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Day Five: Good Goose and Bad Wine
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January 25, 2007
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« Day Five: Duck tongues and Bbq pork | Main | Day Six: Thai food? In Hong Kong? »
Another thing on my list to try in Hong Kong is goose. Goose is
relatively expensive to buy in the U.S., but the few times I've had it,
I've really enjoyed it. I'll never understand American's relationship
with bird meat: we eat massive amounts of chicken, a relatively
flavorless bird, factory-farmed to be even more flavorless and
uninteresting. For special occasions, we pick the turkey, a bird
that's difficult to cook and not the tastiest choice, and then we've
bred them to maximize the breast size at the expense of flavor
interest. Many other cultures have made more interesting choices:
duck, goose, guinea hen, capon...the list goes on.
Stephen and company have recommended Yung Kee for our goose-related pleasure. It's very famous for its goose; in my pre-trip investigations its name came up two or three times. But many assert that it's not the best so much as a standard by which others are judged; a convenient benchmark.
Having no reference point, we are perfectly happy to go. Yung Kee is a huge restaurant in the Central district, right on the edge of Lan Kwai Fong. It's interesting to me how massive Chinese restaurants can be and still be considered upscale. In the U.S., as prices and acclaim go up, restaurants tend to get smaller.
We don't know how much goose to order. A whole goose is relatively expensive, but a half a goose seems like it might not be enough for two hungry people. We decide to bite the bullet and order a whole goose.
When the waiter arrives and I tell him so, he shakes is head. "Too much," he says. "Too much food."
"Half goose?" I propose.
"Too much." He points to the "Regular Portion", which is approximately 1/3 the cost of a whole goose. We shrug and order the Regular Portion.
The waiter asks us if we want any vegetables. He reads off a list, and I pick one that sounds unfamiliar. He asks me if we want _____ on top, some word that I do not understand. I nod my head yes. I also order a glass of the only red wine they have by the glass. It's a Crozes-Hermitage of some sort. It's not very good.
The goose arrives some time later. The skin, I note, is not perfectly done as the skin on the Peking duck was. The meat is dense and flavorful, but it's also chewy. Joe notes that it has been sliced with the grain instead of against it. We both wonder why this was done.
The word that the waiter said that I did not understand, it turns out, was "crab". We are served a mound of perfectly cooked greens, atop which sat mounds of crab in a creamy sauce. The greens themselves are delicious; I wish I knew what kind they were, on the offchance that I could get them in Chinatown. They'd be a great vegetable to serve at a dinner party. And the crab...well, a little crab makes everything taste better. Unexpected but delicious.
We leave the restaurant a little bit unsatisfied, though. I think the Regular Portion is a reasonable amount of goose if you're ordering a few other dishes; that's probably what's expected.
After a bit of wandering around the Central district, we decide to head back to the hotel and go to the little wine bar that's a couple of doors down and get a nightcap.
Juliette's is in a nice space, on the first floor (or, "second floor" as we call it in the U.S.), away from the hustle and bustle of the ground level. There's a lot of space, though it still seems intimate, and the bar staff seems very nice. So what's missing? The wine. The by-the-glass list was an accumulation of cheap bottlings from around the globe, the sort of stuff that you might expect in a very cheap restaurant Stateside. Joe and I both had a glass of Chenin Blanc that neither of us liked.
"I don't think I need another glass of bad wine," Joe said after we'd managed to finish. I agreed.
Hong Kongers have a very curious relationship to wine that I will explore in a later entry.
January 25, 2007 in Hong Kong | Permalink
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Comments
The US isn't so bad; for REALLY special occasions, we make a Turducken!
Posted by: Reca at Feb 2, 2007 8:29:47 PM
I liked the portion where you nodded for _____. I was nodding myself (for _____, not for the familiar crustacean I guess) as I read it. :)
Posted by: shoeseal at Feb 3, 2007 10:32:04 PM
