Recipes to Explore the Best of Hong Kong’s Food at Home

The restaurants, stalls, and markets I feature in my Street Eats videos are more than Hong Kong icons—they tell a story about the way we eat (catch up on the whole series on the Bon Appétit streaming app or YouTube). You can hear it at their tables, where the chatter between the waiters and patrons is a near-constant hum. “Should I order this? How about these?” “Is it too much? I can’t miss this one.” Witnessing these conversations tells you something special, and specific, about what it means to share a meal here: You feel the place around you as you eat. The food is not just a product of the chef; it’s the natural outcome of a continuing dialogue between the people making food, the people eating the food, and the city we love. Here, I’m highlighting some of my favorite dishes from the show, and sharing the tools and translations you need to make them at home. Let’s eat.

Recipes Steamed Fish at Chan Sun Kee

Cantonese cuisine values high-quality ingredients, with a focus on delicacy, cleanliness, and clarity of flavor. So steaming fish is seen as the best method to highlight the particular tastes of different species. At Chan Sun Kee restaurant, their approach is simple: Start with the freshest possible catch; rub it with salt; cook it right on the platter on which it will be served; and top minimally with aromatics and house-seasoned soy sauce. You should taste little more than the fish itself.

Microwave-Steamed Fish relies on, yes, a microwave to quickly cook large fillets. It may seem like an odd technique, but it takes advantage of the appliance’s heat distribution and trapped steam from the plastic wrap to deliver a flaky and moist fish in minutes, without any lingering cooking odors in your kitchen. Don’t forget the seasoned soy sauce and hot oil drizzle at the end, which gently cooks the scallions scattered on each portion.

Recipes Siu Yuk (Cantonese Roast Pork) at Red Seasons Restaurant

My favorite episode in the Street Eats series so far is the one on these whole roast pigs cooked in an underground inferno. Marinated Cantonese-style with salt and sugar, the pigs are pricked all over to create small holes so the seasoning sinks in before they are lowered into fiery pits. As they cook, the prized “sesame skin” forms: consistent, tiny bubbles that give the pork a crispy and crunchy, but never hard, bite, with succulent meat and rendered fat. Since the government has stopped issuing new permits for firepits, Red Seasons is one of the last spots in the city using them to make siu yuk.

To translate the flavors and textures of a Cantonese-style roast hog into a dish that home cooks can recreate, this Siu Yuk (Cantonese Roast Pork) recipe uses a slab of pork belly and a mostly hands-off oven-and-broiler method. It yields perfectly moist, seasoned bite-size chunks of pork belly—each topped with a puffed crackly hat of “sesame skin.”

Recipes Soy Sauce Chicken at Chukfo Taipan Restaurant

The glistening brown chickens hanging in the window of this Cantonese barbecue are prepared using a low-temperature technique that produces perfectly tender meat with a glossy glaze. First, the skin is blanched to tighten and set its shape. Next, the birds are submerged in extra-large pots filled with fried aromatics and soy sauce. They slowly cook in a process most similar to a braise, first simmered, then left to rest off heat, soaking in the liquid as they do.

Outside of a restaurant kitchen, it’s much simpler to stick to skin-on, bone-in legs for Soy-Braised Chicken Legs, which get the same flavorful treatment as the whole chickens but at a smaller scale. The well-lacquered, juicy meat is deeply savory, and it’s ideal alongside white rice and a ginger-scallion sauce.

Recipes Typhoon Shelter Stir-Fry at Oi Man Sang

Come here for big aromatics and high-octane cooking from chef Keung. This mostly outdoor restaurant is one of the last places in Hong Kong with a license to use kerosene as fuel, which means their woks are some of the hottest anywhere. Typhoon shelter stir-fries basically just mean “spicy fried garlic over stuff,” and almost any ingredient, from sweet corn to tender eggplant to fresh crab, can be cooked in this style. Bring a group and order as much as will fit on the table.

Typhoon Shelter Corn Ribs depend on a short blanch before they’re stir- fried to properly cook through. The real star of the dish is the garlic-packed panko, which adds a layered crunch to juicy corn kernels.

Recipes 3 Hong Kong Essentials

Grab a drink at Mostly Harmless

Ezra Star’s bar focuses on sustainability and community, whether in the form of its “farm to glass” cocktail making or the proudly intimate hospitality. The menu changes almost daily and highlights in-season ingredients in unexpected ways, like in a strawberry- leaf-infused whiskey sour.

Take a hike through Dragon’s Back trail

The best way to see Hong Kong is to hike it. The trails that line the lush hills making up the peninsula and outlying islands show off more than the city’s famous skyline, and at varying degrees of difficulty. Dragon’s Back trail curves through the southeast side of the city, winding through the contours of the mountain’s ridges above the coastline. For something a bit less intense that rewards you with a spectacular, and unique, view of Victoria Harbour, walk (or take public transit) up the Red Incense Burner Summit.

Get inspired at the Mills

One of several urban revitalization projects in the city, the Mills was previously a large fabric- manufacturing complex. Now it houses shops, restaurants, and even an arts and textile heritage center to honor the history of the space. It’s a hub for Hong Kong culture that shouldn’t be missed.