Dinner at Le Du

Teutonic flair

Nothing speaks more to Bangkok’s open-mindeness than its latest culinary crush, haute German cuisine diner, Suhring. Yes, you read that right. In a city home to one of the world’s finest, and fieriest, cuisines, German food is the latest “in” thing. And franky, the restaurant does not disappoint. The meal we ate there was perhaps the best we had in the city: surprising, hearty yet delicate and recognisably German dishes served up with an interesting wine selection in a sprawling Sathorn villa surrounded by tropical greenery.

Bread and heartache

Holey is a stylish-looking artisanal bakery on Sukhumvit Soi 33. I had passed it earlier in the week, and waking up craving crusty European bread, I decided to make my way back. While googling for directions though, I turned up more than I had expected. First of all I was surprised to read that the hipster haven was an import from Bangladesh. In fact, the business is a refugee of sorts – having originally started in Dhaka it opened in Bangkok following a harrowing terrorist attack in 2016. ISIS-inspired militants had burst in, killing 20 customers (after torturing those who could not recite a passage from the Koran, including seven Japanese aid workers). I read this munching on my baguette in the cafe’s stylish and friendly Bangkok space, pondering what would have happened had I been in Dhaka that day. Why had a bread shop been a target? Was it simply a place where foreigners congregated, or was it more an scathing comment on the life of leisure enjoyed by expats in a country where few could afford 100 baht (or the equivalent) for a just-baked bread loaf?  The Bangkok bakery that day was certainly full of the fair and the moneyed, Phrom Phong beautiful people, Australian and European expats. And was I then “the enemy” too? Lots to chew over as I enjoyed my bread and butter.

Food food food

This weekend I tried some interesting new dishes: fatty and delicious pork cooked in spicy Hunanese sauce and served in fresh, doughy bread from Cafe Hunan, a fermented squid paste in a Japanese restaurant (it was called “pirate” on the menu) and this astonishing vegetarian Hainan “chicken” rice at one of my favourite places, Veggie SF. It looked and tasted delicious!

Samsen: Thai food in Wanchai

Samsen is a buzzy and much-talked-about hipster noodle joint, housed in a (pretty good) approximation of a Thai shophouse, relocated from the banks of the Chao Phraya to the backstreets of  Wanchai. Although noodles are the specialty, it was the desserts that proved the real standout – coconut ice cream with sweet corn and pandanus glutinous rice balls in salted warm coconut milk. Yum!

Sweet

Tangy yuzu icecream, served in a frozen yuzu – the higlight of a meal in a faux-Hokkaido restaurant with very un-Japanese florid red wallpaper, loud piano music and a lovely waitress from Cebu, on Friday night.

Eat with your eyes

Hokkaidon at Taikoo Shing.

 

Tropical tastes

  

Ronin

Up in an escalator of trippy flashing eyes to a dinner of hot sake, crispy burdock sticks, succulent yakitori and fragrant ochazuke on a cold Friday night – with a lively conversation on “authenticity” in food. Perfect!

Winter!

おでん, Japanese winter comfort food, which we ate at a cute little Tokyo-style ramen bar we discovered in the “Rat Alley” under the Soho escalator. Perfect for cold nights.

Banh xeo street

Eating cheaply and well is one of the highlights of any Vietnam trip and we feasted on roadside noodles served with pungent vegemite-y fish paste and sweet pink onions. These were delicious, but would leave me knocked out a few hours later with a blazing MSG hangover. We also saw oysters frying on the street, frog, and ate local specialities like the cao lao noodles in Hoi An, thick and springy with crunchy pork crackling in a fragrant broth, or bamboo soup.

In Danang our biggest discovery was the “Banh xeo” street,  an alleyway really, home to rowdy, napkin-strewn restaurants serving the Vietnamese crepes stuffed with beans and shrimps, accompanied by satay sticks of beef.

Afterwards we would walk up to Highlands Coffee, one of the city’s innumerable high-decibel “ca phes” serving evening crowds sugar-loaded coffee drinks and weirdly, absolutely no food.

For dessert, the place to go was AVA, a tiny patisserie in a mouldy little room that served the absolute best chocolate cakes I have ever tasted.

