Dangers of a shared table

When it comes to nabbing a bowl of HK's best noodles, I've got the tai tai advantage: a flexible schedule.

Everyone else in HK (7.0 million people) goes to lunch at 1 o-clock. Which means there's no way on earth I could ever get a seat at lunchtime at tiny Lee Yuen Noodles & Congee, located directly behind the Japanese megastore SOGO in Causeway Bay.

Strategically, I roll in at 2:30 to find the place still jam-packed, but with one tiny stool free at a table in the front. "English menu?" No English menu, baby. Are you kidding? What do you want? Beef soup. Ok. Five seconds later, it's there. This place runs really fast, and for HKD 27/bowl (US $3.50) they have to churn a ton of people through this place to make any money.

There's a guy at the front, barely visible through the steamy window, sitting in tank top, shorts, slippers, pushing pork filling into wonton wrappers at 10x the pace I could do it.

So, the soup. Yellow noodles, very fine, a big tangled mass of them in a tiny bowl topped with beef brisket and a little bit of choi sum. Really good noodles. Just chewy enough and with a pleasant aroma, not too pungent (sometimes the smell of fresh noodles can be almost stomach-turning).

Then the brisket is melt-in-your mouth. Really. You just have to get used to putting large pieces of fat in your mouth in this town and not caring. But it's so good. The flavor has a subtle five-spice-edge to it, not too strong.

The broth is so fattening. I can see the golden rivulets of fat floating on the surface. It's slightly sweet, salty, mellow, and then mmm I catch a bit of something that tastes distinctively of orange peel. And just, just as I'm savoring that...

Whammo. Head-to-toe black, long hair flying, iPhone ringing, and -- no, no, no -- a big gust of cloying, heavy French perfume. Not even a floral or plant-based scent, but one of those heavy-duty wear-in-the-winter-in-front-of-a-fireplace kinds of scents. Undoubtedly flying across the street from the SOGO cosmetics counter, but why-oh-why at my table?

I console myself by buying an intriguing rice dumpling, wrapped in lotus leaves (?), hanging from the ceiling to enjoy in the non-perfumed privacy of my own home.