Spring Deer

On Sunday we were supposed to meet the teacher at 12 in the Tsim Sha Tsui station; it turns out the orange line is not faster than the red line, so we arrived 15 minutes late (Duìbùqǐ, wǒmen lái wǎn le). The restaurant was on the second floor (or was it the first floor?) of a building whose entranceway consisted of a poorly recreated Stanley Market. I wouldn't have compared it to Stanley Market at all, except that's what the banner hanging from the ceiling said.

Oh, and the name of the restaurant is Spring Deer, hence the title of this post.


The appetizers. I should have eaten the head of the fish first, to leave a better memory. It didn't taste bad, but the crunchy-squishy texture of the head made me squirm. The teacher told us these fish are only served on Sunday, and we were lucky enough to receive the last dish.

The class was divided between two tables, seven at each. The teacher's daughter sat at my table and did an excellent job of preventing a suffocating silence from settling in. She's actually studied in the U.S. from high school through college, so her English was flawless and she was really curious to hear about our experiences at Lingnan and the hostel life. But you're probably more curious to see the most delicious food in Hong Kong:


Counter-clockwise from ice: shrimp, chicken, duck. We dipped the roast duck in the duck sauce, and placed it in one of those tortilla things you see on the right. Then a slice of cucumber and a slice of I forget what the vegetable was (not anything unusual, either) and it gets wrapped up and eaten like a burrito.


The duck is in the middle; clockwise from duck sauce: not-crabs, very slippery noodles, shrimp, scallion pancakes, the tortilla things, the spicy beef filling for those bread pockets in front of them, meat filling to wrap in the lettuce leaves (behind the spicy beef), spring rolls, cucumbers and forgotten vegetable (leeks?). The stuff as delicious as crabs was [drum roll]...egg whites! It didn't taste at all like eggs, and it was warm and yummy and couldn't have been the least bit healthy. The slippery noodles really were slippery. I tried serving them to a friend and dropped them on the tablecloth a billion times. What made them so tricky was that they were too firm to properly squeeze between chopsticks. Actually, I can't think of any utensil that would have held them.

I ate too many of these. But hardly anyone else was! No way I could leave these battered and fried bananas (dripping with sugar and crispy and warm) behind. No way.