Hong Kong « Healthy and Sane

Entries Tagged as 'Hong Kong'

Kowloon – last night in HK

March 2nd, 2009 · 12 Comments · Eating out, Hong Kong

We’re leaving Singapore tomorrow morning! I can’t believe our vacation is over! It’s kind of sad but we’re also ready to come back home. So we’re not completely sad I’ll do a recap of both HK and Singapore in a different post, but here is a little bit of what we did on our last day in HK…

On our last day in HK we crossed the river and left Hong Kong island to check out Kowloon. It was only 1 stop on the metro but there was a world of difference between the 2 islands! Immediately upon stepping off the metro, we were attacked by touts trying to sell us fake watches, purses and get us to order tailored suits. It was extremely annoying so we quickly got off the main road and instead enjoyed the “real city” off the beaten path.

Oh, I started the morning with one of my yogurt parfaits (bought plain yogurt in the supermarket, an apple on the street, and added a bunch of stuff I brought from home). The plain yogurt here has sugar in it. Weird.

yogurt with apple slices, 1/2 TJ's pb granola bar, Archer Farms trailmix

We checked out the museum of Hong Kong history. It was free that day (all museums are free on Wednesdays there) so we took a few hours looking around and got out. It was the perfect amount of time because we didn’t just walk around aimlessly “just to get our money’s worth”. Here I am in a staged tea shop in the museum… it really looks like the real thing here!

Tea house at the Museum of HK History

Here is Adam in an old tram. His head is hitting the ceiling!!

Adam in an old HK tram

And then we got hungry and found this beautiful food court in one of the malls…

Food Republic

After much considerations I ordered the rice noodles with sour and spicy sauce. The name sounded a little boring, but this dish was anything but. It was amazing and super spicy. After just licking my chopsticks, my eyes started watering and I send Adam to buy us some waters! We split this big bowl. I don’t think I’ve ever had a noodle soup like this before and I’ll definitely be on the lookout for them in the US. This was spectacular!!

Rice noodles with sour and spicy sauce

And for dessert (of course I got dessert!) we went to Bread Talk and I got this little bun. It tasted like a dinner roll with chocolate paste inside and chocolate ganache on top. Very yummy and definitely not too sweet but the perfect amount of chocolate.

Bread Talk choco ganache

Inside of the choco ganache roll

Some pics around Kowloon…

park in Kawloon

Finally this looks like China!

Kawloon

We stopped by the beautiful W Hong Kong hotel and got some drinks. The pictures of the decor didn’t come out We were starving so this bowl of cashews got destroyed in seconds (mostly by me )

cashews at the W HK

I ordered the beachbomber: rum, lime, peach and pineapple splashed with a hint of mint. Best drink so far… yum!

The beachcomber cocktail

And finally the highlight of the night (Adam says it was the highlight of the vacation for him!) – our dinner at the Temple Street night market. It’s funny how much we love super fancy dinners and then really enjoy dinners like this one. Here is most of the dinner, in pictures. We had a table on the sidewalk of the market, were surrounded by people of all ranks and races… and everyone had a blast! The food was secondary, although it was still pretty good.

dinner decor

Adam at Temple St night market

our restaurant

our drinks of choice

me with my beer

our "napkins"

spicy prawns with chili peppers

Chinese eggplant in garlic sauce

me eating my eggplant

bakery

chocolate roll

We took the star ferry back to Hong Kong island, just for the views. It was the perfect way to end a wonderful day.

view of HK from the star ferry

All right, I hope you enjoyed this post. The lights are off here. My husband is already asleep. I am NOT looking forward to another 30 hours of traveling back home tomorrow, but I guess it’s time. See you back in Boston (more vacation recaps to come)…

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Zuma – a fancy dinner in Hong Kong

February 28th, 2009 · 10 Comments · Eating out, Hong Kong, restaurant reviews

We’re in Singapore! Sorry for the lack of posting for the last few days. We’ve had technical difficulties here but looks like everything is working now. Singapore is pretty awesome. I’ll tell you all about later… let’s backtrack a bit back to Hong Kong and a super fancy dinner we had at Zuma on Tuesday night

Zuma is just the kind of place my husband and I love. It’s modern but not futuristic/space-like and it serves fantastic food. We were pretty excited about it, because our top restaurant experiences have been at Nobu in NYC and Oishii in Boston (both on par with Zuma in Hong Kong). I was a good girl and saved my appetite for the meal. There is so much good food in Asia, sometimes it’s hard to control yourself, but there is nothing worse than shelling out big bucks on dinner when you’re not even hungry. Oh I was hungry by the time we got there!

