| Discover Roast Goose |
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Page 1 of 2 Forget turkey. Hong Kong’s bird master, Ho Tong Fung, will sway you to the sublime ways of the roast goose.
SAYING THAT HO TONG FUNG KNOWS HIS GEESE is like saying Mario Batali knows pasta. Fung is an expert, a sage, the Confucius of the perfect roast goose. This bird is his life, and for 33 years he has called the cramped roasting corner in the kitchen of Hong Kong’s Yung Kee Restaurant his second home. 
Ho Tong Fung hacks up more than his fair share of geese in a day. His restaurant, Yung Kee, serves between 300 and 500 of the birds daily.
“In the early 1920s, people wanted dim sum over roast goose,” says assistant manager Kevin Kam, 37. “But during and after the war, there wasn’t much to eat, so they started to eat simple fare like goose.” Since then, goose has come to occupy a prime spot on most Cantonese menus. At Yung Kee, it’s item number one of 350, the restaurant’s bread and butter. In fact, it’s the very reason that this eatery—begun as a modest food stall 67 years ago by Kam’s grandfather, Kam Shui Fai, and now watched over by golden dragons with lighted red eyes—has evolved into a Hong Kong institution. The restaurant, which occupies four floors of the eponymous Yung Kee Building, on Wellington Street, has risen to cult status in this capital of 6.9 million—and beyond. Diners have included both Presidents Bush, Angelina Jolie, and chef Thomas Keller, of The French Laundry and Per Se fame. When Chinese President Hu Jintao came to Hong Kong in June 2007 to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the country’s British handover to China, Yung Kee catered the private dinner in his honor. The restaurant serves almost 2,000 people each day, 362 days a year. The only time it closes is in winter, over the first three days of Chinese New Year. Demand is so high that it even stayed open through the 2003 SARS outbreak and the bird-flu epidemic in 1996. And when I showed up on a Saturday night last fall during a typhoon warning of nine (out of ten), there was a line out the door. (No one is legally required to work when a warning reaches eight.) |
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