Nate and I were fortunate to be invited to a going away dinner this week for one of the principals and his wife who taught R1 here for many years. It was held at the Jumbo floating restaurant, which you may remember from before, as my 30th birthday brunch was at one of the three restaurants there. We went to one of the Chinese restaurants this time for their famous seafood. According to our host, the Jumbo was considered to have the best and freshest seafood in HK for many years. It's also a big tourist spot, as you can imagine, and a bit kitschy. Still, how can you not love it?
I tried not to be too obnoxious with my camera during dinner, so unfortunately that resulted in very few photos, plus this blurry, hastily-shot photo here. But I have to show it to you anyway. This was one of the starters, a thousand year egg. Yep, I tasted it. And yes, it was as blackish-green as it looks here.
Did I mention before the freshness of the seafood? This is one of the servers cooking our "drunken shrimp" right in front of us. She started by pouring hot Chinese wine into a bowl of big, lively shrimp. At which point they started flipping around even more in their pot. I was secretly concerned this was all there was to the preparation, and wasn't sure what to do if handed a live shrimp to peel and eat. Fortunately, she then set the bowl on fire and proceeded to cook them as below. Most of you know I'm not a big shrimp person because I've had too many rubbery, overcooked shrimp...but these were so good! They were more like lobster than the shrimp I've had!
Of the 12 (yes, 12!!!) courses of food we had (two of which were added on the spot by our hosts, and of which I'm not even counting the starters), 8 were various types of seafood. There was fish, lobster, shrimp, mantis shrimp (you have to look this beast up here-- crazy!), crab, abalone, etc. It was insane, and I don't think I can touch seafood now for the next week, no matter how good most of it was. Anyway, I was quite excited to see that amidst the bounty of seafood, we also had Peking duck and duck lettuce wraps!
At the end of the dinner (3 hours later), our guests of honor were dressed up and photographed like the tourists do. The restaurant even printed their photo on a commemorative plate. What a priceless experience!
