Hong Kong Part II: Sham Shui Po Food Crawl and Hong  Kong at Night

Sham Shui Po is a little off the regular shopping and temple visiting Hong Kong tourist track, but if you’re more interested in eating heavenly pineapple buns (below), spicy noodles, and soup dumplings, this is where to come for a serious food crawl. Just take the impressively clean, fast and efficient HK metro to the Sham Shui Po stop and walk up the stairs, it’s one of the easiest neighborhoods to navigate in the city.

Again, it was very difficult for us to figure out names and exact addresses for our spots in HK, but as every high school dean has said 1,000 times before, if you’re looking for trouble you will find trouble. In Sham Shui Po it is nearly impossible to have a bad or even mediocre meal, be it in a small restaurant or from a street vendor. Case in point, the following egg waffle and coconut bubble tea. Both slammin’ good.

One of the restaurants we were sure to hit up in Sham Shui Po was the Lau Sum Kee noodle shop. It’s been around for a long time, the menu says 1956, and they know how to serve up some crispy crunchy fried noodles and beef in spicy chili sauce just the way I never knew I loved it yet until I came here and ate it. Yum.

 

By the way, if you are visiting Sham Shui Po soon and you are interested in pursuing the noodles with dried shrimp and peanut in spicy sauce, it is on Fuk Wing Street, and here is a picture of what the menu looked like at that restaurant. Regrettably, we don’t read Cantonese so we aren’t able to translate the restaurant’s name into English for you!

 

That night, it rained harder than ever before, but we wielded our umbrellas with great muster and managed to check out the nightly Symphony of Lights show by the water front.

 

We also made our way to the Ritz Carlton Hotel’s OZONE Bar, which sits on the 116th floor of the ICC building, the tallest building in Hong Kong. As you can read about on the sleek and trendy OZONE Bar website it is the highest bar in the world, and there you can find very delicious, very fancy, and very pricey drinks and bites.

 

For the view alone, it’s worth it to check out, even on a night like we were there, when we sipped our gin, fresh basil, green apple, lemongrass, yuzu and basil foam gimlets from within a literal cloud.

We loved the proximity of our hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui to this cool ice cream stand, Lab Made, where they used liquid nitrogen in Kitchen Aide stand mixers to craft each individual ice cream order to perfection before our very eyes.

 

We know it looks a little a little sci-fi gimmicky, but the product is a really creamy, and somehow kind of traditional, ice cream treat. The sea salted caramel flavor was our favorite!

By the end of our three days in Hong Kong, we began to get into the city’s groove. We found moments to appreciate the quirky museums and small temples that appeared around the block and between skyscrapers and high rise buildings.

 

This is inside the Man Mo Temple on Hollywood Street in Sheung Wan.

 

Eating our way around Hong Kong was an incredible way to experience this living city of contrasts. We could have easily spent more time there, but we were ultimately ready to get out of the rain. We were fortunate to be able to access the Cathay Pacific Business Class lounge at the Hong Kong Airport, where we toasted our time in Hong Kong and awaited our next flight… to Tokyo!