In fact I was so hungry that when upon sitting down the waiter offered to serve us some edamame “while we’re looking through the menu” I jumped at this “brilliant suggestion.” Unfortunately the second I actually started looking through the menu, I realized that it would be a waste to fill myself on these babies, as delicious as they were. Here are a few pics of the decor (it was dark in there so the pictures definitely don’t do the place justice…).

Zuma decor

The hubs looking through the menu (I was trying to take more pics of the decor without being too obnoxious but it didn’t work )

Adam at Zuma

And the edamame… I picked on it for a bit but then put it on the farthest spot of the table so that I wouldn’t fill up on it.

Zuma edamame

We asked for water and were served a bottle of Voss. At $10 USD for the bottle, it was actually really annoying given that HK has drinkable tap water. Oh well. I also ordered the Rubabu cocktail: rhubarb infused sake shaken with 42 Below vodka + fresh passion fruit. Yum!

Zuma cocktail

Then the food started sprinkling in. First up: thinly sliced seabass with yuzu, truffle oil and salmon roe. The whole dish was spectacular! I ate 3 of the fish pieces and both of the eggplant “toasts” with caviar (my husband doesn’t like caviar)! The eggplant was marinated and was the perfect vehicle to scoop the caviar. The whole dish was so fresh! The yuzu sauce (I’ve never heard of it before this dinner) was a little sour and went really well with the mild flavored seabass. Mmm. I want more right now!

Zuma small plate

Then we got 2 orders of maki (we split them). In the front here you see the zuma chirashi maki – salmon, hamachi and seabass with avocado and sesame-lime sauce.

Zuma maki

The other maki was the dynamite spider roll – softshell crab (warm) with chilli mayonnaise, cucumber and wasabi tobiko sauce.

dynamite spider roll

Both rolls were delicious but nothing special, honestly. Oh, after finishing our cocktails we got a bottle of wine. I probably had around 2 glasses throughout the night.

red wine

Best part – the entrees. I ordered their specialty (I think copied from Nobu) – miso marinated black cod wrapped in hoba leaf. I’ve had Nobu’s miso cod and I remember enjoying it, but I can’t remember which one is better. I’d say it was at least on par with Nobu’s. Sweet and flavorful, perfectly cooked. It was melt-in-your mouth delicious. I love when fish tastes like this!

miso marinated black cod

I gave Adam a few bites of this and in return he gave me a few bites of his dish. It was also very delicious! I’ve never had beef marinated in sweet soy. I’ll look for this now at restaurants – it perfectly sweet but not too sweet. The dish was supposed to be spicy but neither one of us thought it was. It was however excellent!

spicy beef tenderloin

And finally dessert – I was so excited for this one! I haven’t had a really chocolaty dessert so far in Asia, and this sounded just perfect! Warm chocolate cake is my favorite!! Here it is (a small scoop of ice cream with a sesame cracker is hiding in the background).

warm chocolate cake with passion fruit center

Mmm, look at that passion fruit oozing out!

passion fruit center closeup

It was very yummy but not chocolaty enough for me! The dark chocolate bars I brought with me have been the only ones able to truly fill my chocolate cravings. Adam loved this dessert and definitely ate 1/2 of it! I usually don’t like sharing my desserts but he was too quick with his fork

And this ends this recap of Zuma. If anyone ever goes to Zuma (there is one in London and Dubai I think) I’d recommend skipping the maki and getting another small dish or appetizer instead. In any case, we had a really great time. I love fancy dinners!

We’re chilling in our hotel room right now in Singapore. The heat got to us and we need to recover a bit. I’ll probably do 2 more posts on HK before moving on to Singapore. We are having a great time here! I can’t belive mid 90’s is the temperature they have during the winter!!!

