Dining Table Hong Kong Sale
Last winter my friend Chris Cosentino, the chef at San Francisco's lauded Incanto restaurant, left me a voicemail that went like this, lightly edited for style, content, and printability in a family magazine: "Hey Mark, it's Chris. Listen, I hope you're ready for Hong Kong, because we're hitting it running — like, three lunches and five dinners a day, okay? I am not kidding. You better hang on, because it's going to be a rough one. I'm excited, I hope you are, and I'll talk to you later. Bye."
I saved the message, the way I might one of Cosentino's recipes, because, like his food, it is equal parts invitation and dare, turned out with braggadocio, point-blank honesty, and a pinch of mischief. At 40, Cosentino is the leading American practitioner and exponent of what s known as snout-to-tail cooking, a carnivore-centric style that embraces the notion that every single part of an animal should be valued in the kitchen, from the nostrils to the last vertebra, with numerous stops along the way. In the kitchen of Incanto, on his Offal Good food blog, with his salumi operation, Boccalone, in his cookbook Beginnings, and with his various television appearances (including his recent impressive run on Bravo's Top Chef Masters, where he seemed to devour the competition while monopolizing viewers' attention spans), Cosentino celebrates the often overlooked virtues of pig heads, cockscombs, calf brains, lamb tongues, duck testicles, beef tendons, tuna hearts, tripe, and sweetbreads (a.k.a. the gateway offal), elevating them with technique and panache from the shock-value realm of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern to rarefied American cuisine, as refined as it is robust. It's food that is as packed with message as it is with flavor: Old traditions — including the so-called "off cuts" our great-grandparents loved — still have a vital place in modern cooking; if you're going to kill an animal for food, cook every bit of it. Of course, it would all fall flat if the food itself weren't so tasty.
[embed_gallery gid=108 type="simple"]
So when Cosentino invited me to tag along for four days of immersive eating in Hong Kong, one of the most food-fanatical cities on earth, I knew I would be required to keep pace with a particularly insatiable professional appetite — for food in all its varieties, for adventure, for animal parts I vaguely remembered studying in biology class. We had worked together on a TV pilot in the Texas outback, so I already had a sense of his relentlessness. Now I was curious to see how a top-tier American chef skilled in the Italian idiom would handle his first China experience, what he would find fascinating and what he might bring back to his own kitchen. I wondered what kinds of crazy things we'd end up eating — sea slugs? — and how much I might learn from being around Cosentino for a few days.
In the end the itinerary was winnowed to around five restaurants a day, not including the Mandarin Oriental Hotel's vast breakfast buffet, which ranged from dragon fruit and dumplings to croissants. Even so, the long-standing habit of most organisms to eat when hungry was put aside for the purposes of our research, and Cosentino was true to his word: We did hit the ground running. Straight from a nonstop 16 hours inside a metal tube with Cathay Pacific painted on the outside, we chucked back a couple of beers at the Captain's Bar at the Mandarin while a Chinese lounge singer ran through Astrud Gilberto's greatest hits. We then sped our way, close to midnight Hong Kong time, through snaking, up-and-down streets, over to Yardbird, a tiny outpost in the Sheung Wan district devoted to the Japanese craft of yakitori: grilled, skewered chicken, although no description has ever sounded so unequal to the reality. Yardbird, which opened last year, has been called the current It restaurant of Hong Kong, and it wasn't hard to see why. Inside its smoky confines, with diners shoulder to shoulder, chef Matt Abergel, a 31-year-old wonder raised in Calgary, Alberta, and formerly of Masa in New York City, works an oak-burning grill like a virtuoso. His menu is yakitori in all its glory, which, by tradition, means a whole-creature approach perfectly in tune with Cosentino's, each part lightly touched with sea salt or yuzu or miso. The principal dishes included Thigh, Breast, Wings, Neck, Liver, Heart, Gizzard, Inner Thigh, Skin, Knee, and Tail, a round-the-fowl grand tour; the last item — the pope's nose — elicited an exclamation of approval from Cosentino: "Chicken butt on a stick!"
Abergel is one of a number of Western chefs who have gravitated toward Hong Kong in recent years, adding a dash of culinary boom-town to the already burbling melting pot of Chinese, British, and Portuguese influences. Mario Batali, Pierre Gagnaire, Joël Robuchon, and Michael White, to name a few, have outposts here. A local concern called Dining Concepts, meanwhile, specializes in churning out faux versions of famous Western restaurants — Craftsteak, Bouchon, Cecconi's — without the participation of their famous Western chefs, a reminder of China's, let's say, freewheeling frontier spirit. By comparison, Abergel's operation is tiny, a passion project (his sister is a key employee), and the atmosphere is that of an all-night party with food-minded friends ready for the tingle of Sichuan pepper, the singe of charcoal, the yeasty fizz of Hitachino beer. "He's killing it," Cosentino said, as Abergel subjected more and more chicken parts to his flame. In the midst of our jet lag revel, Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto happened to saunter in with a delegation from Japan, including a representative of the fugu industry. Morimoto sent rounds of foie gras and urchin over to our table, which he and his friends then proceeded to more or less drink us under. Welcome to Hong Kong.
