Tim Ho Wan at Olympian 2

Posted on 12 January 2014 by christao408

One of my regular stops in Hong Kong is dim sum at Tim Ho Wan. The Michelin star recognized restaurant has opened several branches in the past few years and the original hole-in-the-wall Mongkok branch closed last year due to rent increases. On the most recent visit, we dined at the newest Tim Ho Wan branch at the Olympian 2 complex in Kowloon.

The new location is a bit of a challenge to find, as it is an exterior restaurant and so you enter the interior of the mall from the MTR system and then have to find your way outside and around the building. Not too difficult, though.

The interior of this branch is larger and brighter than any of the others, which means that the wait (which can be an hour or more at some locations like the Airport Express station at IFC) is much more reasonable. The four of us were seated in about fifteen minutes. The other benefit of the bright lighting is that pictures can much more easily be taken!

Speaking of which…

On the left are steamed pork spareribs with black bean sauce. On the right are steamed beancurd skin rolls filled with meat and vegetables.

On the left is steamed rice with chicken and Chinese sausage. On the right are pan-fried daikon radish cakes.

On the left are the famous baked buns with barbecue pork – these I could eat several orders of. On the right are deep fried glutinous rice dumplings filled with minced meat. Hard to tell from the outside but both were filled with lots of delicious food.

On the left is an interesting dish: quail eggs in dumpling wrappers! On the right is glutinous rice wrapped in a typical “bao” bread and steamed.

I didn’t take pictures of everything because dim sum just doesn’t photograph all that well. But we found the food to still be of a very high quality both in terms of ingredients and preparation. Dishes arrived quickly and service was efficient, if not particularly friendly.

In the future, this is the location I’ll return to for great dim sum while in Hong Kong.

Food in HK – Another Tim Ho Wan Location

Posted on 21 September 2011 by christao408

In April 2010, Tawn and I had the opportunity to visit Tim Ho Wan, the Michelin star winning dim sum restaurant in the Yau Ma Tei area of Hong Kong. When you hear “Michelin star” the normal image is of a big, swanky restaurant. Tim Ho Wan is quite the opposite, a modest twenty-seater emphasizing their food and little else. Because of the chef’s success, a second location was opened in Sham Shui Po, the fabric district in Kowloon. While in Hong Kong earlier this month, we stopped in for a visit.

Tim Ho Wan

(Second Location)
9-11 Fuk Wing Street
Sham Shui Po
Kowloon
‎

Food: Amazing
Service: So-so
Ambience: None
Price: Bargain

Located roughly equidistant between the Sham Shui Po and Prince Edward MTR stations, the second location of Tim Ho Wan is fairly easy to get to. Recognizing it will be a bit more challenging if you don’t read Chinese – there is no English signage. However, the street it is on seems to have no other restaurants, and most of the time you will see a queue out front, so that’s your clue that you are in the right place.

There is also a third location now open in a decidedly more upscale and easier to reach spot: the MTR Airport Express Hong Kong station. Look for store 12A on level one. This way, you can zip into the city from the airport on a four-hour layover, have time to eat the Michelin star earning dim sum, and then head back to the airport!

We headed to the restaurant about 11:00 am on a weekday, sneaking in between the morning crowd (the restaurant opens at 8:00) and the lunch crowd. That meant no wait for us, although just thirty minutes later the other tables quickly filled up. This second location is probably three times larger than the first, so waits are reportedly much shorter than at the first location, where waits longer than an hour are common.

As for the food, it was still very good but I would dare say the quality and care of preparation is lower than we experienced at the original location. And, in one case, the hygienic standards were lower, too.

The cheong fun, wide rice noodles filled with pork, steamed, and served with soy sauce, remain a favorite of mine. Tim Ho Wan prepares them beautifully, with the most delicate and silky noodles I’ve ever had.

Close-up view of the cheong fun, called “vermicelli” on the menu. The dish is just HK$15, about US$2, and even at three times the price, I would classify it as a must-order dish.

Another dish the restaurant is acclaimed for is its char siu bao, or barbecue pork buns. These are baked with a crumb crust on top and have a delightfully flaky texture.

Inside view of the barbecue pork bun. As I understand it, the origin of these bao is that restaurants would use the leftover pork from the previous evening’s banquets as the filling. Of course, that is probably not the case at most restaurants these days. Tim Ho Wan’s are made of very high quality pork and I could eat a few servings of these buns and call it a day.

