e*ting the world

Comilonas - Catalan got my tongue

2012-01-30T19:08:00.004+08:00

Shrimp and chorizo paella

I've blabbed on about the whole private kitchen phenomenon in Hong Kong before, and it all sounds very pessimistic, with all that menu and party coordination, only to be rewarded with mediocre food. But occasionally, along comes a place like Comilonas, and all is good with the world of private kitchens again.

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Celebrity Cuisine - Quintessential Cantonese Luxe

2012-01-24T21:06:00.002+08:00

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.

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Happy Chinese New Year!

2012-01-23T00:01:00.003+08:00

Eat like a dragon! Kung Hei Fat Choi!

Edo & Bibo - Mediocrity at its best

2012-01-17T18:29:00.001+08:00

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.

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

2012-01-16T09:48:00.016+08:00

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).

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

2012-01-14T13:12:00.001+08:00

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.

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Housekeeping - Eater Heatmap to Hong Kong, Flipboard & SCMP

2012-01-10T18:15:00.000+08:00

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".

Xian Jin Seafood, swimmin' down a Taipei lane

2012-01-07T16:40:00.002+08:00

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.

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20 yummiest dishes of 2011

2011-12-31T08:50:00.005+08:00

I've been to some pretty cool places this year, and had some awesome meals. These 20 dishes wouldn't have been as yum as they were if they weren't shared with fantastic people. I know some of you better than others, but trust me, food is only delicious when had in good company.

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The Shake Shack Serenade - New York

2011-12-30T23:44:00.003+08:00

Temple of burger-dom

Ooh, ooh, ooh
What a little moonlight can do
Ooh, ooh, ooh
What a little moonlight can do to you

-Billy Holiday, What a Little Moonlight Can Do

Maybe it was that late autumn, early winter chill. Maybe it was the little light bulbs hanging in a park at night. Maybe it was the burgers. Whatever it is, I'm in love with Shake Shack.

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An Evening at Herman, Copenhagen

2011-12-30T19:28:00.004+08:00

Oysterleaf

I never got over my US-to-Europe jetlag. I just kind of stayed in this semi-awake state, which might have contributed to the meh-ness I felt about this meal. The second night we were here, a fair few of our Noma lunch crew had arrived. One of us was organised enough to book Herman way ahead of time, and from a table of 2, we managed to make it a table of 5. We each made our respective ways to the restaurant. My party was slightly early, so we went up to the spacious (and honestly, lightly stark) lounge/bar upstairs for a hot toddy. After we all arrived, we went back down to Herman.

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Big Sur, California - Coastal Wondering

2011-12-30T17:21:00.004+08:00

Big Sur

Fuelled up on Brenda's grits, we set off on our drive down Big Sur (enroute to Vegas). I'd planned it so we'd stop for lunch at Carmel, snack at Big Sur Bakery, then arrive in time for dinner at Pismo Beach, where our night's accommodation would be.

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Da Ping Huo - Inspired by Sichuan

2011-12-30T12:46:00.001+08:00

Mapo doufu

I'll be honest, I used to cringe every time I saw Da Ping Huo mentioned in articles that can be searched via the words "Hong Kong" and "private kitchen". I thought it was so gwailo (foreigner/westerner). The artist host, the opera-singing chef, it was all a big cliche. I continued to feel this way until I came back this time, after a long, long hiatus, to have dinner with some of my favourite food buddies.

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Brenda's French Soul Food, San Francisco - OMG Grits!

2011-12-29T08:37:00.002+08:00

Be careful what you wish for, lady.

I didn't know what grits were. I thought they were something "dirtier", like hash, so I was pretty surprised when I got something that basically looked like corn porridge that a baby could eat. But most of all, I was surprised that Brenda could make this pale yellow blob taste so day-m good.

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Peaches of New York - Momofuku Ssam Bar, Ma Peche, Momofuku Milk Bar

2011-12-28T11:55:00.006+08:00

Momofuku Ssam - steamed pork buns

The Momofuku empire needs no introduction, so let's just get stuck into it, starting with David Chang's infamous pork buns. It's the stuff of foodie fairytales. Articles have been published, blogs have been posted, copycat recipes have been written, tweets have... um, been tweeted, all about just how omg-f*cking-fantastic these buns are. As much as I tried to stay away from the hype of that kind of literature, I was also here because of it.

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18th Street is a Food Street - Delfina & Bi-Rite Creamery, San Francisco

2011-12-27T23:33:00.001+08:00

Here I am, back onto my USA/Copenhagen/Amsterdam trip posts. Looking back, I didn't eat enough. (The blogger side of me disagrees - way too much blog material to type up). Throughout my time in San Francisco, I was utterly, horribly jetlagged like I'd never been before. I managed to get to Delfina - famed for their pizza but we went for the restaurant option next door. Fatigue got the better of me (trying to drive on the wrong side of the road didn't help) so I didn't check beforehand whether we could have pizza and normal mains (no, you cannot). I even forgot to charge my electronic devices - like my camera. Hence the blurry iPhone photos and the small meal. Bad, bad blogger.