Hoi An: the white rose

 

Cafe society

Camel milk latte at Jethro’s Canteen and kimchi poached eggs at Archie’s.

Melbourne hipster

While back in town, I wanted to see what was new on Melbourne’s hipster strip of Fitzroy. I started with “Easey’s”, a  frankly remarkable bar and burger joint housed in a series of old train carraiges, perched up four flights of grafittied stairs on an innercity sidestreet. Not only is the concept amazing, but the banging nineties hip hop, views, tasy burgers and cute straight bro waiters gave it a fun-time vibe.

 

Around the corner on Smith Street is “Hotel Jesus”,  perhaps the kitschiest of the city’s burgeoning crop of Mexican restaurants, designed by the same team as Bali’s (even more riotous) “Motel Mexicola“.

 

And finally, way down the end of Johnston Street near the river, is “Admiral Cheng-Ho.” The cafe is named after the Chinese explorer ( more often known as Zheng-he) who led a fleet to Africa in the thirteenth century and could hypothetically have taken coffee back to China. Since the closure of “Lawyers, Guns and Money”, a hipster congee and tripe cafe, this is the only Chinese-themed hipster cafe in Melbourne but to be honest, other than the teas on the menu it was mostly standard (and therefore, excellent) Melbourne cafe fare.

Thai style

I popped into Samsen this week, the buzzy new Thai noodle shop opened by a former chef of Chachawan. Located on one of Wanchai’s most atmospheric backstreets, Stone Nullah Lane in the shadow of the Blue House, it is an appealingly laid out little place designed to look like an old Thai shophouse (a look it pulls off pretty well) and named after the riverside district famous for its ferry stop with catfish milling around the pier and flower markets, home to a Catholic cathedral and the little-visited Thai National Library. The Hong Kong version however is packed with throngs of urbane professionals getting down to bowls of Thai street-style noodles. Fun. I’d go back.

 

Iconic

Although I was lucky enough to gorge myself on vogueish Thai food ( care of hot new Bangkok import Soul Food) and a gut-busting Indonesian brunch at one of my favourite spots, Potatohead, the weekend’s most memorable South East Asian meal came courtesy of the Philippines – and more specifically its ubiquitous fast food chain, Jollibee. I finally found the HK branch in Central. For 30 HKD you can enjoy a leg of fried chicken, a burger-shaped patty of rice and a dining room ringing with the sound of Tagalog. Something different!

The perfect long weekend

It started off with sweat and chaos, the sting of sunscreen in my eyes, milling crowds and pushy parents: the annual school sports day.

Then, my muscles aching and nerves shredded, it was time for an evening of luxury. My partner and I had decided to use up some gift certificates for the Mandarin Oriental Hotel’s spa. Sinking into the tiled jacuzzi, in a dimly-lit and windowless warren of plushly carpeted corridors, I exhaled. The steamroom glowed green and red, as plumes of cinammon-scented steam rose out of a rotating metal dish, and a shipping heir and Hong Kong’s representative to the International Olympic Committee wandered in and out. We were massaged in a suite looking out over the harbour, the neon ferris wheel, the-not-so distant Kowloon shore, and then ate figs from a little tray, reclining. When it was over, we sat in the hotel’s lobby, unwilling to leave, while handsome men with rugby player looks wandered in and out. It was a little taste of heaven.

The next day I had some small domestic chores to accomplish – a watch battery to purchase and a key to have cut – and I decided to head to the pushing crowds of King’s Road between Fortress Hill and North Point where I (astutely) surmised I would be able to have these done. While I waited for the key to be cut, I wandered through alleyways and in strange little shabby shopping arcades. There were shops selling software and shoes, tiny glass walled fashion stores in nineteen eighties corridor. In the gloom of the old State Theatre building, rows of brightly lit shops sold boots and slippers in otherwise dank passageways. Old people played mahjong in odd corners. A woman slept in front of a whirring fan.

  

I descended to a subterranean passage filled with smoke from a games arcade, the chatter of Indonesian helpers milling about a domestic work agency and stray cats. This was the home of Sam Kee – a second hand bookstore known as a refuge for alleycats. Felines lay dozing everywhere, on the shelves and on piles of books, and stalked the aisles which were musty with dust and cats’ piss.