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Venetian Macao

February 25th, 2009 · 10 Comments · Eating out, Hong Kong, Uncategorized

After dim sum on Monday we decided to make an impromptu trip to the Venetian in Macau. My hip was still bothering me, so we figured this would be a less walk intensive day so I could recover a bit. Macau is the second special administrative region of the Republic of China (with Hong Kong being the other one). The Venetian hotel and casino was of a particular interest to us, so we took a one hour ferry ride straight to the hotel (well there was a short bus ride to the hotel from the port) and spent the rest of the day there. Fun facts about the Venetian Macao (from Wikipedia)…

The 10,500,000-square-foot Venetian Macao is modeled after its sister casino resort – the The Venetianin Las Vegas – and is the largest single structure hotel building in Asia and the 4th-largest building in the world by area. [The 1st largest building in the world in the Dammam airport in Saudi Arabia, the 2nd is the Aalsmeer Flower Auction in the Netherlands, and the 3rd largest is terminal 3 of the Beijing International Airport] This thing is bigger than airport terminals!!!
The main hotel tower was finished in July 2007 and the resort officially opened on August 28, 2007. The resort has the largest casino space in the world with 550,000 square feet, 3400 slot machines and 800 gambling tables), 3000 suites and a 15,000 seat arena for entertainment/sports events.

And of course similar to Hong Kong the place has lots of lots of shopping (here is a link to just shops at the Venetian hotel!!!!) + there is more high end shops at the Four Seasons (attached to the Venetian).

So the plan was to do a little gambling, a little shopping (or at least window shopping) and go to a cirque de soleil show, Zaia, at night. Sounds like fun, right?

I had a 100 calorie chocolate bar on the ferry there…

TJ's 100 calorie bar

And upon arrival at the Venetian had the best taro green tea with milk bubble tea. Yum! Love the purple color!!

taro green tea with milk and tapioca pearls

My husband had a Macao beer

Adam with Macao beer

me at the Venitian

The Venetian is really beautiful. We thought it was fun that we’ve been to the original casino in Vegas and of course Venice in Italy!

the great hall at the Venitian

That’s one of the bathrooms… they all had gold framed mirrors. Very fancy!

bathrooms at the Macau Venitian

champagne bar Venitian

Then we got a little hungry and got a few snacks. What you see here is a bunch of delicious looking buns with pork and chicken. Unfortunately they were all filled with onions and I almost gagged after trying one of them. Eww eww eww. I hate onions!!!

bbq pork stuffed bun

bbq pork rolls

chicken mini pie

So the only way I knew to get rid of the onion taste in my mouth is to get something sweet. I got this “mango pancake” – at least that’s what the sign said. This did not resemble pancakes at all, but was still pretty good (and better than onion filled pastries!!).

mango pancakes

It had kind of like whipped cream inside with a few bits of mango. I wished there was more mango there. I ate one of these balls and shared most of the other one with Adam. He loved them

inside of mango pancakes

And then we realized I still hadn’t had any alcoholic drinks on the vacation. That had to be remedied. We went to a bar I had a few cashews…

bar snacks

Tried the mango bellini tini, but it was nasty.

bellini tini

So I had my husband’s white wine instead. Actually I didn’t feel like that either, so I only had a few sips.

white wine

After a little bit of gambling and a whole lot of window shopping (the place was HUGE!!!) we decided to have a quick dinner at the food court. Oh did I mention that Zaia was off on Mondays? Boo!!! I was so sad because we were really looking forward to the show. I guess we’ll have to see it next time we’re in Hong Kong

Here is where Adam got his dinner. He really wanted to get some hanging goose…

hanging meat

roasted goose

I had a bite of this (Adam’s goose above) but it was filled with bones and I didn’t much care for the sauce. He liked it. I got a Korean noodle dish… and it completely inedible. It smelled foul the second I got it so I was apprehensive. I took a tiny bite and threw the rest away immediately. I really hate wasting food so it was hard, but seriously I could not stomach this thing. This was the first (and only thing so far) on this trip that I thought was truly disgusting (sorry if any of you are Korean and love this dish!).

glutinous rice with korean spicy sauce

So I went to a different vendor and got beef stir fry with noodles. It still had onions (no one here knows the world “onions” when I ask) but I could pick them out and ate about 1/2 of this dish.

stir-fried noodles with beef strips

And that was my food for the day. We had a really fun time but next time, we’ll definitely check the schedule for Zaia before we go! There are also a bunch of other casinos, restaurants and museums on the other side of Macao so we’d probably explore there as well.

We’re off to check out from our hotel. Only 1/2 day left here in Hong Kong. So sad. We really really love it here! Seriously, we kind of want to move here! But that’s ok, we are arriving in Singapore at midnight. I have a feeling we’ll really love it there too! See you later, bloggies. I hope we have wireless in our hotel in Singapore (I think we should).