29.9 (24% more expensive), and this didn't even affect the price comparison since City had a cheaper option available.
But any Hong Konger will tell you that CitySuper is not where you go to save money, so let's move on, shall we?
When I compared Wellcome, ThreeSixty, and TASTE on the 44 items or equivalents that they all stocked... (Another drumroll, please.) TASTE rocked! At TASTE my basket cost 1207 HKD, whereas at Wellcome it cost 1258 HKD (4% more) and at ThreeSixty it cost 1650 HKD (37% more).
How did TASTE do it? It's interesting... Experientially I've always preferred dealing with TASTE's staff. The stockers happily answer my questions about where to find things and the checkers can handle non-standard situations in English. It seems like the staff are allowed to *think* not just follow orders. At Wellcome, the staff do occasionally think for themselves, but it's usually to try and short E a few dollars at checkout (repeatedly).
Anyway, back to TASTE... The buyers there use their smarts for my benefit. They appear to have a better connection for some local produce like ginger and spring onions. For example, at TASTE ginger is 10.9 HKD/lb, whereas at Wellcome it is 24.8 HKD/lb (27.3 HKD/catty or ~500g) and at ThreeSixty it's 30 HKD/lb (66 HKD/kg).
For many goods all three stores appear to have the same distributor, but TASTE either gets a volume discount or offers a few loss leaders. For example, Kimlan Grade-A Light Soy is 11.9 HKD at TASTE while it's 13.9 HKD at Wellcome and at ThreeSixty. While this didn't affect the comparison, I was also interested to see that TASTE was on par with the other stores on its 2-fer deals, but often offered a lower single unit price. For example, Penfold's 2009 Koonunga Hill Cabernet Merlot is 168 HKD/2 bottles at both Wellcome and TASTE, but the single bottle price at TASTE is 119 HKD while it's 139 HKD at Wellcome. (Doesn't surprise me.)
Where the active thinking at TASTE really shows is the fact that they find better substitutes for Western items that wind up being uncomfortably expensive once you ship them across the ocean. For example, both Wellcome and ThreeSixty carry microwave popcorn: Newman's Own brand, which frankly, is a bit pricey at 51 HKD/box. That's US $6.58 or $2.19 for each individual bag inside. Not movie theater prices, but not cheap. By comparison, TASTE carries Orville Redenbacher for 28.9 HKD (24% cheaper). You might prefer Newman, but Redenbacher works in our household.
To their credit, Wellcome offered lower prices on many items, for example the aforementioned carrots. And they shot themselves in the foot by being out of stock for a few important items -- like chicken filets, which are normally 39.9 HKDs/lb -- leaving me stuck with the grossly overpriced Hazeldeen's organic boneless chicken thigh meat at 100 HKD/lb. But in the end, what it came down to was that TASTE did a better job for me as the customer. My basket there was cheaper.
Whoa -- shame on me for writing such a long post, but I've got more to say!
Who owns TASTE?
The richest man in Hong Kong -- Mr. Li Ka-shing -- that's who!
TASTE is just one type of grocery store owned by AW Watson company, which is a subsidiary of Hutchison Whampoa. The other stores are Park & Shop, Great, and Gourmet.
A little bird told me that the primary purpose of TASTE (and its sister stores?) isn't to make a big profit. It's to generate cash flow for the other Li businesses. Apparently groceries are purchased net-30 or net-something, so TASTE can buy a ton of stock on credit, put it out on its shelves, and keep a constant flow of cash coming in from its customers. Handy ;-)
In case anyone reading gets their feathers ruffled by my comparison, keep in mind that I didn't write this as a journalist or business person. I took it on as a consumer trying to figure out the best choice for grocery shopping among the places reasonably convenient and suitable for my location and tastes.
If you don't believe me, try it yourself.
I am feeling really guilty.
In my last post I wrote that I don't really like Thai food. Which is stupid for a bunch of reasons...
First, it's stupid because it makes it sound like I didn't eat anything yummy on our trip to Bangkok. In fact, I tasted many, many scrumptious things, on top of the phenomenal mango with sticky rice at Ban Khun Mae.
One of the things I loved about Thailand was that Thais eat all of the time! Everywhere you go at any time of day there is a little cart on the corner with a delicious treat. Things like...
Fresh-squeezed tangerine juice. It doesn't taste like orange juice. It tastes like nectar. Pretend you're a humming bird when you drink this stuff. It's pure, gorgeous natural fruit sugar.
Sour Isaan sausage. Filled with fermented pork and soft sticky rice, with the kind of tang you get in a good salami. It's fat and roasty and tantalizingly two feet away from one's sniffer walking down the street. Irresistible.
