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No, this isn't about
the documentary that I'm absolutely dying to watch, although I'm borrowing the title because it fits.
I remember getting some culture shock when I first moved to the US to start college. The Chinese food I encountered in Spittsbush was nothing like most of the food I grew up eating. What the hell was "
chop suey"?! "
Lo mein" was clearly some kind of noodle dish, but why were these stupid Americans
putting it on top of rice and eating it in the same mouthful?!
But soon I found myself getting pretty fond of
General Tso's chicken, thanks to the chicken being deep-fried and covered in a sweetish brown sauce. I ate a lot of it. I had never heard of it growing up, but my uncle told me that it's actually called 左宗堂雞 and Hunanese in origin, and a little less sweet and a little spicier in its original form.
Well, I haven't had much American Chinese food since I moved to Hong Kong before the Handover, and on most of my early trips back to the US, getting American Chinese food wasn't exactly at the top of my list. But eventually I grew to miss it, and even tried in vain to look for it all over San Francisco's Chinatown on my last trip in 2008. No go. During my trip to Chicago and New York this past June, I was again too interested in the local cuisine... and for the one meal where I thought about having Chinese on the fly, even
Panda Express was closed...
So you can imagine my excitement when I heard that someone actually wanted to serve
gweilo Chinese food in Hong Kong. And tonight, my friend who grew up in the US decided that we should check out
Fu Lu Shou for ourselves.
Our visit started with a little bit of annoyance. When I booked our table last week, I was told that the access code to enter the metal gates would be given to us when they called us to reconfirm the reservation today. We had a 6:30 p.m. booking, but by 5:50 p.m. no one had bothered to call me. After a couple of tries I finally got through to the restaurant, but the person who answered the phone had to ask someone else for the code... Oh well, at least we got in.
I had spent some time combing through the write ups in blogosphere, so I had some idea about the kind of food on offer. Someone had mentioned that everything they had was deep-fried, and a quick scan through the menu shows that easily 70% of the dishes are indeed battered and fried... and all the dishes we ordered turned out to be deep-fried, too... A healthy meal, it was not.
I had read somewhere that the restaurant does not allow BYO, so we ended up each ordering a cocktail. How could I imagine starting the meal with anything other than a drink called
fook yu?! In fact, I looked for noodles called
fook mi on the menu, but alas it was nowhere to be found. Well, this Hennessy VSOP-based drink was kinda tasty, but what the hell were they thinking when they put chunks of chocolate into a drink with ice cubes?! I also found it a little expensive since it cost the same or more as all but one of our dishes.
