SNAPSHOTS | HONG KONG 2018 | DAY 7

Another dreary morning in Hong Kong means another bowl of congee for breakfast!

After taking the shuttle bus to Mong Kok, we made our way over to Fa Yeun Street Market. The first floor of this building is a wet market, with stalls selling fresh produce, meat, and seafood. When you make your way up the escalators to the third floor, you will find Mui Kee Congee, a third-generation food stall serving up bowls of hot congee to locals.  

With sticky floors, worn tables, plastic stools, and no air conditioning, it's certainly a no-frills type of establishment. At places like these, you know the food must be good since it's the only thing that must be drawing people in.   

My favourite iced lemon tea, per usual.

Between the three of us, we shared a couple bowls of congee, along with a side of youtiao (Chinese long doughnut) and cheung fun (steamed rice rolls). For our congee, we ordered a combination of fish belly, sliced beef, and pork meatball. Only downside with ordering fish belly is all the tiny fish bones, so eat with caution!

The congee was smooth, but I did find it watery. I like my congee on the thicker side so that you can still distinguish some of the rice grains.

Cheung fun is a popular street food in Hong Kong. Plain rice noodle rolls are dressed in a combination of soy sauce, hoisin sauce, and sesame sauce. It's sweet, salty, and nutty. A simple dish but so delicious.

Exploring yet another street market in Mong Kok.

Because of all the rain, it was quite lucky that today was our planned "shopping mall" day. We took the MTR to Diamond Hill, to visit Plaza Hollywood. There was a good variety of stores in the mall. I think I spent most of my money here just stocking up on skincare.

For lunch, we ended up at everyone's favourite fast food chain, the golden arches. It's funny because I rarely have McDonalds at home but I'll always make a point to visit McDonalds at least once in Asian countries. The reason being -- they have so much more cool stuff going on!

The location we went to had a separate McCafe counter, selling desserts like mille crepe cakes and cream puffs. Like .. what?!?!

McWings! I think the United States also sells these, but of course, Canada does not.

One of McDonald's promotions at the time was this flight of four different sauces: Szechuan teriyaki sauce, honey mustard sauce, Singapore curry sauce, and Szechuan kung pao sauce. Aside from the honey mustard which is a pretty standard flavour, the rest were ... interesting. I'll leave it at that.

Last item -- corn pie! Sounds weird, but it was surprisingly good. The filling was like a sweet creamed corn. Don't knock it until you try it!

After lunch, our plan was to go see Nan Lian Garden, located just outside Plaza Hollywood. Unfortunately it was raining really hard, to the point that there was signs about a typhoon warning, so we skipped it and made our way over to our second mall of the day.

 apm is a 7-storey shopping mall located in Kwun Tong that mainly targets a younger demographic.

One of my main missions in apm was to track down BAKE Cheese Tart. BAKE is a Japanese chain born out of Hokkaido. They now have over 40 locations, mainly across Asia. Before Hong Kong, I've come across BAKE twice, once in Tokyo and the other in San Francisco. I never did get a chance to try it while we were in Japan (since we already tried Pablo's), and the shop in San Francisco was still under construction at the time. Third time's the charm right? 

Well, it was certainly worth the wait. In my opinion, it was wayyyy better than the one I had at Pablo's. The cream cheese filling had a mousse-like texture, super fluffy and creamy. The tart shell was crispy but tender, breaking apart easily when you bit into it. BAKE also gets extra bonus points for serving them warm.

For dinner that night, we took the MTR back to Mong Kok. My parents wanted Chinese BBQ so we happened upon Tai Hing, a chain specializing in roast meats.

We definitely over-ordered, since we got an assortment platter on top of an order of roast goose.

The meats were okay, but they satisfied the craving. (I just could've done without the goose head on the plate.)

- CT