Hong Kong has many Michelin-star restaurants in places you wouldn’t expect, so it has a reputation for good food. In central Hong Kong, there’s one place, Lan Fong Yuen, where the tables are sticky and the service is actually quite bad. But the food is so amazing that it draws the young, the old, the working class and the wealthy; if you go on the right day, you’ll see people pulling up in Lamborghinis. They serve Yuanyang tea, a milky tea brewed in lengths of material that look like giant socks, and they offer lots of traditional Hong Kong food. For breakfast, my favourite is beef satay with udon. Or you can go more traditional and have instant noodles with satay beef. It’s not the Thai satay you might be familiar with. It’s subtler, more beef-stock flavour over peanut, but completely yummy. If you’re looking for something sweet, the French toast is a must: a golden fried delight that oozes with condensed milk. Or how about an egg, cheese and Spam sandwich, which is a prominent part of the culture there. Down the road, there’s another great place, Kau Kee Food Cafe, which is so well known that there’s always a long queue before it’s even open. It makes the most amazing braised beef in huge pots that have sat on the fire for more than 20 years, creating melt-in-your-mouth meat.
Lan Fong Yuen, 2 Gage Street, Central, Hong Kong; Kau Kee Food Cafe, Ground Floor, 21 Gough Street, Central, Hong Kong.
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