As Chef Christian Yang takes an appreciative sip of his tea at Hong Kong’s 92-year old Lin Heung Tea House, the dozen people on his food tour do the same. Only they are drinking tea they made themselves, seated at their own desks, scattered all over the world.
Despite COVID-19, this year’s Hong Kong Wine and Dine festival is bigger than ever. Spread over five weeks, the festival aims to champion the food and wine industry, which has been struggling due to the pandemic.
The Gourmet at Home programme offers a curated list of takeaways and delivery menus from luxury hotels for Hong Kong locals: an afternoon tea hamper by the Ritz for instance, with smoked salmon rillettes, spiced cookies, raisin scones and more. The festival also includes an online cellar, offering 442 wines from all over the world.
However, the biggest draw this year are 34 free livestreamed masterclasses, hosted by Hong Kong’s most celebrated chefs and mixologists. This weekend, for instance, chef Ronald Chau, of FAM, will demonstrate how to make Sichuan style stewed Mandarin fish fillets, while chef Uwe Opocensky from Petrus at the Island Shangri La teaches participants to make his shallot tarte Tatin with truffles and comte sauce, and chef Manav Tuli from CHAAT, Rosewood Hong Kong, cooks a Punjabi dhaba chicken curry.
A salmon dish at the festival | Photo Credit: Special arrangement
Popular with Indian tourists, Hong Kong received 3,37,997 visitors from India last year. Puneet Kumar, director, South Asia and Middle East at Hong Kong Tourism Board, says they decided to stage the decade old festival in a “brand new ‘online + offline’ format” to sustain global interest in the event and boost the local economy without compromising on the health and safety of exhibitors and participants.
Puneet says the first 12 masterclasses, on November 21 and 22, attracted around 1,70,000 views. He adds, however, that dining offers from hotels and restaurants also proved popular with Hong Kong locals, with some selling out on the first day, demonstrating that offline events too had enthusiastic takers despite the pandemic.
On the ground
While the virus has evidently had a powerful impact, Hong Kong is fighting back. Back in Lin Heung Tea House, famous for its dim sum trolley, which usually draws a large, animated crowd of diners, it is unusually quiet. Between teaching his virtual tour group how to brew tea, Chef Christian appreciatively eats shrimp dumplings. In the background servers hover in masks while a relaxed elderly customer reads his newspaper.
The tour continues through the Kowloon Soy Company, offering traditional, artisanal, naturally fermented sauces alongside large jars of fermented tofu, salty duck eggs and dry tangerine peels.
Chef Christian walks though the business district, explaining how busy it gets in the evenings, with woks on high flames and “guys in tailored suits sitting on plastic stools, eating the most delicious sea snails in black bean sauce”.
Then, he introduces viewers to chef Dai Lung, creator of one of Hong Kong’s most iconic dishes, sorrowful rice.
Here roasted pork belly is marinated in a heady blend of rose wine, with sesame sauce, oyster sauce, fermented bean curd, red bean curd and cinnamon, then served on rice with perfectly fried eggs, sunny side up. In 1996, the dish featured in a movie, The God of Cookery, directed by Stephen Chow, and has inspired both fine dining and street food ever since.
Stating that he has been a chef for 58 years, chef Dai Lung explains how Stephen challenged him “to take a common dish and make it special”. The secret, he says, while taking a festival master class, is an obsession with high quality ingredients. The most charming discovery, however, is when he unveils the recipe for his secret sauce: fry grated onions, then add light soy sauce, dark soy sauce, sugar and “Maggie seasoning.”
Like sorrowful rice, the festival’s strength, despite being held in a difficult year, is its alluring blend of luxury and easy accessibility. Winding up his tour at the local wet market, Chef Christian shows viewers how to check the quality of an egg, by holding it up against a light bulb (“If it is cloudy, it is old. Do not buy it.”).
It’s all a metaphor
He waxes eloquent about how much Hong Kong loves eggs. “Especially tea eggs, which are stewed in their shells in a marinade of star anise, soy and tea leaves for many hours,” he says, explaining how cracks in the shell leave a distinctive pattern, and infuse the eggs with flavour.
He concludes thoughtfully, “We have a saying here: Life is like tea eggs — it tastes better only if there are cracks.”
Log onto the Hong Kong Wine and Dine festival at https://winedinefestival.discoverhongkong.com/eng/