Street Snacks

街頭小食

Appears in

Hong Kong Diner

By Jeremy Pang

Published 2017

About

Roadside Barbecue Pits

Hong Kong’s train and metro system is so efficient that it can almost make people forget that there are places to be visited and enjoyed outside the reach of the MTR and overground. Some of the best streetside eating in the city will in fact require you ditching the underground in favour of a minibus or taxi and possibly even some dreaded walking, but in my opinion it’s an adventure worth taking!

Beachside barbecue pits around the Western Country Park can be rented, and along many of the more popular beaches around Sai Kung region you can get all the equipment and pre-marinated food you need to keep the barbecue going. These entrepreneurial restaurant owners have taken note of the true basics of Chinese cooking, where 90 per cent of the work is in the preparation (which they do for you), and the other 10 per cent is there for you to have fun, experiencing the food in a memorable environment: beachside or parkside, circling around a large barbecue pit. And what a great restaurant business it is too. Aside from the immense amount of marinating, there are almost no chefs required to run the restaurants! Genius.

With the food on offer at these barbecue joints, it’s a given that most Hong Kong barbecues will involve quite a few processed foods, such as shop-bought fish cakes, frankfurters (Hong Kongers Love frankfurters), fishballs and meatballs of all kinds to suit the Hong Konger’s love of processed meats and fish. If that’s not your kind of food, however, you can dive straight into the meat section, where you will find fresh marinated steak, ribs, chops, chicken legs and wings, or a whole array of seafood; whatever takes your fancy.

The posher places are also a little more inventive and have straw mushrooms wrapped in thin slices of minute steak, whole garlic tiger prawns on a stick, poached octopus tentacles on a stick, curried tripe on a stick, fresh shiitake on a stick . . . genuinely anything that can, pretty much will be thrown on to a stick when it comes to Hong Kong street food. In Sai Kung, you can actually head over to the pier, where there are fishermen selling freshly caught fish and seafood, pick up what you want and then take it to the barbecue joints to cook up on the fire.

And as the stick-loving street food culture brings us back to the busier streets of Hong Kong, it’s not just the beachsides that embrace the barbecue culture and love of raw fire. There are still some local streetside hot pot places around Kowloon City and Temple Street that have their hot pots cooking on outdoor coal-fired table-top buckets, where the claypots are interchangeable with small table-top grills, allowing you to barbecue whatever you want at your table. During the winter months, when locals are less inclined to sit outside to eat, streetside sweet potato stands pop out of nowhere to warm you up, with their coal pits roasting chestnuts on the top, and a secret built-in ‘oven’ that’s busily slow-cooking a box full of sweet potatoes below. Hong Kong people love to eat simple food like this, where the natural flavour and texture is perfect as it is.