Live Seafood in the New Territories

For those of you used to dining in the Hong Kong style seafood palaces of the San Gabriel Valley or the San Francisco Bay Area, seeing tanks of live seafood is de rigeur.  But nothing in the good old USA compares to our meal this evening at Chuen Kee Seafood in Sai Kung in the New Territories.  Because while one might end up ordering a few live seafood items as part of the dinner back home, at restaurants like Chuen Kee, your entire menu may consist of live seafood items.  For instance, tonight we had nine courses consisting of live boiled shrimp, salt and pepper mantis shrimp, razor clams in black bean sauce, individual sized South African whole white abalone, whole scallops served in the shell with glass noodles, geoduck sashimi style, geoduck jook, stir friend geoduck with celery, and steamed tiger fish.  Not exactly a balanced meal, but all I can say is "Wow!"  And have you ever seen tanks that look like this?

How I Turned Overnight From Mr. Sickly To Mr. Healthy

While fighting what appeared to be a head cold for a few days right before our currently in progress Hong Kong dining excursion, I stopped to think when was the last time I had been sick.  I think it was probably three years ago when I went on vacation to Nashville and developed laryngitis (and consequently had difficulty ordering at Chinese restaurants since I was unable to ask questions about menu items) and an uncontrollable cough.  Indeed for the past 40 years I’ve seldom caught any illnesses.  It’s been 25 years since I had the flu, possibly just as long since I had a fever, and perhaps I get a cold maybe every two years.

But if you knew me when I was in school you’d be stunned by this run of relatively good health.  I missed nine consecutive weeks of kindergarten, not with a major illness, but rather a continuous series of nagging colds. (However, in the next 10 week period I was only absent 15 of the 49 school days in that segment.)  I missed three consecutive weeks in junior high due to bronchitis, and even two straight weeks in law school due to the flu. 

So what is the reason for my change in health, which essentially turned on a dime in the mid-1970s?   Well it was just dumb luck (or extreme fortune).  I had just started working and one day I found this sheet of paper lying on an unattended desk in the staff room where I was housed.  It was a mimeographed review of a book entitled There IS A Cure for the Common Cold.  It detailed the author’s theory of how strategic use of vitamin C can ward off the onset of illness.  This book did not advocate recurring mega doses of vitamin C,or even daily year round doses of the vitamin, but rather periodic intake of increased dosages of vitamin C upon exposure to illness.  The author recommended just 625 mg of vitamin C every three hours after exposure, though I have altered that to 500 mg every hour.  

From that point I followed that advice and my health turned 180 degrees. I haven’t taken a sick day from work in over 25 years as I just work through the occasional cold.   In all these years I only got sick once from Mrs. Chandavkl (an elementary school teacher who often fell ill to her students’ germs) or my kids, and I think that one time was from shared food.. In more recent years, zinc has proven to ward off illness, so I’ve also added that to my arsenal. I’ve also attributed the few times that I’ve gotten sick to getting a chill, so I’m also paying special attention to staying warm, and also getting sufficient rest..  

Destination Hong Kong

As anybody who follows Chinese food knows, the quality of Chinese food in Hong Kong far surpasses that found anywhere in the United States.  Not only is this the consensus view of almost anyone who has eaten Chinese food both in Hong Kong and the United States, but when one commentator, legendary Chinese American filmmaker Wayne Wang, was quoted as saying the best Chinese food in the world was in the San Gabriel Valley, he was ridiculed from stem to stern.

Like everybody else, I truly believe that Hong Kong Chinese food is superior to American Chinese food.  But the truth is, I cannot say this belief is from personal experience.  And it's not that I haven't eaten in Hong Kong, since I've been there three times.  The problem is we never knew anybody in Hong Kong who could show us around and take us to the best restaurants.  Consequently, whenever we visited Hong Kong we would walk into random restaurants.  The result was Chinese food, that with just a couple of exceptions, was not in fact better than anything we had in the San Gabriel Valley.  I guess the analog would be a foreign tourist taking his meals at McDonalds, Denny's, Olive Garden and Tony Roma's and not being impressed with American food.

Potentially another issue is the possibility that not all categories of Chinese food in Hong Kong are vastly superior to what we are used to.  I've heard it said that while Hong Kong Chinese food at the extremes--high end dining and subway station/street food is greatly superior, that the food at say a mid-range dim sum place might not be.

Consequently, it  is with great anticipation that we're looking forward to our trip to Hong Kong where we will be hosted by people familiar with the local food scene.  You can follow my tweets @chandavkl.

