A Little in Love with Hong Kong

Over the weekend, I ate blood. I gambled at the temple of tack that is the Venetian. I sweated my ass off running from meal to meal and loved every minute of it.

I never thought of myself as the kind of person who would attempt, let alone enjoy, any of the aforementioned activities. But, then again, I never thought I'd be so enamored of Hong Kong. We were there for only a short trip, but I'm already dying to get back.

"Wouldn't it be great to stay here for a year just to study the food?" I asked, surveying the impossible landscape of skyscrapers jutting out of dense, mountainous jungle. Hong Kong is a city built on hubris.

"There's just so much to learn, so many fantastic ingredients and amazing diversity," I prattled on.

JP nodded in agreement but added a cautionary, "You couldn't really do it, though, could you? It would be hard to pull off."

My reverie broken, I flashed him a hurt, can't-I-have-a-dream look.

We went from watching live razor clams ooze out of their bamboo-reed shells at a market in the morning to eating them, sauteed in a chili-laced black bean sauce, that evening; from gorging ourselves on Portuguese suckling pig and bacalao fried rice in Macau, to sipping molecular cocktails and dining on refined New Nordic cuisine back in Hong Kong; from dainty dim sum at a stylish hidden spot, to down-home and dirty (figuratively, not literally) Chiu Chow cuisine -- goose blood and kidneys, oyster omelettes, steamed fish air bladders.

One of the first meals I cooked once we got back to Tokyo was, naturally, Chinese.

It's been infernally hot here, and, when the temperatures rise, Asians reach for bitter melon, a hearty gourd that looks like a warty cucumber. My parents called it fu-ga, but in Japan it's called goya. One of the classic ways to prepare it is stir-fried with chicken and onions in homemade black bean sauce.


Bitter melon is, as the name suggests, emphatically bitter and thus a tricky ingredient to pair. I'd been hoping to find a nice jukusei-shu aged sake to go it with, but things didn't work out that way and I came home with a bone-dry Tobi-kara from the excellent Mizubasho in Gunma prefecture. Although I wasn't sure how it would go at first, I was very pleasantly surprised. The sake, while light and refreshing on the palate, had the strength to stand up to the strong flavors of the dish. The spice and bitterness of the bitter melon brought out the sweet, ricey tones in the sake. A good match.


I may be a little in love with Hong Kong, but the sake will always make me happy to come home to Tokyo.

On another note, my friend Beau Timkin of San Francisco's True Sake was kind enough to invite me to recommend a sake for his August newsletter. If you're not already a subscriber, get over there and check it out. His newsletter is always a pleasure to read and chocked-full of sake-centric information!