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Eat to Give - La Parole, a Social Enterprise

2011-12-26T00:32:00.001+08:00

Canapes

I had the good fortune of being invited to a Christmas dinner at a restaurant that was right under my nose all along, but never tried - La Parole in The Pemberton in Sheung Wan. I met friends, old and new, which is always fantastic, but the best part was that I got to learn more about La Parole. If you read French (or decide to use Google Translate, duh) you'll know the name means "speech". Weird name for a restaurant, right? Well, not really when you realise La Parole is a social enterprise that supports Benji's Centre, which helps children with speech disorders from low-income families receive quality speech therapy services.

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Noma, Copenhagen. The World's "Best Restaurant"...

2011-12-19T01:00:00.004+08:00

"Was it good?"

Everyone (who is foodie/geeky) has been asking me this since I got back to Hong Kong.

"It was interesting," has been my default answer, as a way of hedging my argument (and buying time to give it some more thought).

I want to just blurt, "no, the food wasn't the best I've had" but I think Noma deserves more than that (honest as that was). I've been putting off this post because I've been having an internal argument with myself about this, and the other obvious fact that it's been named "World's Best Restaurant" by the S. Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants award two years in a row.

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Saturday Farmers' Market at Crossroads, Tuen Mun

2011-12-11T16:07:00.004+08:00

Roselles (aka hibiscus), leaves intact

The weather in Hong Kong has been beautiful these couple of weeks. Crisp, sunny, temperatures hovering below 20C... The perfect kind of weather for market-going.

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Vegas for Vegans - Pura Vida

2011-12-05T17:30:00.003+08:00

Black bean burrito

If you've been reading posts about my recent travels (thank you!), you'll know that my main travel companion, T, is vegetarian on the 1st and 15th of each lunar month. We happened to be in Vegas on one of these days - you'll know that we had dinner at Bartolotta, and that the Wynn is vegan and vegetarian friendly. But when I decided to set our GPS to Pura Vida, I had no idea it was a vegan "bystro". It was just sort of on the way to the outlets (I don't gamble, but I use/lose my money in other ways). In fact, T didn't even have to be vegetarian that day. The reason we came was because I saw pictures of pancakes on Yelp. Pancakes and shopping! How delightfully frivolous!

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Geist, Copenhagen - late night New Nordic

2011-12-02T12:30:00.002+08:00

Suckling pig with artichoke

When you try and Google "late night dining in Copenhagen", you get websites with lists of restaurants that include names like Pasta Basta and Ricepaper (for a Thai restaurant...). No offense, they might be fabulous, but I didn't fly all the way to Copenhagen to eat Thai. If you're a psychotic foodie, you'll know I'm here almost exclusively for New Nordic. Lucky for jetlagged me, Geist is open for dinner till 1am daily.

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é by Jose Andres - Avant Garde-ism in Brash Las Vegas

2011-11-24T08:41:00.003+08:00

Stairway to... Jose?

Jose Andres, a name not quite as well known outside of the US as Mario Batali or Thomas Keller, but within, he's been on the scene a long time, getting people to stop and look (and taste) avant garde Spanish. He's an elBulli alum (almost everyone doing avant garde is nowadays, no?) but that's about all I knew. When I told people I was going to Vegas, gourmet traveller kindly sent me a very detailed email of everywhere they went and heard about on a similar trip (SF > Big Sur > Vegas). One that caught my eye was é by José Andrés. Many people in the US know him by his other restaurant, the super-experimental Minibar in D.C.

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Bartolotta - There's an ocean in Las Vegas (for vegetarians too)

2011-11-23T07:15:00.002+08:00

Mushroom ragout tagliatelle

Being vegetarian in the land of steakhouses and poker seems counter-intuitive, but is entirely possible. Funny that I should even be thinking about it, as (clearly) I'm not virtuous enough to be vegetarian, but best-friend-T is doing the vegetarian-on-the-1st-and-15th-of-the-lunar-month thang, so there we were, in Vegas, on the 15th of the 10th month of the lunar calendar.

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Red Door Cafe - Eclectic San Francisco, but what did you expect?

2011-11-12T02:31:00.008+08:00

I suppose cliches and stereotypes all exist for a reason - a significant number of people who are seen as part of a particular "group" do indeed have similar qualities. San Francisco's stereotype, as a city, is probably hippy, eclectic and gay, so why should one be shocked when they arrive at Red Door Cafe?

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Coi Restaurant - San Francisco Sophistication

2011-11-11T11:15:00.011+08:00

So you might have heard that I recently quit my job to ~~bum around~~ go freelance and work on some passion projects. Well, before all that, I decided to reward my newfound unemployment by spending a nice thick wad of cash on travelling. I'm currently in Vegas, but my first stop was San Francisco, so let's start there.

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