Old school Hong Kong day part 1: morning tea at Lin Heung

I had a couple of visitors from out of town this weekend, but unfortunately my schedule was too busy to take them out properly... so in the end we settled for "morning tea (早茶)" at a Hong Kong institution - Lin Heung Tea House (蓮香樓).

We arrived just after 10:30 a.m. on this particular Saturday, and not surprisingly there was not an empty seat in sight.  The reason why this was only my third visit to said establishment in almost 20 years of being in Hong Kong - never mind that my office has been within walking distance for quite a few of those years - is I never wanted to spend time waiting for a table.  My last visit was with Sheets, and since his family owns the place, there was naturally no need to wait for a table...

Well it took the three of us a while, including me trying to not get into an argument with some locals - but we did eventually manage to find 3 empty chairs to settle our butts into.  After rinsing our tea cups, bowls, chopsticks and spoons in the bowl of hot water provided, I grabbed our stamp card and went to look for our food.

As I would remark later to a couple of Caucasians at the same table, you gotta fight for your table and also fight for your food here.  Depending on where you find your seat, it may be unlikely for the dim sum carts to ever reach you... so you just gotta go find the ladies with the carts and bring the food back to the table.  And on most days like today, there's gonna be a mob surrounding the cart as soon as it comes out of the kitchen.  In fact, a bunch of people and I were kinda standing around waiting for the cart to emerge, and would pounce on the poor cart lady within seconds - almost like a feeding frenzy of piranhas or sharks...

Siu mai (燒賣) - this was OK, but I was disappointed that they weren't serving the ones with quail eggs that I had on my very first visit.

Steamed rice with chicken feet and pork ribs (鳳爪排骨盅飯) - on my first "outing" I was a little frustrated by the mob surrounding the first cart, so on my way back I decided to grab this from the other cart with fewer surrounding "sharks"... The rice would prove filling for all of us, but in any case this was a classic dish that would be interesting to my visiting friends.

Squid in curry sauce (咖喱魷魚) - with pork rind, too.  Unfortunately this was absolutely bland, which was really surprising.

I think this was some kind of rice flour rolls (粉卷)... there was some minced pork and prawn wrapped inside.  Anyway this was OK.

Steamed pig's tripe siu mai (豬肚燒賣) - very old school way of serving large pieces of pig's tripe on a bed of minced pork.

Steamed prawn dumplings (蝦餃) - not bad.  This time the chopped bamboo shoots were tender.

I think these were duck feet rolls (鴨腳扎), a piece of taro and a chunk of minced pork wrapped with some tofu skin (腐皮).  Kinda interesting.

This was a lot of food for us, so we decided to take a stroll around town for the next hour to help us with digestion... but not before grabbing my favorite egg tarts (蛋撻) from Honolulu Coffee Shop (檀島咖啡餅店).