Rice custards. Delicate, salty-sweet, molten-hot mellowness, cooked to order on a big cast-iron griddle -- with just a smidge of savory green onion. Great day-dreaming food.
Plantains with fresh shredded coconut and sugar. Slippery, slightly meaty plantains. Light, fluffy julienned coconut. A coating of coarse, crunchy sugar. An incredible texture experience for only10 bht ($0.30).
Besides yummy street snacks, we also we ate a super-luxurious lunch at Sra Bua by Kiin Kiin in the new Siam Kempinski Hotel, which someone recommended to us as "the best restaurant in Thailand."
My snout was so deep in my plate (or plates), I don't remember what E was eating, but the highlight of my meal was this frozen red curry with lobster.
Cold, smooth ice cream, crunchy roasted cashews, delicate flesh, and airy foam. Oh, and shallots! I kept tasting the curry ice cream, which was unequivocally sweet, and expecting my palate to reject it -- like garlic ice cream or something -- but the flavor was exactly right and the ice cream format seemed perfectly natural.
That was after this surprising, delicate beet foam and fish dish...
...and followed by this banana cake and caramel sauce served on a large piece of bark.
It was a fascinating and strange meal (ice cream twice at lunch?). I kept thinking "What am I eating?"
This kind of goes to the heart of the matter about liking or not liking "Thai food."
If you ask Chef McDang, who was born into the Thai Royal Family and just published a very beautiful book called The Principles of Thai Cookery, I wasn't eating actually eating Thai food at Sra Bua.
Why? Well, to start with, the chef wasn't even Thai! Sra Bua is a sister restaurant to Kiin Kiin, run by chef Henrik Yde-Andersen, who also has a restaurant in Copenhagen. Painfully, Kiin Kiin is one of only two Michelin-starred Thai restaurants in the world. The other -- Nahm in London -- is headed by an Australian (David Thompson). Ay yi yi.
McDang points out in his blog that, in his meal at Sra Bua, he was served a mayonnaise emulsion (no emulsions in Thai food) and a fresh baby carrot (sorry, no carrots in Thai cuisine) stuck in a planter pot of dirt. Much more important than that, McDang says, is that these farang chefs don't seem to recognize the importance of rice to the Thai way of eating:
"Our words for rice and food (khao) are the same.""When dining, Thais always eat 'family-style' -- many dishes are shared by all at the table, communally. The only individual thing about our eating is our personal plates of rice.""The fork and spoon are well-suited to Thai food: the fork shepherds the food onto the spoon, which is then used to lift the food to the mouth.""To get a real snapshot of what Thai food is about, you have to understand the concept of 'kluk': mixing your different dishes into your rice with your fork and spoon, getting your own personal measures of each dish..."(The Principles of Thai Cookery, p. 24)
This was really interesting to me because when I sat down and tried to identify why I didn't like Thai cuisine, my gut-level feeling (literally) was that it's too harsh. It's so sweet, spicy, raw, and rich, sometimes all in one dish! My body just viscerally recoils even when my taste buds rejoice. Well, duh. You're not supposed to eat it straight. According to McDang, in Central Thai cuisine (what's best known throughout the world), "regular rice (khao suay), eaten with a fork and spoon, forms the basis for each meal." (p. 81)
Like so many Westerners whose minds were infected by Atkins, I avoid white rice like it's rat poison. So when E and I hoof it off to a Thai restaurant in the States or here in HK, we order a bunch of robustly-flavored dishes -- like green chicken curry with rich coconut milk and bitter eggplants and spicy, fishy, raw, sweet green papaya salad, etc. -- barely cutting our entire meal with a forkful of rice. This is not the way to do it, apparently. You need some rice to digest, and enjoy, the food.
Do you think the folks at Michelin know this?
Last night E and I read John Colapinto's 2009 article "Lunch with M: Undercover with a Michelin inspector" in The New Yorker.
In the article, the anonymous inspector repeatedly underscores the technical nature of her work. Inspectors rate every dish and ingredient on quality of products, mastery in the cooking, technical accuracy, balance of flavors, and creativity of the chef. She says,
"It’s just technical. I mean, cooking is a science, and either it’s right or it’s wrong. And that’s something that’s very objective. Either a sauce is prepared accurately—or it’s not."
I wonder if Michelin inspectors tasting Thai food know whether the pastes underlying each dish they try are prepared accurately. I wonder if they know the concept of 'kluk' and are mixing flavors in each spoonful when they judge whether sauces are balanced. Hmm.
According to McDang, eating Thai food in a Western way isn't eating Thai food.
