Doesn’t TaZte Like Chicken

Location: Hong Kong

Author: My Husband

After having our 糖水 at Hung Fa Lau, we stepped out of the restaurant and went into the one right next door. Dinnertime!!

Tai Ping Koon (太平館餐廳) is one of the oldest ongoing dining establishments in China/Hong Kong, and is the originator of quite a few HK-style café dishes that are so ubiquitous today. For this reason, many consider it to the forerunner of the HK-style café or “茶餐廳”. Some even consider it to be the very first one.

Tai Ping Koon Restaurant. Established in Guangzhou in 1860.

The restaurant wears its history proudly, and the first page of the menu tells its story in three languages.

First page of Tai Ping Koon’s menu. The gist of their history: Founded in Guangzhou in 1860 by a guy who was a chef in a western trading company. Boasted a stable of customers who were famous in Chinese history. Moved to Hong Kong in the 1930s and still managed by the same family today. Famous dishes include: roast squab, smoked pomfret, Portuguese style baked chicken, and Swiss sauce chicken wings.

Because we already had so much to eat in the afternoon, we really weren’t feeling very hungry at all. However, that didn’t prevent us from trying out some of their specialities…

Fried Beef hor-fun or “乾炒牛河”. Look at the color and caramelization on the hor fun; it’s perfect – the cook really did an excellent job of controlling the wok-hei when frying up the noodles. This was easily the best beef hor-fun I’ve had. Although I wasn’t hungry, I wolfed down more than my fair share of this.

Swiss sauce chicken wings, a HK-style café standard. These were very good – plump chicken wings with a good balance of sweet and savory in the sauce. There was a small blurb in the menu about the history of this dish. Apparently, this started off as a chicken dish prepared with a sweet soy sauce. Upon trying it, western guests gushed about it, and kept saying “sweet sauce, sweet sauce!”. Since the chef back in the day wasn’t conversant in English, he adopted that description as the name for this dish – except he mispronounced it as “Swiss sauce”. So there you go – Swiss sauce chicken doesn’t have anything to do with Switzerland.

Roasted squab. My wife loves squab, and she really knows a good one when she tastes it. She really liked Tai Ping Koon’s version – the meat was tender and succulent, and the flavors were very good. The sauce was excellent. The only downside, if you could consider it that, is that the skin wasn’t crispy because of the method of preparation. Most other restaurants deep fry the bird instead of roasting it. Note the contraption for squeezing the lemon wedge – you don’t see this in other HK style places.

GIANT soufflé. We saw this at quite a few tables, and we had to order it. I’m not sure if the perspective comes through in the photo, but this soufflé is the size of a human head. There’s no fancy preparation here – just a giant soufflé that was perfectly baked. It didn’t come with any sauces or accompaniments, which was ok because it tasted fine by itself.

I ordered some tea to finish off the meal and expected the regular HK-style milk tea. But the above was what I got instead – loose-leaf tea, steeping in a pot. A tea strainer was provided, along with a small pot of evaporated milk.

Tai Ping Koon was a really interesting experience. It serves HK-style café dishes, but in an environment that isn’t quite HK-style café. The waiters wear buttoned-down shirts under waistcoats, and go about their work in a professional demeanor. As you can see from the way tea is served, some vestiges of traditional western dining are preserved, yet there are no real “western” dishes served. Suffice it to say, we really liked the food at Tai Ping Koon, and we’ll be back the next time we’re in Hong Kong.

Next post – our visit to the one and only Michelin three-starred Chinese restaurant in the world.