Sometimes It's Cheaper To Travel Around The World Than To Stay At Home

Those of you who read my sad tale of not having enough food to eat on last year's Baltic cruise may recall my extended conversation with the Maitre D' at the ship's restaurant.  During the course of the conversation he mentioned one passenger who had sailed on over 200 of his cruises without any complaint about the food.  At the time I thought to myself, "Wow. That must be one rich woman."  However as I have since learned you don't have to be rich to sail off so often, you just have to be flexible as to when and where you take a cruise.

The key to cruising economically is taking advantage of last minute cruise deals where the lines slash prices on upcoming cruises that have not sold out.   At the time of my most recent cruise in June, I  knew little of the specifics--how do you hear about these cruises, how close to sailing date can you make the arrangements, and how about air fares when you book late?

Fortunately a travel agent explained the process to us, so well that I was able to book a cruise for Mrs. Chandavkl and her sister last fall less than a month  before sailing date.  The cruise was a 12 day Mediterranean cruise with stops in Barcelona, Marseilles, Naples, Rome, Florence, Mykonos, Istanbul, Izmir, Venice and Athens.  All for the princely sum of $599 for the base cruise.  That's only $50 a night, and covers your food, your lodging and your travel.  Forgetting the cost of airfare, that's something that almost anybody can afford.

So how do you get these deals?  When we took our Baltic cruise this past June, we had made our reservation in December, and were given until March to confirm our reservation and pay the balance of the cost above the refundable deposit.  As things turn out, for cruises of over a week, 90 days before the sailing date is the cutoff point for paying for the cruise, while shorter cruises give you until 75 days before sailing.  Consequently, at these 75 and 90 day milestones, the cruise lines know how full their boats are with confirmed passengers, and whether fares need to be discounted to fill the boat.  Therefore it is at these 75 and 90 day markers that a particular cruise fare could be heavily discounted.   And given the fact that no cruise line wants a ship to sail with empty rooms, they'll keep slashing the prices until the boat fills up

As for the details of finding these cruises, travel agencies dealing with cruises make it easy.  For example, our cruise agency, Vacations to Go,  has a button on its homepage labelled "90 Day Ticker."  This takes you to a page that lists all discounted sailings that depart within the next 90 days.  The bigger the discount, the emptier the ship.  If you look at the current offerings, you can take a 50 day cruise that sails next week from London to Singapore, stopping in Lisbon, Gibraltar, Malaga, Malta, Turkey, Athens, Crete, Suez Canal, Oman, Mumbai, Goa, Colombo, Phuket, Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Jakarta, Bali, Semarang, Lombok, Komodo, Ujung Pandang, Java, Surabaya, and back to Singapore.  The cost for an inside room?  Would you believe $2,700?

Of course there are logistics to deal with.  You can't book the cruise until you know you can get a flight to the departure point, but you don't want to buy your plane tickets until you've confirmed your space on the cruise.  Consequently you need to check to see if there are flights available, quickly book the cruise, and then quickly book the flights.  The closer to sailing date, the greater the potential cruise discount, but on the other hand, the great chance of air fares being higher or flights not being available.  But if you can pay $50 a night for a seven week cruise that's a minor inconvenience when your Social Security check will more than cover all your living expenses for that time period.

The Lazy Man's Way To Attend The Rose Parade

The Tournament of Roses parade on New Year's day is indeed one of the great spectacles of Southern California.  It probably has singlehandedly brought more migrants to the Los Angeles area than any other factor.  As I previously wrote, it might rain on December 31, it might rain on January 2, but it never rains in Pasadena on January 1 when the parade is telecast to an otherwise freezing country.  (OK, it did rain once in the last 60 years on January 1.)

But as worthy of an event the parade might be, it can truly be a hassle to see it in person.  I remember once getting up in what seemed to be the middle of the night, driving to Pasadena,  looking for parking on the residential streets, then being totally confused when looking for my seats, barely being seated before the parade started.  And many thousands of others camp out overnight to watch the parade from the curb.   (Despite the sunshine at parade time, temperatures can still get quite nippy overnight.)

However, as I subsequently learned, there is another way to see the parade in person, which is almost laughable as to the lack of time and effort that it requires.  The parade route is quite long and I believe it takes almost two hours for the parade to reach the end. If you catch the parade route after it turns north from Colorado Blvd. onto Sierra Madre Bl., you'll find that the crowd is only a few people deep. And the start of the parade doesn't reach that point until 10 am which means you can sleep in and still go to the parade.

A couple of times we actually watched the first half of the parade on TV, then drove over to the end of the parade route and saw the whole thing in person. At that time of day it was clear sailing on the freeway since it was too early for Rose Bowl game traffic, while everyone attending the parade arrived a long time before and was safely parked.  Parking at this part of the parade route was pretty good.  We parked on the streets north of Colorado and west of Sierra Madre Bl., and probably had no more than a three block walk to the parade.

So if you've been deterred from seeing the parade after watching the TV news interviews of people camped out on the sidewalk, or the cost of grandstand seats, there is a better way.

The Best Chinese Food In the U.S. Is In Las Vegas? I Don't Think So.

Recently I’ve seen comments made that the best Chinese food in America can be found in Las Vegas.  While I agree that Las Vegas serves the most expensive Chinese food in the US, and that some of this expensive food is quite good, one cannot say that Chinese food in Las Vegas' restaurants tops that in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, or even a few other cities. 

My suspicion that the comments elevating the status of Las Vegas Chinese food are attributable to a comment made several years ago by Ruth Reichl of the New York Times.  In an interview she did say that the best Chinese food in the US was in Las Vegas.  However she qualified her statement significantly by saying she was referring to private invitation dinners provided by the casinos to their high roller Chinese clientele.  And clearly at the time she made that statement, the high quality Chinese food designation clearly did not extend to Chinese restaurants open to the public, nor does it do so today.

Now there is good and authentic Chinese food to be found in Las Vegas, particularly since the construction of the Las Vegas Chinatown mall on Spring Mountain Blvd. in 1995.  Actually there had been better than average Chinese food available in Las Vegas for quite a while.  At one point probably 25 or 30 years ago it had been noted by the L.A. Times that a number of casinos served top notch Chinese food, but only after midnight.  Presumably this was to satisfy Chinese high rollers who gambled through the night.  Then as the Las Vegas Chinese community grew in the early 1990s, a few authentic Chinese restaurants started to open up away from the Strip, such as Emperor’s Table on Decatur and Chinese Garden on Sahara.  With the opening of Chinatown Plaza with its roster of  Los Angeles based Chinese restaurants including Sam Woo BBQ, 1 6 8, Plum Tree Inn and D.D.’s Café, Las Vegas had truly arrived as a city having a selection of authentic Chinese food choices.

Interestingly, Las Vegas continues to attract Los Angeles area Chinese restaurants that set up branches there.  And we’re not talking about large, widely known Chinese restaurants, but rather smaller, niche players, like Shaanxi Gourmet, Dong Ting, Kim Tar and Yunnan Garden.  Meanwhile, in the casinos on the Strip, virtually every hotel has opened at least one, if not two Chinese restaurants on premises.  An interesting concept was the establishment of branches of well known existing Chinese restaurants in the casinos, such as Cathay House, K J Dim Sum, Sea Harbour (via Vancouver and Los Angeles) and Royal Star (via Santa Monica, and known as Ocean Star in Monterey Park).   However, the experiment seems not to have worked as K J Dim Sum in the Rio appears to be the only one still operating.    

I'm sure that existing restaurants were used by the casinos to attract Chinese Americans familiar with these restaurants, which seemed like a winning strategy.   Indeed, opening a branch of Sea Harbour, likely the best Chinese restaurant in the Los Angeles area and one of the better Chinese restaurants in Vancouver, in Caesar’s Palace seemed like a sure thing.   One can only speculate what went wrong as the restaurant never had much success from day one.   The reviews were bad from the start and the complaints about the pricing were loud.   My guess is that they tweaked the menu to appeal to non-Chinese diners and marketed it as a highly upscale restaurant.  In so doing they alienated their core followers as to both quality and price.  Meanwhile the brand name was meaningless to the non-Chinese who had never heard of them. 

In the casinos the question is whether any of the upscale Chinese restaurants that have opened up are authentically good.   In at least one case, Hakkasan in the MGM, the answer is yes.  Since its rollout in Manhattan a couple of years ago, Hakkasan has advanced the concept of upscale but authentic Cantonese food in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami and Las Vegas, and has done it so well it makes one wonder why nobody did it before.  Whether this will be a growing trend in Las Vegas or not is the $64 question.   Wing Lei which opened up in the Wynn a few years ago has a Michelin star, but its menu is decidedly inauthentic, plus apparently they lost the star chef who originally opened up the restaurant.  So for now, we’re still waiting for great Chinese food to arrive in Las Vegas at multiple venues accessible to us mere mortals.

Chinese Foodie Night Comments

For those of you who could not attend SCCLA's Chinese foodie presentation, here are my remarks.

Now I know that some of you have read about me as the crazy lawyer who’s eaten at 6,000 Chinese restaurants, but I’m sure that a lot of you have not, so I will make my remarks on the presumption that you haven’t heard about me.  I had been dining in anonymity for decades.  Then last year, a food writer named Clarissa Wei, who’s sitting right here, found out that I kept an Excel schedule showing the 6,000 Chinese restaurants I had eaten at.  She asked me if anybody had ever written me up and I replied no, why would anybody want to?  She interviewed me and the story ran on the LA Weekly website.  That item was quickly picked up by the Huffington Post, People.com, went viral  around the world, including the Chinese language press, and a whole bunch of celebrity gossip websites, all of which I found quite befuddling except to wonder if there was a new category of public figure called celebrity diner. 

That led to an all expense paid visit to Springfield, Missouri for me and my wife Mary to sample Springfield’s signature cashew chicken at several Chinese restaurants and have our picture taken with the restaurant owners, plus the mayor of Branson gave us the key to the city.  Eventually the furor died down, until this past April when the Los Angeles Times ran its Column One story written by Frank Shyong on my spreadsheet, complete with interactive timeline map of where I ate over the years.     This was followed a feature on the Yahoo News and Good Morning America websites leading to another 15 seconds of fame.  The end result is I have 850 Twitter followers, a Chinese restaurant column on a restaurant website called Menuism, and field requests from strangers asking questions like what’s the best Chinese restaurant in Cincinnati.  To my horror, casual responses to three such short questions ended up as newspaper articles, or in one case, an article on the Canadian Broadcasting Company website so I've learned to always be careful to watch what I say.

At this point I need to issue a disclaimer.   People hear that I have eaten at 6,000  Chinese restaurants and they all assume I’m a foodie and Chinese food expert.  I am not a foodie.  Eric Chan here is a foodie—he takes pictures of all his restaurant meals.  I do not.  My daughter Christina, who is also a lawyer, is a foodie.   When she went to Asia last year and sent us the link to her photos, I found that 80 percent of the pictures were of food.  When I travel, I only take pictures of the scenery.   And I’m no Chinese food expert as sometimes I don’t even know what’s in the Chinese food I’m eating.

Now the fact that I am not a foodie is quite significant, because when I started this journey, it certainly wasn’t about the food and in many respects it still isn’t.  Rather, as the L.A. Times article focused on, it was about a different kind of search.   Because as a Chinese American I grew up in a Los Angeles far different from what most of you are familiar with.  A Los Angeles where Asians, or as we were called back then, Orientals, were under one percent of the population, a mere  20,000 Chinese, not 500,000 like today.   We were such a rarity that when I started my first job one of the other new hires thought I was Mexican because he had never met a Chinese person before.   It was a time when, because of decades of anti-Chinese immigration laws, virtually all of the Chinese residents in America had roots in the seven counties of rural Toishan outside of the city of Canton.  A Chinese community largely comprised of illegal immigrants and their descendants, like three of my grandparents who came to America illegally.  A Los Angeles where many neighborhoods, not just San Marino but places like Glendale, South Pasadena, Inglewood, and parts of the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles were off limits to Chinese Americans and other minorities.  And a Los Angeles where as a little boy I didn’t eat much Chinese food because I found the Chinese food of the day to be largely unpalatable because it wasn’t particularly good. 

For me the triggering event on my journey was the ethnic studies movement that was born in the late 1960s. In my last quarter as an undergraduate at UCLA, they offered the very first Asian American studies class.   Immediately I was captivated by the topic of the experience of Chinese people in the United States. There was a dearth of material on the topic, such that a novice like myself who was studying to become an accountant could write a term paper on the history of the Chinese of Los Angeles and immediately have it published in the budding ethnic press. That same person could then go on KNX radio, KCBS television and speak at conferences as a so called "expert" on the subject, and even be keynote speaker at one of the very first Asian Pacific American Heritage month events in Los Angeles, quite laughable given that my credentials consisted of having taken all of two university level classes in Asian American studies.

My interest in food  developed a little later, after the convergence of three factors when I started to work and travel. First of all, I made the acquaintance of friends at work from Hong Kong, who showed a passion for food that I had never encountered before.   My Hong Kong friends had been the vanguard of the late 1960s immigration of Chinese from Hong Kong to the United States, when the American immigration laws changed to permit Chinese to come here in large numbers, and the new residents brought their food with them. This upgrade in Chinese food sparked an interest in me, as this new and exciting form of Chinese food was so much better than what I was used to. Finally, I started to travel around the United States, and made it a point to eat at Chinese restaurants to the extent possible, as part of a greater interest in seeing what Chinese residents and communities were like throughout the United States. Indeed my one and only published restaurant review written in 1977, of Hong Kong Restaurant in Sioux City, Iowa was as much about the setting of the restaurant near the Sioux Bee Honey factory as the food itself.   And to this day, eating  Chinese food while traveling is part of my greater desire to experience various Chinese American and Canadian communities.

So as you can see, in the beginning it wasn't at all about the food, and even today the food is only part of the story.