Another winning dish is what the menu calls the “glue rice dumpling”, or glutinous rice dumpling. Filled with sausage and other goodies then wrapped in a lotus leaf and steamed, this is the most generously-sized item on the menu – about the size of my hand with fingers open wide. The quality of the ingredients is very high and the rice is very aromatic.

The pan fried turnip cakes, another dish that is usually a favorite of mine, disappointed. On our visit to the original Tim Ho Wan location, these cakes were fantastic, with a nicely browned crust and a flavor that comes from only the most seasoned of griddles. In fact, at the original location, this was my favorite dish. Unfortunately, the version at location number two was undercooked and uninspiring.

We made a wrong turn with the steamed beef balls in bean curd (tofu) skin. Commonly nicknamed “Chinese hamburgers”, these meatballs were cooked very rare. While I enjoy rare beef (steak tartare is wonderful), the texture didn’t work well in this dish. Additionally, one of our dining companions found a hair stuck in one of the balls. We brought this to the attention of a server, who replaced the dish but did not offer any compensation. While I know that Hong Kong doesn’t have a reputation for good customer service, the least I would expect at a Michelin starred restaurant (at any decent restaurant, for that matter) is that we not be charged for the dish that had to be replaced.

We headed back on track with the siu mai, steamed pork dumplings with shrimps. These mainstays of dim sum were tasty, although there was nothing particularly impressive about them compared to siu mai I’ve had at a dozen other dim sum restaurants.

Dining companions Tehlin with her daughter. When I ordered, I ordered for four hungry adults, forgetting that a child isn’t going to eat nearly as much. Oh, well, more for the rest of us!

Chris, Tawn, and Chinese aunty.

For dessert, we ordered two types of warm, sweet soup. One was the corn and purple glutinous rice and the other was green peas with sea lavender (a type of fragrant seaweed). Both were tasty but didn’t photograph very well. The third dessert, described as “tonic medlar & petal cake”, was tasty and beautiful. It is a gelatine of dried flowers, probably Chrysanthemum, that was beautifully golden and wonderfully aromatic. This is the type of dessert that is at once very simple – Jell-O! – but also very dramatic.

All told, we had twelve dishes and tea for four, and the bill came out to UK$177, about US$24 for three and a half people. While we did have the hair in the meatball incident and three dishes that were only average, the remaining dishes (especially the cheong fun and char siu bao) were fantastic and well worth the effort to find the restaurant.

Chinese Poetry

Posted on 4 March 2011 by christao408

Checking my Gmail this morning, the daughter of a high school friend and his wife sent me a message. “Hi! Stuck with Chinese homework. Have to write a poem.” I think she was using the chat feature as an excuse not do her homework. “No worries,” I replied. “I can help.”

After a few minutes of thinking, I responded with the following poem. It is Chinese. Kind of.

Chinese Poem

There once was a siu mai

All covered in sauce.

My brother didn’t want to eat it

So I said, “That’s your loss.”

Picked up by my chopsticks

and dunked in some soy,

The tasty steamed dumpling

brought my tummy lots of joy.

That’s all the creativity I can muster today. Have a good Friday.

Food in HK – West Villa

Posted on 25 April 2010 by christao408

The day after joining Chris and Tehlin and their children for a proper Cantonese dinner at Tsui Hang Village, Tawn and I met up with Tehlin and her son Sam for dim sum at West Villa, another Curry Puffy recommended restaurant.

Located in the Lee Gardens Two building in Causeway Bay just a few minutes away from the Times Square shopping center, West Villa is a nicer quality dim sum restaurant. What was interesting about it is that the food, while tasty, isn’t necessarily all that different (or better than) the cheap yet decadent dim sum at Tim Ho Wan. Let’s take a look at the dishes we enjoyed.

Chinese “donuts” wrapped in rice noodle skin. These are unsweetened sticks of dough fried just like donuts. They are often served (unwrapped) with rice porridge called jok.

Chao fun – Rice noodles with shrimp inside with a sweetened soy sauce. Similar in quality to what we had at Tim Ho Wan although I think the noodles were thicker and less delicate here. Compare here.

Deep fried spring rolls. This dish and the next one illustrate the risks when eating dim sum of choosing dishes that leave you feeling heavy and full.

Fried taro paste puffs. Better than it sounds.

The signature West Villa dish – char shu – barbecue pork. These was really meaty and tender. Great flavor.

