Greek wine’s rich history and recent rebirth, and a sampling from one of its...
Greece has an illustrious winemaking tradition that goes back 6,500 years. The Greeks used to dilute wine with sea water (it was called thalassitis, from thalassa, the Greek word for sea) and season...
View ArticleRestaurant reservation app eatigo arrives in Hong Kong with discounts galore
“Connecting empty tables with empty stomachs” is a mission statement that time-starved gastronomes in our food-loving city will applaud. New in town, eatigo’s website and mobile app are designed to...
View ArticleLeaving home for college? Here’s a cookbook for you
For many of us, leaving home means missing the food we ate growing up and suddenly having to learn to cook, perhaps calling parents to ask for recipes and advice. For Shu Han Lee, that moment came when...
View ArticleSusan Jung’s recipe for calamansi and creme fraiche tart
I love calamansi so much that I grow my own on a small tree on my balcony. The citrus fruit, which is also called calamondin, hails from the Philippines. It is tiny – only about 2cm in diameter – but...
View ArticleCookbook: A Singaporean recalls the delicious Filipino food his helpers...
You might have a hard time finding this heavy (more than 600 pages!) 2013 volume, unless you travel to Singapore, where it’s available in bookshops such as Kinokuniya. You can also order it on the...
View ArticleSusan Jung’s recipes for ‘cooling’ melon dishes to beat the Hong Kong heat
Many Chinese believe winter melon, fuzzy melon, Chinese okra (also called angled luffa) and bitter gourd are “cooling”, which is why you’ll see these vegetables piled high in the market when the...
View ArticleHong Kong fine-dining chef Shane Osborn’s ode to a bacon sandwich – with...
For Shane Osborn, chef and co-owner of Central fine-dining restaurant Arcane, the perfect weekend breakfast is a humble bacon sandwich. “It’s just one of those comfort type things that starts the...
View ArticleThe great tea robbery: how the British stole China’s secrets and seeds – and...
Within the elegant confines of one of Hong Kong’s classic colonial buildings, tourists are partaking in the most quintessential of Chinese cultural activities. Some appear slightly bewildered by the...
View ArticleBritish chef Martin Benn on finding fame in Australia and learning from Marco...
How did you get into cooking? “I wanted to be a chef from a young age – I’m the black sheep because my family is in the building trade. At that time, there was no such thing as a celebrity chef, though...
View ArticleSushi in Japan? Raw beef in Korea? They got it from China, where Confucius...
A week before I took my parents to Japan for a holiday, I read a story about how one should think twice before consuming raw seafood because of the risk of parasitic infections. But, like many...
View ArticleSusan Jung’s recipe for Chinese braised chicken with pickled young ginger
It’s around this time of year that you start to see young ginger in the market. With its pink or green tips, thin, pale skin and moist, mild flesh, this ginger – also called spring ginger – is very...
View ArticleThe weird hybrid wines that leave even the experts guessing at their origin
A trend of sorts among my fellow sommeliers is sourcing obscure wines and seeing if anyone can figure out what it is they’ve been poured. We have been stumped and surprised by odd – sometimes weird –...
View ArticleCafé Gray Deluxe chef Gray Kunz on a Hong Kong epiphany, his go-to dai pai...
How is it that you came to be born in Singapore? “When my dad was in his late 20s, he moved to Surabaya, Indonesia [from Switzerland], working as a coppersmith in mines. When the second world war broke...
View ArticleThree top bottles from Australian winemaker David Powell’s new venture with...
With his imposing stature, ponytail and cigarette in hand, David Powell stands out in a crowded room. Asked about the impact of smoking on his tasting abilities, the Australian winemaker, not one for...
View ArticleSusan Jung’s recipe for roast pork and kimchi wraps; kimchi chigae
At any given time, I have at least two types of home-made cabbage kimchi in my fridge – young and aged, with the former eventually morphing into the latter. The young kimchi is no more than a couple of...
View ArticleWhy kung pao chicken bears little resemblance to the original Sichuan dish
Wherever you go in the United States, signs advertising the same handful of fast-food restaurants jut above rooflines. For Hongkongers, many will be familiar – McDonald’s, KFC, Subway, Pizza Hut – but...
View ArticleThe Raffles Hotel Cookbook: delicious recipes served up with a helping of...
The Raffles Hotel has been a Singapore institution for 130 years. Synonymous with luxury, the property has survived war and other periods of upheaval, including the Lion City becoming an independent...
View ArticleDebunked! Kitchen facts and myths
Mention the words “science” and “cooking” in the same sentence and the phrase “molecular gastronomy” springs to mind. Scientific techniques have added zest to high-end cuisine, but you don’t have to be...
View ArticleSusan Jung’s recipes for Thai and American-style fried chicken
There are an embarrassingly large number of fried-chicken recipes in my home-cooking repertoire. It’s because I make what I like to eat, but I wouldn’t be cooking it so often if others didn’t like it,...
View ArticleHow two chocolate enthusiasts turned their passion into a Hong Kong small...
Walk down Gough Street in Hong Kong’s Central district of a morning and you may notice the alluring scent of hot chocolate. Follow your nose and you’ll soon spot its source: at the far end of the...
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