That night we went to see a movie, “Don’t Breathe”. It turned out to be terrifyingly claustrophobic and so we followed it up by knocking back a drink at the skyscraper-top gay bar Circo to recover our nerves, looking down over the Causeway Bay streets through big, dark windows.

Finally, there was a delicious dim sum at “West Villa,” an upscale yum cha restaurant also in Causeway Bay serving pulped pomelo skin in shrimp sauce, taro balls and raddish cakes, delicious noodles and almond paste buns, goose webs and turtles, which clambered in a bucket near the entrance.

A quick twilight run over the ridge from Pok Fu Lam to Kennedy Town in the breezy early-Autumn evening, and a perfect Hong Kong weekend had come to an end.

Jet-so Jetsons

Kam Mong, the Wong Kar Wai-esque late-night cha chaan teng I discovered recently in Mongkok’s seedy Portland street sex district has a new attraction:  1950s-style busty robo-waitresses! Expect a full report soon…

Weekend report

So what did  get up to this week? Dinner at the new vegetarian hangout Ovo Cafe in Central, tucked away in a mini-mall with an organic food supermarket and the new incarnation of Maya, another highly-regarded Hong Kong vegetarian eatery.

Saturday brunch: scrambled tofu in caramel with pine nuts, and an overpriced but delicious baguette at Le Pain Quotidien.

At home, reading about philosophy, the Shanghai White Terror and Karl Ove Knausgaarden’s “My Struggle” (not yet finished, and lots to process before I write more on that.)

Dinner with a new Brazilian friend and a good Shatin buddy – steamed fish in blackbean sauce and monkeyhead mushrooms – and then fun, fanciful drinks at Quinary: frothy earl grey martinis and yuan yeung with whiskey-flavoured condensed milk.

A Sunday swim in a murky pool on a warm, late Summer day: the sky cloudy and grey, with a warm breeze blowing. More reading.

Then on Sunday, as we drove in to Yau Ma Tei to see a movie, news of a fire at the city’s fruit market, just a block away from our destination. I had been at the market just the week before: shopping for dragon fruits and longan amid the dangling, flashing lights and the sooty old buildings, dating back to 1913, one with a tree sprouting maturely out of its roof gables.

Although the dust has yet to settle, I’ll be sad if this unique old part of Hong Kong is lost.

Trapped in a traffic diversion, we arrived at the cinema late and did a disorienting dash down the street of fortunes tellers, to the flashing strobe lights and drunken warblings of the pavement karaoke bars.

The movie itself was disappointing: “If Cats disappeared from the world.” The premise was great – a man dying of a brain tumour is approached by the devil who offers to extend his life, on the condition that for every day gained, something precious will disappear from the world…

Sadly though, it was really poorly executed: full of cheesy piano music and clumsy allusions to much better films, like an unnecessary trip to Argentina halfway through, quoting liberally from “Happy Together.”

Disappointed, we went to Temple Street to eat a late supper of Malay Cake and shrimp dumplings at Kung Fu Dim Sum, before back to bed for Monday morning.

 

Three Meals

Expensive but elegant Vietnamese cuisine at Garcon Saigon, off Star Street.

A disappointing meal at Yunnan People restaurant. The rice noodles with tofu were tasty, but I had come all the way to the dreary industrial suburb of San Po Kong for the restaurant’s menu of imported-from-Yunnan bugs: fried crickets, grubs and beetles, none of which were available on the rainy day I visited. Oh well.

And finally, new Kennedy Town favourite Orchid Veggie, with its sea grapes, tasty fried eggplant, mushroom platter (below) and durian cupcakes.

South X Southwest

Some discoveries back on Hong Kong island. For example, who knew that every morning around 7am a makeshift market happens on the Aberdeen waterfront? The Tanka “Boat people” come in to buy vegetables and sell fish. I was surprised to find such an “Asian” scene – old women squatting over fish or leafy greens, spread out on the ground among milling crowds of (also mostly elderly) shoppers – in my own backyard. Also, a new cafe in Shek Tong Tsui, Artisan Garden above, and below sea-grapes from the tasty “Orchid Veggie” vegetarian fusion restaurant in Kennedy Town.