And so the trip went, a dizzying glide of flavors and destinations, the city passing by in a blur out the windows of a minivan that had been procured for our passage from one groaning table loaded with goodies to the next. An American's initial impression of Hong Kong is of an Asian New York that has been dropped on top of San Francisco, of density and elevation and cosmopolitanism superimposed on improbable, breathtaking topography. In the Graham Street market the feeling is of Chinatown writ large: a profusion of weird vegetables, tubs holding perfect mauve cubes of coagulated pork blood, and seafood vendors filleting their inventory in the open air, careful to leave intact the shocking white swim bladders. These are dried and reconstituted as "fish maw" in any number of dishes, such as the amazing bean curd fish maw roll at the nearby Lin Heung Tea House, on Wellington Street. Lin Heung is considered the granddaddy of Hong Kong's dim sum parlors; trolleys have dispensed buns, dumplings, and duck feet there since the late 1920s. At 10 in the morning, the teeming fluorescent atmosphere brought to mind an OTB, minus the gentility. The food, however, felt like the best New York or San Francisco dim sum after it had gone through finishing school; the flavors were delicate, fresh, and invigorating, qualities we would encounter again and again in this city, which has access to all the traditions of Asia, the maritime haul of the Pacific Ocean, and a demanding population of unapologetic eaters numbering more than 7 million. At one point Cosentino, whose drive and curiosity kept us going as he furiously scribbled notes and asked questions at every stop, remarked that we were seeing "just a tiny raindrop of what Hong Kong has to offer." But that raindrop contained a veritable culinary universe: the crazy indoor beer garden that is Tung Po, which happens to be as long as a football field and as loud as a goal-line stand, and where young British bankers go to eat fried pig knuckles and squid ink noodles next to Hong Kongers young and old; the old-school polyglot realm of Tai Ping Koon, established in 1860 during the Qing Dynasty, where they serve wings in "Swiss sauce," soufflés, and a succulent roast pigeon, whose brain Cosentino nonchalantly sucked out of its skull; Kau Kee, the noodle shop with perhaps the biggest cult following in the world; Sang Kee, a congee emporium that has posted notices reading stop swearing! in Cantonese, as if to prevent diners from crying out, "Damn, this is great congee!"; Lok Yuen Beef Ball King, which serves bouncy, collageny meatballs in a noodle soup that prompted Cosentino to proclaim, "I would eat this every day"; and Sea King Garden, in the Lei Yue Mun seafood market, where you point to what you want from the tanks full of cuttlefish, lobsters, mantis prawns, crabs, geoducks, abalones, and razor clams, and then it arrives, cooked, at your table half an hour later, along with endless rounds of Blue Girl beer.
Of course, there were surprises everywhere, from the pickled black olives in a smoky dish of fried rice at the vegetarian restaurant in the Nan Lian Buddhist Garden ("This might actually make me a vegetarian," said Cosentino, the noted carnivore) to just about everything on the 16-course tasting menu at Bo Innovation, the El Bulli of the East, where molecular gastronomy meets ancient Chinese tradition. The taro puffs filled with goose liver at Dynasty, a fancy place your upstanding grandparents might take you for Sunday lunch, were like a dim sum dish reimagined at Le Cordon Bleu. Abalone is an addictive flavor you never get out of your mind. And try to find barbecued pork (char siu) like the kind you get at, say, Wah Fung or Joy Hing. The only remedy is to go back. "I will go back," Cosentino insisted. "We're never going to find what we had here, anywhere. It's never going to be the same."
If there's one dish I wish I'd smuggled home it would be, hands down, the char siu bo lo baau — barbecued pork pineapple bun — at Tim Ho Wan, on Fuk Wing Street in Kowloon. Like Yardbird, Tim Ho Wan is the passion project of a Michelin chef, Mak Pui Gor, formerly of Hong Kong's Four Seasons. It is considered the cheapest Michelin-starred restaurant in the world, which is a convenient enough yardstick to allow us to declare it the greatest dim sum house ever created. The bun in question is a crisp golden pastry, sweet on top and scored to resemble a pineapple, stuffed with tangy char siu. Cosentino called it, quite accurately, "the magic bun." We made our way through nearly the entire menu, from pork siu mai jeweled with little goji berries on top to delicately steamed pork tongue to succulent turnip cakes to still more pineapple buns, Cosentino declaring it "the most technically achieved dim sum I've ever had" — all to the tune of about $40 for a party of five.
During a break in the meal, Cosentino was escorted upstairs into the crowded, clanging kitchen to take a place on the line, learning his way around egg custard buns amid fryers and steamers and an amused Tim Ho Wan staff. As he gamely fell in, I remembered random details he had told me at one point or another about his lifelong obsession with food: spilling baby powder on the carpet of his boyhood home in Rhode Island (his background is more or less half Neapolitan and half Mayflower) and attempting to turn it into a pancake; entering an oyster shucking contest at age 18 and being forced to withdraw when he cut his hand. Now, after turns on the Food Network and well out of his Incanto comfort zone, in a strange city with its ancient foodways, here was a top-tier American chef bonding with a Hong Kong kitchen over a shared ardor for dough, for perfect execution, and for pleasing the appetites of other humans. "I'm too slow!" Cosentino shouted. "If I got paid by the piece, I'd be in trouble." He botched a few buns and then a few more. The staff laughed and clapped him on the back. There, there, Mr. American Chef.
Later Cosentino would marvel at encountering in Hong Kong "so much food and so much culture and so many people willing to share." He would go home and begin folding the notes he had taken into new dishes at Incanto, sharing his Hong Kong journey with his own staff, his own diners, his fellow chefs, one flavor or technique at a time. But for now Cosentino was in the moment, and it happened: a perfect egg custard bun from the American! Applause. And then another, and another, and another.
This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io
Source: https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/dining/a845/hong-kong-dining-guide/
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar