What to eat in Hong Kong: dim sum, cha chaan teng and the rest

This is the article we send before a food trip. It covers yum cha and how to order it, the cha chaan teng, roast meats, seafood, and the honest paragraph about what is overrated.

Yum cha, the meal to plan the day around

Yum cha literally means to drink tea, and it is the morning and midday meal at which dim sum is served. It is a social event more than a menu: families, three generations at a round table, tea poured constantly, an hour and a half of small plates.

Plan around it rather than fitting it in. The good rooms are busy from about eleven, shared tables are normal, and the meal ends when the trolleys stop, usually mid afternoon.

How the ordering works

Most rooms now use a paper sheet and a pencil. The sheet lists dishes in Chinese, often with English alongside, grouped by price band: small, medium, large, special. You tick quantities, hand it to a passing member of staff, and plates arrive in waves rather than in order. A stamp on your card records each dish. You pay at the end.

Some older rooms still run trolleys. You catch the eye of the woman pushing one, she lifts a lid, you point. It is faster and more fun and there are fewer of them every year.

Tea comes first and is part of the ritual. You will be asked which one: jasmine, pu-erh, oolong or chrysanthemum are the usual four. When someone fills your cup, tap two fingers on the table as thanks rather than interrupting. When you want the pot refilled, tilt the lid off the top and leave it ajar.

What to order, in the order we would order it

Three to four dishes a head is a full meal for most people. Start with the steamed, move to the fried, finish with something sweet.

• Har gow, shrimp dumplings in a translucent wrapper. The benchmark dish. A good one has a thin pleated skin that holds together and whole prawns inside.
• Siu mai, open-topped pork and shrimp dumplings, usually with a dot of roe on top.
• Char siu bao, barbecue pork buns, either steamed and cloud-soft or baked with a sweet crackly top. The baked version at a good house is the single best thing on the sheet.
• Cheung fun, wide rice noodle rolls filled with prawn, beef or fried dough stick, drowned in sweet soy.
• Lo mai gai, sticky rice with chicken and sausage steamed in a lotus leaf. Heavy. Order one for the table.
• Phoenix claws, braised chicken feet in black bean. Genuinely delicious, all texture and sauce, and the dish visitors avoid for no good reason.
• Turnip cake, lo bak go, pan fried until the edges crisp.
• Beef balls on a bed of bean curd skin, bouncy in a way that is deliberate.
• Egg tarts, dan tat, to finish, plus custard buns if you can manage them.

Order in two rounds rather than one. Half the pleasure is deciding what to have more of.

The rooms

Hong Kong has three kinds of dim sum house and they are different experiences. The vast banquet halls, loud and bright and full of families, are the classic. The small neighbourhood shops do four or five things superbly and nothing else. And there is a tier of dim sum in hotel dining rooms and modern restaurants that is refined, quieter, more expensive and often technically excellent.

We book the ones that take bookings and give you the realistic queue time for the ones that do not, which is usually twenty to forty minutes at peak and almost nothing at 10.30am.

Cha chaan teng, where the city actually eats

If yum cha is the occasion, the cha chaan teng is the daily reality: the local diner, fluorescent lit, fast, cheap, formica tables, a laminated menu with sixty items and a set for every hour of the day.

The food is Hong Kong’s own invention, a collision of Cantonese cooking with British and Portuguese habits that exists nowhere else in quite this form.

• Milk tea, strong black tea strained through a cloth sock and cut with evaporated milk. Bitter, thick, and the drink the city runs on.
• Yuenyeung, milk tea mixed with coffee. Better than it sounds.
• Pineapple bun, bo lo bao, which contains no pineapple. A sweet crackled top on a soft roll, ideally served with a cold slab of butter inside.
• French toast, deep fried, peanut butter in the middle, condensed milk and a pat of butter on top. An engineering achievement.
• Macaroni in soup with ham and a fried egg, for breakfast, which makes no sense and is entirely correct.
• Baked pork chop rice, a tomato sauce and cheese dish that arrives volcanic.
• Scrambled egg on toast, done properly, soft and folded.

A full breakfast set with milk tea runs about four to six dollars. Sit where they put you, order fast, eat, leave. Nobody lingers and the turnover is the point.

Roast meats, the cheapest great meal in Asia

A siu mei shop has the birds hanging in the window: roast goose lacquered mahogany, char siu with its blackened caramelised edges, soy chicken, roast pork belly with skin like glass.

You order it over rice with a spoon of the drippings and some blanched greens, and it costs six to ten dollars. Roast goose is the one to travel for, and the famous village shops in the New Territories are worth the trip if you are already out that way. Char siu, done well, should have fat running through it and a sweet, slightly burnt exterior. If it is uniformly lean and pale, walk on.

Wonton noodles, congee and the noodle shops

A bowl of wonton noodles is a small precise thing: thin springy egg noodles under a few prawn wontons, in a broth built from flounder and pork bones, with a spoon of chives. Traditionally the noodles sit on a spoon at the bottom of the bowl so they do not go soft. Four to seven dollars, eaten in ten minutes, and better than most things costing ten times as much.

Congee is the other great cheap bowl: rice cooked down for hours until it collapses, with fish, preserved egg and pork, or beef. Add a fried dough stick and dip it. This is breakfast, hangover food and sick food, and it is the most comforting thing in the city.

Seafood, and how not to overpay

Sai Kung town, Lei Yue Mun and the waterfront at Lamma all work the same way. You choose the fish or the shellfish from the tanks, you agree the cooking method, and it arrives twenty minutes later. Steamed with ginger and spring onion, or stir fried with garlic, or with black bean.

Pricing is by weight, and this is the one place in Hong Kong where we tell people to be careful. Confirm the price of the specific fish, by weight, before it goes to the kitchen and not after. Our documents give you the shops our partner team uses and a sentence to say. Done properly it is a wonderful long lunch and the bill is fair.

The cooked food centres

Above many municipal markets there is a floor of cooked food stalls: plastic stools, tiled floors, a dozen kitchens, beer from a fridge, and some of the best wok cooking in the city. Typhoon shelter crab, salt and pepper squid, clams in black bean, stir fried greens.

They are noisy, hot, unglamorous, and where we would eat on your last night rather than in a hotel dining room. Fifteen to twenty five dollars a head with drinks.

What is overrated, honestly

Temple Street night market for shopping. Smaller and more ordinary than it was, and most of the goods are the same goods sold everywhere. The food stalls after eight are still worth an evening. Go for those.

Dim sum at whichever room is currently the most photographed. Frequently a ninety minute queue for cooking that a neighbourhood house does at least as well with no wait. We will book the famous one if you want it, and we will also tell you what you are paying in time.

Hotel buffets. Expensive, and in a city with this much good cheap food, a strange way to spend an evening.

Restaurants with picture menus in six languages on the Tsim Sha Tsui tourist strip. The rule that holds everywhere holds here.

Egg waffles as a meal. They are a snack, they are good, and they have been marketed into a landmark.

Dietary requirements

Vegetarian is easier here than in much of the region, thanks to the Buddhist vegetarian tradition and a handful of genuinely good vegetarian restaurants, some attached to monasteries. But oyster sauce, dried shrimp, lard and pork stock are in more dishes than a menu admits, including in vegetable dishes. We brief restaurants in Cantonese in advance rather than relying on a phrase card at the table.

Shellfish allergies need the same handling, because the broths are frequently seafood-based even when the dish is not.

Plan this trip

Tell us how you like to eat and Asaf will build a Hong Kong trip around the meals rather than around the sights, with the bookings made and the queue times written in. Free, and with no obligation.

Start planning

Keep reading

• Hong Kong: the complete guide to planning your trip
• Hong Kong for the first time
• What a trip to Hong Kong really costs
• What we would skip in Hong Kong
• Food and culture in 6 days
• All our Hong Kong trips

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