Sai Kung's Seafood Street

December 2016 was the third warmest year on record in Hong Kong and yesterday's forecast temperature was up to 24 Celsius (that's mid-70s Fahrenheit) so we headed to the fertile coast of Sai Kung peninsula for a seafood dinner.

Sai King is known as Hong Kong's back garden, equally renowned for its scenic hiking trails and its beautiful coastline with pristine white sandy beaches. The 'seafood street' of Sai Kung town is famous for its many seafood restaurants and when we arrived at 4pm the waterfront was bustling with hungry visitors.

You can either order your seafood from a restaurant menu or buy it from the many small boats (sampans) congregating at the two piers or tied up to the harbour wall.

At the first pier there were up to a dozen sampans tied up with small plastic boxes of fish and shellfish, some ready priced - but haggling expected!

 
The variety of fish and shellfish was amazing, all alive and apparently in good order. Each sampan had a fisherman/seller awaiting offers and ready to negotiate. Everything from octopuses to shrimps to clams was on show.

Our party, led by CK, who has spent a lifetime in the catering trade and knows his onions (and his grouper), decided to patronise one of the boats moored against the harbour wall.

The particular  boat we bought from had almost one hundred water-filled containers in which were a huge variety of seafood. We ended up buying prawns, razor clams, baby geoduck (a species of large clam), regular clams, two kinds of crabs (one the chunky red backed kind, the other red and white with long spindly legs), fish, and the largest prawns I have ever seen - mantis shrimps (also known as 'pee-ing shrimps' in Cantonese since they shoot a jet of water when picked up!)

There was also a boat that specialised in preserved seafood, sun-dried fish and clams etc, wrapped in polythene, but most of the custom was for the fresh seafood.

People were strolling along the harbour wall, enjoying the warmth and approaching twilight. Everyone seemed to be put for a stroll, grandparents, infants, couples, teenagers and amahs with a day off. There were benches every few yards and I was tempted to sit down - except my chosen bench was already taken...

Do you mind if I ...?

Grrrrr!

Actually, that's one of the changed I've noticed in Hong Kong over the last 20 years. The number of pet (especially dog)-owners has grown hugely. We passed two separate 'pet hospitals' on the way into Sai Kung and there were literally dozens of people with pets on a leash. However, one of the most amusing aspects is that many of the dogs are small, lap dogs, and are often carried around by their owners. And it's not just small dogs, there are dog-carriages for bigger dogs. Don't believe me? Look here:

We took our purchases to a restaurant and then went for an hour's stroll while they cooked the food. There must have been a couple of hundred yachts in the harbour, from seventy foot long yachts that cost almost a million US to plastic boxes barely six feet long that hardly floated.

The restaurant that we chose was at the far end of the harbour wall, almost as far away as it was possible to get from the self-proclaimed Michelin-starred restaurant near the entrance.  Many of the restaurants are a bit sniffy about cooking food their patrons have brought in - but it's worth making an effort to find the ones that will cook it, that way you guarantee the quality and freshness of your dinner - and save some money; it will cost maybe HK$60-80 per dish for the restaurant to cook for you, but it's well worth it.

Many of the restaurants had their own fish tanks, indeed some restaurants were wall-to-wall fish tanks, while there were also specialist fishmongers along the seafront.

I'd never seen so many fish in my life. 'Here's looking at you, squid!' (with apologies to Humphrey Bogart in the film Casablanca).

The restaurant we chose was at the far end of the harbour wall, and did not look so appealing from the water...(it's on the far left below).

But after an hour the food was all done, steaming plates of seafood accompanied by salty fish fried egg rice and cold bottles of Carlsberg beer. What stands out?

Well the streamed prawns that we started with were succulent and juicy, the mantis shrimps (above) had a huge amount of lobster-like meat, the razor clams were unexpectedly tender with the sweet juicyness of lobster coming through the sauce, the regular clams were extra tasty and the crabs went down well. I'm not a fan of crabs or lobster cooked Chinese-style, the meat ultimately extracted seems out of proportion to the effort required, but the rest of family certainly enjoyed them, possibly their highlight of the evening.

And so home to bed...