Tehlin and Sam. Oh, wait! What’s that outside the window? Where did Tawn disappear to?! Ha ha…

Braised veggies, kind of like lettuce. Very tasty. The clay pot lends a wonderful smoky, slightly charred flavor.

Steamed glutinous rice with pork and shitake mushroom in a lotus leaf. Compare this to the version with large slices of pork served at Tim Ho Wan.

Fried fish with a slightly salty and spicy batter. Very light and not at all oily.

Beef “meatballs” sometimes called Chinese hamburgers.

Siu Mai– pork and shrimp dumplings.

Fried pork spareribs with a sprinkling of a salt and white pepper.

Overall review: good quality dim sum with the barbecue pork and spareribs being the highlights. Service was good although there was a fifteen-minute wait even though we had reservations. This wasn’t necessarily the best food we had in Hong Kong but if you are in the area and are looking for good dim sum, West Villa would be a good choice.

Not to Korat

Posted on 2 November 2007 by christao408

This was going to be the get-away weekend: the last weekend before the preparations for the move to the new condo got serious. So Tawn and I were going to drive up to Korat and Khao Yai, about two hours northeast of Khrungthep, visit some property that Tawn’s father owns up there, and explore the self-proclaimed “Gateway to Issan“.

So what would be the one thing that would stop us?

Our designer, who with his globe trotting travel schedule to far away places like Turkey and India, has summoned us to a meeting to discuss furniture. Since scheduling time with him has been so difficult, we must make ourselves available when he is. To be fair, he is a well-known Thai designer, doing many stores and boutique hotels. He’s doing our home remodel as a favor as he’s our friend, certainly at a discounted price, so these schedule challenges are a small price to pay.

Still, we’re not going away this weekend.

Friday night I met Tawn at Paragon to take a look at some furniture at the Martha Stewart Store. Actually, it isn’t the Martha Stewart store, but it is the only store in Thailand authorized to sell the Martha Stewart furniture collection, so the entire store is done up so that you wouldn’t know that it isn’t a Martha Stewart Store.

We go in there frequently to get ideas as it is a style we like. The store was designed by our decorator friend and dressed by him as well, as are many of the furniture stores in Paragon.

The lady who works there is so familiar with us, she just invites us in to have tea. We sit at a dining room table on display in the main room, drinking tea and nibbling M&Ms, like two life size mannequins.

While there, we looked at various catalogs, discussed different pieces of furniture on display, and considered the merits of ordering a US-sized bed versus a Thai-sized one. A king-size bed in Thailand is not a king-size bed in the US.

Khun Nirin – note the carefully crafted PR in this linked story – told us of an experience where two picky customers – a pair of women – spent a half hour lying in one of the beds (under the covers, even) in order to try it out before spending that much money to buy the mattress. It was the middle of the day, other customers were coming and going, and the women just lay there seeing if they’d be comfortable on the mattress for an extended period of time.

If you think about it, it makes sense. Most of us shop for mattresses by lying down for sixty seconds or less.

I ate Halal for dinner at my favorite vendor in the food court. The nice lady there prepares Muslim style food and they have a chicken roti-mataba that is just lovely.

It is a southern Thai dish that takes thin, crepe-like roti and stuffs them with a curried chicken (or beef or lamb) and shallot mixture, then fries it in a pan to crisp the sides a little. The mataba is served with a side salad or cucumbers, shallots and chilies in a rice wine vinegar sauce, along with a spicy green chili sauce.

Not feeling fully satiated, I went haram and ate some pork satay. That was tasty, too, although obviously from another vendor.

Below: Tawn took a dozen takes for this picture at a dozen different settings before coming up with something usable.

As there wasn’t much to watch in the cinemas, we headed home where I was early enough to participate in a conference call with work at 10:00. Which was kind of boring, actually.

Funny food pictures: Above: Ken and Roka clown around at a Japanese restaurant called Yayoi, part of a Japanese chain that is operated here in Thailand by MK Restaurants. They serve you tea in this fun, brightly-colored English teapots with these tiny pink teacups that look to be stolen from a child’s tea party set. Below: Last weekend in the midst of errands we stopped for dim sum at SK Park Hotel, at the Chinese restaurant that Tawn’s whole family frequents. We didn’t check in advance and lucked out that nobody we knew was there.

christao408

The adventures of an expat American who moved to Bangkok for his husband.

Tag Archives: Dim Sum