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Posts tagged ‘Culinary Travel’

Jan 5

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Wandering Hong Kong at Year’s End

The server was getting impatient. Hovering over our table, she made it clear from her thinly veiled annoyance that we’d taken a little too long to order our food. Bama and I were having our Boxing Day breakfast at a no-frills cha chaan teng (local diner) in Cheung Sha Wan, a working-class neighborhood of Hong Kong’s Kowloon Peninsula. We’d crossed the harbor to track down Gold Garden Café and its puff pastry egg tarts made to a traditional recipe. “Did they just come out of the oven?” I inquired politely. “No, you’ll have to wait till 11 for that. The ones we have now are still kind of warm.” Read more

Nov 20

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Uzbekistan Eats: Somsas and So Much More

Suitcases propped against a counter in the vaulted departure hall at Tashkent train station, Bama and I wolfed down our own triangular somsas in a paper bag, biting through layers of thin, flaky pastry to get to the fragrant beef and onion filling. This humble breakfast on the go would herald the start of a culinary adventure through Uzbekistan — 14 days spent hopping between the ancient Silk Road cities of Bukhara, Khiva, and Samarkand, along with Tashkent, the country’s modern capital. After years of dreaming about such a trip, we were ecstatic to finally be in Central Asia. Read more

May 11

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On the Food Trail in Bali

There was a time my knowledge of tropical food-bearing flora was so limited, I recognized nothing other than banana trees. Some of that ignorance can be attributed to my upbringing in Hong Kong’s hyper-dense concrete jungle. While holidaying in my hometown in early 2014, Bama laughed when he realized I had no idea a relatively common plant grown in the soil of the city’s outlying islands—and sometimes on urban rooftops—was in fact the papaya tree. Read more